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Masculinities and Manhood
in Contemporary Irish Drama
Acting the Man
Cormac O’Brien
Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish
Drama
Cormac O’Brien
Masculinities
and Manhood
in Contemporary Irish
Drama
Acting the Man
Cormac O’Brien
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-030-84074-7 ISBN 978-3-030-84075-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84075-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Fiona Morgan
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated—with love always and ever—to Scots Michael, who
taught me how to see the bigger picture, Mister.
Acknowledgements
While I am sure to accidentally omit some names, I endeavour here

to offer grateful thanks to the many people without whose generous
support—intellectual, practical, and emotional—this book would never
have made it to publication: First and foremost, heartfelt gratitude to
Emilie Pine whose unwavering belief in my ability to survey six decades
of Irish drama equals her erudite and insightful input into and guid-
ance of this project in its early years. Thanks also to Gerardine Meaney,
Anne Mulhall, Moynagh Sullivan, Emma Radley, Caroline Magennis,
Fintan Walsh, Noreen Giffney, Margot Backus, and Debbie Ging for their
mentorship and guidance through the unwieldy field of Irish gender and
sexuality studies. For their support, guidance, and generosity of time,
thanks are due to all of my colleagues in the School of English, Drama
and Film at University College Dublin, not least Danielle Clarke, Lucy
Collins, P. J. Mathews, John Brannigan, Margaret Kelleher, Michelle
O’Connell, Frank McGuinness, Catriona Clutterbuck, Niamh Pattwell,
and of course those unsung heroes who keep the wheels turning, Karen
Jackman and Pauline Slattery. Irish drama studies can be a challenging
field to navigate, thus grateful thanks are due to Eamonn Jordan, Melissa
Sihra, Brian Singleton, Steffi Lehner, Tony Roche, Christopher Collins,
Miriam Haughton, Ondrej Pilny, Claire Wallace, Maria Kurdi, Chris
Morash, David Clare, Alexandra Poulain, and Shaun Richards. Elaine
Aston deserves singular thanks not only for her input into this project
but also for her guidance and mentorship over the years. Deserving also
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
of stand-alone thanks is Marta Cook, who provided new insights into

Irish culture and post-colonialism. Several American scholars have been
generous with their time and mentorship; thus heartfelt transatlantic
thanks go to Ed Madden, Mary Trotter, Jennifer Slivka, Kate Costello-
Sullivan, Anne Teekell Hays, Barry Devine, and Jose Lanters. Irish theatre
practitioners have been more than generous with the provision of scripts,
soundtracks, videos, and interviews; special thanks therefore to: Phillip
McMahon and Jenny Jones at THISISPOPBABY, Feidlim Cannon and
Gary Keegan at Brokentalkers, Oisin McKenna, Neil Watkins, Derbhle
Crotty, Charlotte Bradley, Paul Mercier, Peter Sheridan, Shaun Dunne,
Shane Byrne, Gerry Stembridge, and Declan Hughes. Thanks also to my
editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, particularly Jack Heeney, for their
patience and support throughout what has proved to be a very turbu-
lent and trying year. My mother Nora, as well as my father Noel (who
we tragically lost last year) have been steadfast in their loving support, as
have been my sisters, Gemma, Geraldine, and Noreen. Every author has
their own private, trusted copy-editors and proof-readers who toil, thank-
lessly and without formal merit, outside the official publishing process;
thus I owe a deep dept of gratitude to Julie Ann Robson, Jess Kelly, and
Lillis O’Laoire for many hours of painstaking and meticulous work on my
chapters. And finally, for being the stage-manager who keeps this show on
the road, all the love in the world to my partner, Scots Michael, without
whom none of this would happen.
Cover image is from The Year of Magical Wanking (2010) written and
performed by Neil Watkins, directed by Phillip McMahon, produced by
THISISPOPBABY. The photographer is Fiona Morgan.
The author gratefully acknowledges UCD’s College of Arts and
Humanities Funding Scheme for Quality Publications, 2020/2021.
Contents
1 Introduction: Acting the Man 1

2 The Fantasy of Manhood 41
3 The Pathology of Patriarchy 85
4 Men of the North 127
5 Masculinity Without Men 171
6 Acting Queer 213
7 Conclusion: Acting This Man 267
Index 277
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Acting the Man
Frank: No, but the job. You know, it’s like a big tank. The whole
town is like a tank. At home is like a tank. A huge tank with
walls running up, straight up. And we’re at the bottom, splashing
around all week in their Friday night vomit, clawing at the sides
[…] and the big-shots – are up around the top, looking in, looking
down. […] Spitting. On top of us. And for fear we might climb
out someday – Do you know what they’re doing? – They smear
grease around the walls.
Joe: Come on out of here to hell.
From On the Outside by Tom Murphy & Noel O’Donoghue,
1959.
Joe: I want to say that I am absolutely outraged! […] A man has
a right to his own mind, Carmel. Just because I’m your husband
doesn’t mean you own my thoughts. You can’t know everything
about me. […] I love you Carmel, I really do but you can’t expect –
I’m a human being. I have a right to my own … you know […]
Would you give over now with the touchy-feely nonsense? You’re
making my chest hurt.
Carmel: The worry here is that I opened a letter addressed to you –
not that you ordered a pair of stockings for yourself from a girl
called Abbi? […] I need to believe that you are a better man than
I currently believe you to be, Joe.
From No Romance by Nancy Harris, 2011.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. O’Brien, Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84075-4_1
2 C. O’BRIEN
In Noel O’Donoghue’s and Tom Murphy’s 1959 play, On the Outside,

Joe and Frank are young single men, futilely trying to beg, borrow, or
steal the entrance fee to a rural dance because, although employed, they
have no disposable income whatsoever. Their performances thus resonate
with the social marginalization, cultural exclusion, and economic precarity
experienced by a vast majority of everyday workingmen in late 1950s
Ireland. And yet, while both are painfully aware of their lack of finan-
cial and social capital, they are more concerned that not gaining entrance
to the dance has dashed any hopes of having sex with women that night.
With their potential female partners already inside the dance—two women
whom they describe in language that belies both their sexual inexperience
and an objectified, misogynistic view of female sexuality—their chances
of displaying their manly virility and potency is very much left ‘on the
outside’. Joe’s final closing line, ‘Come on out of here to hell’, indi-
cates not only that they will give up on their efforts to gain entrance
to the dance, but also that they will, most likely, abandon Ireland itself
and emigrate to the ‘hell’ of England.
Fifty-two years later, Nancy Harris’ No Romance (2011) is set in a
funeral parlour, where Joe, a once-prosperous businessman who has gone
bust, rather than mourn his dead mother laid out before him, agonizes
and shouts because his daughter has posted a picture of herself in a
wet t-shirt competition on the Internet. His wife, Carmel, annoyed by
his sexual hypocrisy, produces a pair of women’s lingerie stockings that
Joe has ordered from an online sex worker and so exposes his growing
addiction to Internet pornography. While the economic precarity that
threatens Joe somewhat echoes that of the men in On the Outside, the
demise of his business is a direct result of the global financial crash of
2008, a fiscal disaster that, as many critics elaborate, was engendered by
unregulated neoliberal capitalism. Still, Joe’s performance is also under-
girded by several problems shared by his counterparts in On the Outside,
such as an inability to prioritize his anxieties, a misaligned and objectified
understanding of female sexuality, and a sense of the contemporary world
passing him by. Thus, although the settings and historical placement of
these plays are very different, and the individual performances are equally
contrasting, there is nevertheless a cluster of underlying anxieties shared
by Frank and Joe in 1959, and Joe in 2011, with regard to how they
should ‘act the man’. Both plays therefore suggest a landscape of shifting
and yet at times static performances of Irish manhood; a landscape that
this book maps across a time frame—the 1960s to the 2010s—during
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTING THE MAN 3
which Ireland underwent several periods of profound social, political,

economic, religious, and cultural change.
This book therefore charts the journey, in terms of both stases and
change, that male characters have made in Irish drama from the 1960s
to the present; a journey whose significant characteristics are alluded to
in the above quotations. Echoing the similarities and differences between
the masculine anxieties of Joe and Frank in 1959 and Joe in 2011, one of
the primary aims of Acting the Man is to critically elaborate a seismic shift
in the theatrical performance of Irish masculinities and, by extension then,
in the broader society and culture. Responding to the world around them
as it revolves on an ever-changing socio-political axis, male characters in
Irish drama, this book argues, have shifted from embodying and enacting
post-colonial concerns of Irishness, nationalism, and national identity, to
performing paradigms of masculinity that are driven and moulded by
the political and cultural praxes of neoliberal capitalism. Throughout the
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Irish drama, as this book shall demonstrate,
was underwritten by performances of a nationalist resonance, whereby
male characters embodied concerns about overdetermined manhood and
Irish identity. More recent performances of masculinity have, since the
mid-1980s and even more explicitly since the 1990s, shifted into manifes-
tations of market-driven masculinity whereby hyper-consumers purchase,
subsume, and subsequently perform mediated tropes and narratives of
homogenously globalized manhood.
Still, this shift is neither as all encompassing nor as liberating from the
old ways as it initially appears. Since the 1980s, the increasing entrench-
ment of neoliberal socio-economic policies and cultural practices means
that Irish gender roles subscribe to consumerist tropes of identity that are
as class-anxious as they are rigidly gendered—as rigid, albeit in different
ways, as the social models of gender that came before. Joe and Frank
in On the Outside are trapped in heavily gendered socio-cultural schemas
and display a hunger for sexual experiences that are intrinsic to their being
men from late 1950s Ireland. Not only does their economic precarity and
willingness to emigrate from that ‘vomit-filled tank’ speak to the autarky
of Eamonn DeValera’sIreland, but their lack of access to and knowledge
of women and female sexuality also resonates with Catholic Nationalist
teachings and ideologies of the time. Furthermore, as the emigration
narratives of thousands of Irishmen like Joe and Frank demonstrate,
life as an Irish navvy building English motorways and council estates,
while quite different to the unemployment or low-paid farming such men
4 C. O’BRIEN
had left behind, was nonetheless another form of ‘hell’ (McEinri 2000).
Half a century later, Joe in No Romance has easy access to market- and
digitally mediated versions of his sexual fantasies, courtesy of high-tech
infrastructures and credit cards, and via that most globalized and commer-
cialized of entities, the Internet. Yet, when those fantasizes are disrupted
harshly because an online photograph of his daughter forces him to see
the anonymous living dolls of internet pornography as real women with
lives and personalities, his misaligned notions of women and female sexu-
ality replicate those of the men in On the Outside. Crucially, Joe in No
Romance could be any contemporary Western man. His performance of
angst-ridden masculinity, indeed Harris’ entire drama, could easily be set
in many developed nations across the Global North in the 2010s and still
play out in the same ways with the same consequences. Thus, while Joe
and Frank in 1959 do what Irishmen must do, Joe in 2011 does what
globalized Western men must do.
However, and characterizing one of the key sites of inertia in this shift
from nationalism to neoliberalism, the concerns and vicissitudes of hetero-
sexual men still remain the primary driving forces behind Irish theatre
(both artistically and as an industry) and Irish social, political, and cultural
life. To explore why this might be; to discover why, in so many cases,
change in Ireland has meant different ways of staying the same, Acting
the Man also elaborates parallel shifts and stasis in regressive systems of
gender and sexuality in Irish culture, politics, and society, whereby patri-
archy, misogyny, and homophobia have morphed from being explicit and
easily identified, into implicit, often invisible structures of control. Hiding
themselves in market-mediated tropes of polarized gender and sexual
identity, these regressive systems are promulgated under the allegedly
liberal gloss of ‘consumer choice’ and ‘individualism’, thus effacing their
workings so as to be invisible by their very ubiquity. Joe in No Romance,
as an individual in the globalized economy of the twenty-first century,
understands purchasing internet pornography as a ‘right’, and when
his wife points out the misogyny and lack of responsibility inherent in
his choices, she is chastised for interfering in his privacy and even his
thoughts. Moreover, as No Romance aptly exemplifies, quite frequently
when male dominance is challenged, such challenges are responded to
with dire warnings about men becoming disenfranchised, or somehow
emasculated, thus heralding doom-laden portents of social breakdown,
and, most frequently, of men being thrown ‘into crisis’. Therefore,
alongside considerations of the shift from nationalism to neoliberalism,
Acting the Man also interrogates the contemporary notion of ‘masculinity

in crisis’ whereby traditional modes of masculinity—in particular patri-
archy—are perceived as being under threat due to socio-political gains
made by feminism and LGBTQ rights movements.
Up until quite recently the landscape of Irish theatre scholarship
has been inflected primarily by post-colonial criticism, although it is
now starting to move towards identity politics and biopolitical criticism.
Certainly, over the last thirty years, there has been a growth in crit-
ical examinations of gender and sexuality, albeit predominantly in terms
of femininity and feminism. It is only in the last decade, with land-
mark publications such as Brian Singleton’s Masculinities and the Irish
Theatre (2011) and Fintan Walsh’s Male Trouble: Masculinity and the
Performance of Crisis (2010), along with several journal articles and book
chapters responding to a new wave of male playwrights that rose in the
1990s, that Irish drama scholarship has begun to think about men and
masculinities in a critical framework. Of these works, this book acts most
in tandem with Singleton’s 2011 monograph, however several funda-
mental critical apparatus set his and my books apart; first, Singleton’s
work starts in the 1990s whereas this book takes 1959—both in terms
of politics and playwrighting—as its starting point. Furthermore, where
possible and in consultation with Singleton, we have avoided analyses of
the same dramas. Singleton’s work has a chapter dedicated to race and
ethnicities of colour (which focuses in the main on television drama)
whereas this book folds such analyses throughout its chapters with the
main focus on opposing ethnic identities being those of differing models
of white Irish manhood, particularly with Northern Irish masculinities
in Chapter 4, ‘Men of the North’. This book, unlike Singleton’s, has
a chapter dedicated to interrogating ‘Masculinity without Men’, which
is to say, analysing female-centric and -authored plays for the ‘pres-
ence by absence’ of patriarchal masculinity. And finally, while Singleton’s
book focuses on masculinities both onstage and within the Irish theatre
industry, this book is a critical survey of the shifts and changes in the
ways in which male characters in Irish drama have been represented since
the 1960s to 2020. Acting the Man hence aims to intersect several nodes
of thinking about Irish drama—postcolonial, gender, queer, and biopo-
litical—and thus develop a new critical framework; not only by drawing
from and building on the long tradition of post-colonial scholarship, but
more so by intervening into it, teasing out, and nuancing performances
6 C. O’BRIEN
of masculinities that have been, up until now, largely taken for granted by
critics as representing a monolithic ‘Irish manhood’.
Examining a diverse corpus of Irish drama and performance both main-
stream and on the margins, popular, and fringe, Acting the Man maps this
new critical landscape and thus creates a space for innovative and original
readings of canonical Irish plays while also giving several fringe and alter-
native theatre events their first intellectual consideration. Chapter 2: The
Fantasy of Manhood, examines the ways in which hegemonic or soci-
ety’s dominant form of manhood is constructed both subjectively and
in the socio-political and cultural arenas. Having examined how domi-
nant models of manhood are constructed in this chapter. Chapter 3: The
Pathology of Patriarchy, then scrutinizes the ways in which these forms of
manhood assume entitlement to a place at the top of the gender order and
then take that place, often to the detriment of women, trans people, and
other less dominant models of masculinity. Chapter 4: Men of the North,
examines how the construction of dominant masculinities and their oper-
ations in society function in different ways once they are situated in a
zone of conflict, in this case during the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and in
the post-conflict or peace process. Chapter 5: Masculinity Without Men
examines the ‘presence by absence’ in dramas that have all-female casts or
are female-centric and in plays that are written by and for women. The
book’s final main chapter, Acting Queer, posits queer dramaturgy as a way
forward for a more egalitarian Irish theatre, both in performance and as
an industry.
Crucially, the book’s critical landscape demonstrates the ways in which
theatrical performances of Irish masculinity and, by extension, the lives
of Irish men and the other lives they touch, have always been subject to
inflexible ideologies, driven at first by issues of national and post-colonial
identity, and more recently by neoliberal and homogenously Western
concerns. Both of these ideologies are universally impacting, as the book
demonstrates in chapters on performing masculinity in both the Republic
and Northern Ireland, and in chapters that focus on women’s and queer
drama. Acting the Man thus takes its readers on a journey: a journey that
begins with an overtly patriarchal, nationalist manhood that often made
direct comment on the state of the nation, and ultimately arrives at several
arguably regressive forms of globalized masculinity, which are couched in
misaligned notions of individualism and free choice and that frequently
perceive themselves as being in crisis.
1 Contexts and Concepts of Masculinities

The word ‘masculinity’ means many different things to many different
people. As it is popularly understood in everyday life, it is taken to mean
how men—the males of the human species—walk, talk, behave, and think
in ways that are specific to and caused by their being male. In other words,
masculinity is perceived as a distinct cluster of characteristics, movements,
gestures, attitudes, mindsets, and utterances, that are enacted by male
bodies and which thus differentiate them from females. Furthermore, that
this cluster of characteristics is traditionally bestowed with ideals of power,
strength, decision, reason, leadership, economic success, political acumen,
and national protection has been used frequently to justify the masculine
control and oppression of women and homosexual men. But even this
generalized understanding of masculinity has nuances that vary with the
march of history and from culture to culture. Consider, for example, the
term ‘machismo’ and its Anglophone counterpart, ‘macho’. In its original
Spanish and Portuguese contexts, both historically and in the present day,
‘macho’ functions as a compliment that pays homage to a man’s virility
and attractiveness to women while signalling his ability to provide for and
protect his family. Simultaneously, however, the term has been globalized,
at first through Spanish and Portuguese colonialism and later by economic
migration, and so its meanings have changed over time beyond its orig-
inal Iberian contexts. In European and North American nations, ‘macho’
now carries a negative valence, denoting a particular form of overdeter-
mined, arrogant sexism while also perpetuating racial stereotypes about
‘over-sexualized’ Latin men. Yet in gay cultures, ‘macho’ resonates with
the sexual fantasy of muscle-bound, domineering men (of any ethnicity)
who do ‘hard-man’ jobs like the cop or the fireman—indeed, much gay
pornography and nightclub marketing will have the term ‘macho’ figured
somewhere in its branding.
Geopolitically, the social enactment of masculinity will vary as different
governments, educators, religious entities, and sports associations posit
and sometimes enforce ideals—both legislative and cultural—about how
they expect men to act as men in their societies and communities. Even
within the everyday living of one nation state there are vast differences
in the ways men are expected to embody their masculinity. Consider, for
example, the type of masculinity portrayed by an unmarried farmer, living
and working in an isolated community in rural Ireland which is deeply
religious and conservative. And compare that to the ways in which an
8 C. O’BRIEN
atheist, married man with three children, who lives in an affluent Dublin
suburb and works as a senior executive at a global corporation, would
enact his masculine identity. Indeed, one would, with these two examples,
see differences in their expressions of masculinity depending on where
these men were at any given time of the day and with whom they were
interacting. Consider now the single gay man, employed and living in
the city-centre, with a busy social life. While his sense of masculinity
will contrast with the two above examples, it will also differ from that
of another gay man who is older in years and settled with a long-term
partner. And the ways in which all of these men convey a sense of
masculine identity would change should their sources of income become
reduced or stop altogether.
It becomes clear, then, that masculinity is not one ahistorical, fixed
state of being that applies to all men at all times, but rather a set of ever-
changing, geopolitically specific models of manhood that are shaped by
socio-political, cultural, religious, and economic contingencies outside of
the male subject. This notion of many different, culturally and tempo-
rally contingent paradigms of manhood led scholars in the mid-1980s to
posit the concept of ‘multiple masculinities’. This in turn has fostered
the critical study of ‘men and masculinities’; thereby not only plural-
izing masculine characteristics and mindsets, but further making a definite
separation between the bodies of men and the social configurations of
masculinities that map across those bodies. Men and masculinity, for
so long assumed to be one and the same thing, are now intellectually
conceptualized as separate but mutually dependent entities.
Furthermore, as a cluster of culturally constructed paradigms that
map themselves across male bodies, we can infer that masculinities are
acted out, or performed, as those bodies move through social and
theatrical time and space. Yet, while the word ‘performance’ denotes
something that is rehearsed, practised, and deliberately brought before
others, for quotidian male subjects this is rarely a conscious process.
It would be foolish to suggest that the majority of men awake in the
morning and decide to perform their masculinity in one particular way
or another. Indeed, as this book illustrates throughout, the performance
of masculinity and its effects on others is something to which many men
afford little or no thought. Therefore, although we can see how masculin-
ities are, in one sense, ‘performed’, our understanding of the psychic
machinations and cultural conditioning that drive these performances
needs further unpacking.
Drawing from the work of linguistics scholar, J. L. Austin, gender

philosopher Judith Butler argues that the enactment of gender paradigms
can be considered ‘performative’ rather than performance. Austin theo-
rized ‘performative speech acts’ whereby certain events are made to
happen, or brought into being, by merely uttering that they have
happened, with the most cited example being that of a wedding: the
minister or legal celebrant, through the performative speech act of ‘now
pronouncing you husband and wife’, changes the social, legal, and
cultural status of the couple in question. Butler applies this thinking across
gender, arguing that it too is brought into being, or made to happen,
through the subject enacting or doing a ‘stylized repetition of acts ’ which
have been embedded deep into the psyche since infancy (1988, 519).
The ‘regulatory fiction’ of gender, as Butler calls it (1990, 45), is there-
fore brought into being by doing it, rather than brought into doing by
being it—or by any essence of innate, pre-birth manliness.
While it is tempting, in the light of these formulations, to consider the
male body as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which culturally specific
scripts of masculinity are imposed, it is vital to consider the interwoven
effects of language, history, and, especially in the case of Ireland (or any
post-colonial state), the role of imperialism. At their most fundamental,
theories of gender differentiate between the biological sex of bodies as
they are born into this world (i.e. male or female), and the culturally
constructed codes of gender as they are socially mapped onto those bodies
(i.e. masculinity and femininity). However, the ‘natural’ biological body is
known to us, can only be known to us, through language, which itself is a
cultural construct—thus the language and taxonomies through which any
given culture understands ‘natural’ bodies will have their own historical
bias and, in the contemporary era, market-mediated meanings. To trouble
this cultural sex/gender binary even further, it leaves intersex and trans-
gender bodies—those either born with some degree of both male and
female biological characteristics or those who need to perform socially
a gender configuration different to their biological body—out of the
mix completely. Such bodies are, in many cases, perceived as ‘unnatural’
anomalies and are subject to violence, legal ambiguity, and easy incar-
ceration. Colonization too has had a massive impact on the sex/gender
binary with the imperialist formulation of the ideal subject as being a
white, heterosexual male still prevalent across the globe—thus ‘natural’
bodies of colour acquire different, often objectified and eroticized mean-
ings as do the cultural codes of gender that are mapped across them.
10 C. O’BRIEN
As several post-colonial scholars have elaborated, when former colonies

transition into independent States, their previous status as colonized,
‘feminized other’ morphs not only into overdetermined gender roles, but
also into violent misogyny and homophobia as the fledgling nation seeks
to assert its strength through the valorization of ‘natural’ strength and
prowess and thus ‘natural’ gender roles (Nandy 1988; Meaney 2010).
Vexatious bodies that do not conform to the new nation’s ideals of gender
(ideals, we must remember, that were inherited from the former colonial
oppressor), such as non-conforming women, transgender subjects, gays,
lesbians, and other queer-identified people, are ushered out of public
sight through exile, criminalization, incarceration, and in some cases,
elimination.
The sex/gender binary, then, is not as clear-cut as it may first seem.
What is clear, however, is that both our understandings of natural bodies
and the cultural codes of gender that are mapped across them are highly
regulatory, and those who cannot or will not conform to them are often
punished, both culturally and legislatively. And yet, the entrenched nature
of these gender performatives, as they are automatically, unconsciously,
and unquestioningly enacted by the subject, makes them seem natural,
pre-emptive, pre-cultural, part of the order of things. Although the male
subject performs his masculinity, by virtue of the performative nature of
gender, often he does not realize this to be the case.
2 Hegemonic Masculinity
and Performing the Nation
Although one can recognize that social and theatrical performances of
masculinities are multitudinous and varied, it is important also to interro-
gate how, in any given culture and historical era, one particular paradigm
of masculinity rises to a dominant position and is thus socially sanctioned
as the only acceptable way to be a man in that time and place. Originally
proposed in a field study of social inequality in Australian high-schools
by Martin Kessler in 1982, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is the label given
to this dominant construction of manhood (Connell and Messerschmidt
2005). Hegemonic masculinity can thus be understood as an overarching
paradigm of manhood that rises to social prominence and thus dominates
configurations of gender practice within any given society. On an indi-
viduated level, it becomes an exalted model of masculinity to which men
aspire while, on a societal level, it embeds itself into social structures and
cultural practices as a means of legitimizing and sanctioning heterosexual

male dominance.
Because hegemonic masculinity is popularly imagined, with idealized
men appearing in media, sports, drama, film and television, and public
discourses, its reification ensures that it is, in actuality, embodied by very
few, if indeed any men. As Raewyn Connell puts it, ‘Hegemony is a
question of relations of cultural domination, not of head-counts’ (1993,
610). Clearly then, while hegemonic masculinity cannot be considered
normal because it is rarely achieved, it is certainly normative and asymp-
totically aspirational; rather than being a suggestion of how men should
act and treat other people, it functions as a regulatory dictate. Hence,
hegemonic masculinity is competitive, and, being based on a reified ideal,
remains constantly unresolved, subject to eternal self-doubt and ques-
tioning by other men. This questioning happens most of all in all-male or
homosocial settings. Within homosocial groupings of men, the subject’s
masculinity must be validated by his peers through systems of surveillance.
Men find themselves under the perpetual scrutiny of other men; ranking
each other, evaluating their counterparts’ performances of manhood, and
thus permitting, should the performances be found up to par, entrance
into the dominion of hegemonic masculinity. Men in homosocial settings
constantly check themselves, and each other: ‘Am I manly enough? Is he?’
This social dynamic thus autologously feeds into hegemonic masculini-
ty’s schema of competition, suspicion, and self-doubt. The constant need
to keep up with and then outdo other men’s performances of manhood
means that masculine peer surveillance functions as one of hegemonic
masculinity’s most powerful social tools.
Irish drama, by virtue of the Abbey National Theatre’s role in the
early twentieth-century struggle for Irish independence, has been heavily
bound up in the project of nation building and promoting the national
imaginary. However, what much scholarship has elided is that the project
of theatrically building the nation is inextricably interwoven with the
project of promulgating Irish hegemonic masculinity. Performances of
hegemonic paradigms of manhood in Irish drama, despite shifting and
changing over time, so often essentialize Irishmen as ‘sons of the nation’
or as symbolic of the state of the nation. Writing in a specifically Irish
context, Debbie Ging asserts:
gender identity and national identity are remarkably similar [.…] Through
subtle processes of symbolic and cultural reinforcement, nationality and
12 C. O’BRIEN
masculinity tend to become viewed as essential qualities […] how

masculinity and femininity are defined in a given society is central to that
society’s collective concept of self, and vice versa. (2012, 21)
Indeed, it is possible to trace a through-line of hegemonic masculinity

in modern Irish theatre using a few prominent examples: It begins with
W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s 1902 drama Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in
which the male hero abandons his bride in order to die for Ireland, moves
via Tom Murphy’s and Brian Friel’sAngry Young Men in A Whistle in
the Dark (1961) and Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), to its most
recent manifestations in Conor McPherson’s disaffected, socially disorien-
tated men who question the supposedly egalitarian nature of Irish society
from the 1990s and beyond. Falling in line with several prominent Irish
cultural institutions such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the
state-sponsored broadcaster RTÉ, the Irish political establishment, and
the Catholic Church, Irish theatre has functioned as a primary site and
conduit of hegemonic masculinity. In many ways, then, the history of
modern Irish drama can also be read as a cultural history of modern Irish
manhood.
However, the hegemonic paradigms promoted by entrenched bastions
of Irish masculinity such as the GAA and RTÉ are shifting, a phenomenon
that has not gone unnoticed by several prominent scholars of Irish culture
(Cronin 2014; Mulhall 2013; Ging and Free 2016). The place of hege-
monic masculinity in Irish social life and the cultural associations that
support it have, since the exposition of Church and Institutional abuse
scandals in the early 1990s as well as generational shifts in attitudes
towards LGBTQ sexualities and women’s rights, made decisive moves
away from traditional strangleholds of identity such as Catholic Nation-
alism and its overt homophobia and misogyny. In 2009, Dónal Óg
Cusack, a high-profile and much admired GAA hurling player, came
out publicly as gay via his autobiography Come What May. Cusack
spoke subsequently on many national media platforms about Ireland’s
entrenched architecture of homophobia and the often life-long harm
caused by homophobic bullying of young LGBTQ people while simul-
taneously raising awareness about men’s mental health. Cusack thus
prompted a shift in attitudes towards gay masculinities in Irish sporting
traditions and by extension in the culture more broadly. Furthermore,
his public coming out, I would argue, had a positive influence on the
subsequent success of the Equal Marriage referendum in 2015. The
GAA has since spoken out in support of gay players and has mounted
several campaigns to dispel homophobia from Gaelic games while also
promoting women’s GAA sports. Simultaneously, the successful passage
of the Equal Marriage referendum was overwhelmingly supported by
many heterosexual men—both ordinary citizens and public figures—who
could be considered exemplars of hegemonic masculinity. Indeed, the
Abbey Theatre hosted several events in support of a Yes vote for the Equal
Marriage referendum.
It tempting to thus argue, particularly given the success of the marriage
referendum, that Irish hegemonic masculinity has evolved to encom-
pass queerness or at least gay-identified men. In this vein, scholars such
as Eric Anderson argue for ‘inclusive masculinities’ (2009), a hybrid
model of hegemonic masculinity in which gay men allegedly function
freely and without oppression. However, for other critics, this formu-
lation is too simplistic. Scholars to date have asserted that one of
hegemonic masculinity’s defining characteristics is heterosexuality; there-
fore any social enactment of male homosexuality was considered to sit
firmly outside the boundaries of the hegemonic project. Up until the
last decade or so, this claim certainly held weight, particularly when we
consider that hegemonic masculinity—because it is an unstable, idealistic
identity with ever-shifting boundaries—has always defined itself as that
which it is not, rather than state what it is. Homosexuality, therefore, has
functioned as a key counter-identity for hegemonic masculinity.
There exists, however, a narrow, limited performance of commodi-
fied and market-driven gay masculinity which, while it cannot exactly be
considered part of hegemonic masculinity, can operate in tandem with
it. I speak here of a mode of gay lifestyle and living that theorists such as
Michael Warner, Lisa Duggan, and Gavin Brown identify as ‘homonorma-
tivity’ (1999, 2003, 2012). I would also argue moreover, that within the
realm of queer-identified masculinities, homonormativity can be concep-
tualized as the gay equivalent of hegemonic masculinity (and this is an
argument I critically unpack in fuller terms in Chapter 5). This model of
gay manhood, apart from same-sex partner, looks and acts very much like
heteronormative masculinity and is inextricably bound up in neoliberal
consumerism. Indeed, contrary to Anderson’s claims that the apparently
reduced homophobia of hegemonic masculinity has facilitated the emer-
gence of more inclusive or non-homophobic forms of manhood, several
scholars argue that Anderson’s ‘inclusive masculinities’ may be little more
than a strategy for so-called ‘progressive’ straight, white, middle-class men
14 C. O’BRIEN
to increase their economic, social, and political power (O’Neill 2015; De

Boise 2015; Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Ging 2017).
Gay masculinities we cannot therefore assume will always already be
pro-feminist or anti-patriarchal merely by virtue of same-sex coupling
or because this was once an outlawed and oppressed sexuality. Indeed,
upon closer scrutiny, it appears that hegemonic masculinity will allow gay
masculinities to operate alongside it on the provision that the common
bond is misogyny. Ging demonstrates in a 2017 study of online self-
labelling masculinities—a toxic digital space known as ‘the manosphere’—
the ways in which both gay and straight men espouse virulent misogyny in
the name of ‘men’s rights’. Indeed, as Connell and Messerschmidt remind
us:
Men can dodge among multiple meanings according to their interactional

needs. Men can adopt hegemonic masculinity when it is desirable; but the
same men can distance themselves strategically from hegemonic masculinity
at other moments. Consequently, ‘masculinity’ represents not a certain type
of man but, rather, a way that men position themselves through discursive
practices. (2005, 840)
It follows, then, that the pro-gay yet anti-feminist discourses that Ging
identifies demonstrate the ways in which Anderson’s ‘inclusive masculini-
ties’ not only exclude women but can also be explicitly invested in uniting
men—regardless of sexual orientation—in a bid to secure social privilege
over women.
Certainly the ‘straight-acting’ homonormative paradigm of gay
manhood is easily digestible to the mainstream and, in keeping with
hetero-patriarchal hegemonic masculinity, will subscribe to normative
lifestyle choices such as proclaimed monogamy, the creation of a family
with children (either through adoption or a surrogate mother), home
ownership, and the right to join the military among other things. Here,
then, is a model of gay manhood that seeks assimilation into norma-
tive structures as opposed to radical queer masculinities which look for
liberation from capitalist systems of governance and their incumbent
market-driven lifestyle paradigms. And while the assimilatory aspects of
this gay manhood are no bad things in and of themselves, they become
problematic when they become normative; by which I mean when these
cultural codes and scripts are not only popularly understood but more so
politically promulgated as the only way in which gay masculinity can and
should operate in social and theatrical time and space.
Furthermore, because this model of gay manhood is now part of
normativity, brought into being primarily through consumership and in
online spaces, it slots neatly into the already patriarchal structures of the
State and shores up the neoliberal status quo.
Moreover, as this book demonstrates throughout, while many of
these shifts in Irish hegemonic masculinity, including its tolerance of
homonormative manhood, are inherently progressive, they are nonethe-
less underwritten by political and social practices of neoliberal capitalism.
By attending to all of these recent, ostensibly progressive shifts in Irish
manhood, Acting the Man, it is hoped, augments and furthers a nascent
body of Irish cultural and queer scholarship that is now interrogating not
just how hegemonic masculinity is performed by gendered subjects oper-
ating at the top of a social hierarchy, but also the ways in which that
hegemony plays out across the bodies and lives of others, including the
theatre spectator.
3 Patriarchy and Its Dividends

On 28th October 2015, the Abbey Theatre publicized its programme of
events for the following year’s centenary celebrations of the 1916 Rising
which it called ‘Waking the Nation’. That of the ten plays programmed
only one was female-authored and a mere three to be directed by women
was, paradoxically, both shocking and unsurprising. The misogynistic
structures of the Irish theatre industry were now fully and publicly laid
bare and what had, up until that point, remained a well-known but rarely
examined problem in Ireland’s theatrical culture could no longer remain
ignored. Clearly for the Abbey, as Carole Quigleyputs it, ‘women and
their artistic work do not belong on the national stage and they do
not represent a part of the nation worth “waking”’ (2018, 85). The
Abbey’s sexist programming gave rise to an international activist move-
ment protesting the patriarchal structures and secondary status of women
in creative industries. Kickstarted on social media by Irish set-designer,
Lian Bell, and named #WakingTheFeminists by director Maeve Stone, the
hashtag went viral within days; with the irony of its shortened tag, #WTF,
(an Internet acronym for ‘what the fuck?’) serving to hammer home the
outrage, exasperation, and injustice experienced by female theatre prac-
titioners in Ireland and abroad. And while #WakingTheFeminists proved
16 C. O’BRIEN
successful in terms of forcing change in the Abbey’s programme as well as

sparking a global movement with subsequent rallies and conferences and
publications, this work is not over. As I elaborate further below, the Irish
theatre industry—both artistically and managerially—remains patriarchal
in ideologies and personnel.
In terms of patriarchy in performance, the masculine body onstage
performs within a kaleidoscope of signifiers of hegemonic masculinity—
those culturally embedded symbols of power, strength, leadership,
national protection, and control. Coupled with male-peer surveillance
and the subjugation of women, these signifiers mean that several systems
of male dominance—explicit and implicit, visible and hidden—move and
shape the lives of characters in Irish drama. As such, both the charac-
ters’ and the spectators’ investment in and journey through the worlds in
which the drama operates are shaped—and to a great degree, controlled—
by several systems of entrenched male dominance or patriarchy. Patriarchy,
then, can be understood as a set of socio-political, cultural, economic,
and religious systems, that intersect and control configurations of gender,
class, race, and sexuality, by positioning the social and cultural perfor-
mance of hegemonic masculinity as the dominant central identity from
which all other subjectivities are deemed to have deviated and to which
they are thus considered inferior. These sometimes subtle and insidious
systems, in which both women and men (often complicitly) partici-
pate, privilege the interests of hegemonic men and boys over the bodily
integrity, autonomy, civil rights, and dignity of women and girls, as well
as queer-identified subjects and non-hegemonic males.
These entrenched systems engender what Connell identifies as ‘the
patriarchal dividend’ (2005, 79). Although only a small number of men
will identify entirely with or subscribe to male dominance in society
(and over the last decade, such men tend to congregate in digital online
spaces), and while many men will actively agree with the tenets of femi-
nism, the majority of men still stand to gain from patriarchal structures.
The history of patriarchy and its perpetuation in our contemporary world
thus gives rise to structures of male privilege that go largely unquestioned
by and are often invisible to the men who stand to gain from them. That
even men who perform an ostensibly egalitarian model of masculinity
can still reap patriarchal dividends illustrates the complexity of systems
of patriarchy while simultaneously foregrounding how such systems are
bound up in intricate relations of complicity and coercion. But beyond
that, what the patriarchal dividend really highlights is that as much as
individual men (and some women) may need to examine their behaviour
and beliefs when it comes to masculinist centrality and visibility, it is the
very structures of patriarchy that need to be challenged and reformed if
society and culture are to move towards an egalitarian gender order.
With social and theatrical systems and performances of patriarchy so
deeply entrenched at all levels of Irish culture and society, and their subse-
quent dividends providing ample rewards for just being born a man,
regardless of one’s level of active participation in hegemonic paradigms,
the internalization of such systems engenders a skewed form of base
knowledge, or axiomatic epistemology, that is masculinist to its core.
This patriarchal epistemology undergirds received truths and assump-
tions, operating at the very root of society’s core beliefs. In essence,
patriarchal epistemology functions as the baseline from which all other
forms of knowing and believing spring, and, as the baseline, it goes
unquestioned. Philosophers of systems of knowledge and epistemology
identify two fundamental forms of human knowing: a priori and a posteri.
The former is knowledge that is non-empirical, acquired independently
of experience, and is arrived at ‘before the event’, indeed, brought ‘to
the event’. While the latter is knowledge garnered from experience and
evidence, knowledge gained from ‘the event’ itself. What I argue here is
that while patriarchal epistemology is popularly understood to be a priori
knowledge, it is, in fact, an a posteri system of knowing. The collective
and individual internalization of patriarchal systems and their dividends,
coupled with the performativity of social gender roles skews understand-
ings of patriarchy so that, much like gender, it appears to be a natural,
pre-cultural force emanating from the beginning of time. Yet, it is clearly
not. Systems of patriarchy and their dividends are derived from an a
posteri knowing and set of experiences that have taught men, implicitly
and explicitly, and over a long period of time, that such systems are to
their advantage.
Irish theatre is a culturally prominent economic and socio-political
structure with a meta-structural existence outside of itself not only in
media commentary, reviews, and scholarship, but also in the hearts and
minds of its audiences. Thus the Irish theatre industry operates both
within and as a sub-system of the various patriarchal systems that consti-
tute Irish society. That Irish theatre is a patriarchal entity, not just as
an industry, but more so in its creative practices and policies, is well
documented. As Eamonn Jordan puts it:
18 C. O’BRIEN
the imaginations of Irish theatre practitioners, playwrights especially, have

been seriously ideologically loaded, not only in the specific prioritization
of primarily male values, references and aspirations, and in their general
scrutiny of, and obsession with, masculinity, but also in their consistent
subjugation, marginalization and objectification of the feminine. (2007,
143)
Where female characters are given prominence in Irish theatre they have,
until very recently, generally fallen on either side of the madonna/whore
binary—either sexualized objects, or asexual maternal figures. Ubiquitous
throughout the Irish theatrical canon is the trope of Mother Ireland,
whereby women are figured as nation, as an imagined, objectified space
that might perhaps be fought and died for, but above all is romanticized
and de-humanized.
As illustrated not just by #WakingTheFeminsts but by vicious criti-
cism of the appointment of Garry Hynes as the Abbey Theatre’s most
recent female artistic director in 1991,1 the performance of patriarchy in
Irish theatre is not restricted to its stages. Patriarchy is embedded within
the industry itself, in media events, and, importantly, in the board rooms
where programming and funding decisions are made. Moreover, that
unproblematic representations of gay men did not come to prominence in
Irish playwriting largely until after the decriminalization of homosexuality
in 1993 further illustrates the national theatrical imaginary’s propensity
towards propping up the patriarchal status quo.
As my analyses of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy throughout
this book illustrate, entrenched forms of patriarchal manhood are limiting,
narrow, harmful—even dangerous—and, above all, exclusionary; not only
to women but also to men who do not meet hegemonic criteria. This is
the case whether theatre is created within the 1960s–1970s model of man
and nation, or the more recent market-driven paradigms of masculinity.
This exclusion is present not only in Irish playwriting, but also, in subtle
ways, in Irish theatre scholarship. Much drama scholarship to date (with
notable exceptions of course), has largely been uncritical of Irish male
characters as gendered subjects, and the ways in which such subjects
1 The first official female artistic director of the Abbey was Lelia Doolan, who held the
post from January 1972 to December 1973. Furthermore, it should be noted that from
1937 to 1941 the actress and director Ria Mooney held a similar post at the Abbey which
was, however, not labelled as ‘Artistic Director’.
move through theatrical and social space and time. Such criticism, while
sometimes giving passing mention to a monolithic notion of singular
‘masculinity’, parses Irishmen as being symbolic of their struggles against
Englishmen. Or Irishmen are analysed in terms of their efforts to gain
autonomy within oppressive state and religious apparatus, but seldom
discussed in terms of being hegemonic men who function at the top of
a gendered social hierarchy. Such uncritical figuring of Irishmen not only
fails to uncover or foreground challenges to hegemonic masculinity and
patriarchy in both Irish drama and society, but also renders masculinity as
unproblematic, as somehow unmarked by ideology and history.
Certainly, Acting the Man draws from and is indebted to the large
body of post-colonial criticism in Irish theatre studies. But simultane-
ously this book aims to intervene into that scholarly conversation by
interrogating not only how Irish hegemonic masculinity and systems of
patriarchy mould dramatic characterizations and theatrical performances,
but more so by asking questions about how men perceive themselves as
men and the ways in which these perceptions are performed.
4 Irish Manhood and the Market

In September 2008 global financial markets crashed—quite spectacularly.
This market meltdown brought to a sudden and unexpected halt a fifteen-
year period of unprecedented economic growth and wealth creation in
Ireland known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. The harsh effects of the crash’s
subsequent long-recession were particularly debilitating with two succes-
sive governments implementing breath-taking programmes of austerity
while seeking financial bailouts (in reality, loans with stringent condi-
tions attached) from the ‘troika’ of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Union
(EU). Recovering from the crash in typical neoliberal boom-and-bust
cycle, Ireland’s finances rebounded so well that by 2017 the economy
was again thriving with a mere 4% unemployment and an ever-rising
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which saw the nation cited as one of
the fastest growing economies in the EU (Whelan et al. 2017). However,
because the Tiger Era boom relied heavily on a construction industry
bubble, a key strategy of economic recovery undertaken by the govern-
ment was to sell distressed property at knock-down cost (Kitchin et al.
2015). These unoccupied buildings, mainly apartment complexes and
hotels, were scooped up by American venture capitalists (aka, vulture
20 C. O’BRIEN
funds), thus giving their new owners a near-monopoly over the rental
housing market. This meant, in turn, that the supply of rented accommo-
dation dwindled with many small-business landlords departing the market
due to their inability to compete with the venture capitalists. Unsurpris-
ingly, the cost of renting a home, especially in the nation’s cities, has
soared to unaffordable levels (Byrne 2020).
Both employment and the provision of home are key components
of masculine identity. Therefore, while the long-recession disrupted
the former, the rental crisis threw the latter into disarray. Unemploy-
ment, since the foundation of the State in 1922, has played a major
role in the Irish economy and has long been, therefore, a key factor
in the construction of Irish masculinities both hegemonic and other.
The housing crisis, however, has engendered a previously unexperienced
disruption to this other crucial tenet of male identity—the ability to
provide shelter for oneself and one’s family. A new model of homeless-
ness has emerged whereby ordinary families with both adults working
stable jobs on industrial-average wages cannot afford to house themselves.
Compounding this further, I write this Introduction during the current
Coronavirus pandemic which has stalled national economies on a global
scale with unemployment sharply on the rise again. Currently the world,
not just Ireland, faces an uncertain economic future.
Masculinities and money are inextricably bound together in many ways
and on many levels, not least the typical hegemonic role of male as
breadwinner and provider. Discussing Irish masculinities and the long-
recession, Diane Negra foregrounds the ‘seldom elaborated or explored
point that cultures of male entitlement and risk had much to do with
the global financial collapse’ (2014, 223). Quoting Michael Lewis’s
prescient observation that ‘Ireland’s financial collapse […] was created
by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestion that maybe they
should stop and ask for directions’ (2011), Negra notes that while other
recession-torn nations such as Iceland were quick to interrogate correla-
tions between patriarchal systems and the economic crash, ‘Ireland almost
uniquely clings to its status quo’ (223). What Negra and Lewis make
clear, then, are the complex relationships between masculinities—partic-
ularly patriarchy—and both national and global systems of capital. It
becomes apparent not only how any given economic culture and climate
shapes and shifts masculinities as they play out in many different arenas,
including drama; but also how masculinities have an overdetermined
bearing on those same economic cultures and climates.
Indeed, social and theatrical performances of Irish masculinities have

always taken their cue from the nation’s financial vicissitudes while simul-
taneously feeding back into them. Joe and Frank in On the Outside are
not only excluded from the dancehall by virtue of lacking the entrance fee,
their economic and class precarity directly caused by and dramaturgically
symbolising decades-long government policies of economic protectionism
and cultural autarky. More so, they are also positioned on the outside of,
or just before, what is known as ‘the Lemass Era’; a period of political,
economic, and theatrical upheaval that this book takes as its historical
starting point. Sean Lemass, succeeding as the fourth Taoiseach (Prime
Minister) of Ireland in 1959, implemented T. K. Whittaker’s ‘Programme
for Economic Expansion’, thus opening Ireland to global markets and
heralding a fifteen-year period of economic growth and quotidian pros-
perity. Wind forward fifty-two years to Joe in No Romance, and we are
presented with a performance of patriarchy in crisis—his crisis engendered
not only by the boom-and-bust cycles of neoliberal capitalism that put
pay to the Celtic Tiger, but more so by his own participation in it. Joe,
given his age (mid-fifties), performs a paradigm of patriarchy that histor-
ically encompasses and is inflected by the prosperity of both the Lemass
Moment and the Celtic Tiger, as well as two long-recessions that engulfed
Ireland, first from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, and again after the
global financial crash of 2008.
Joe in No Romance thus performs not just a crisis of patriarchy, but
also a crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Throughout this book I interro-
gate the complex nexus forged by social and theatrical performances of
masculinities, patriarchal structures and governance, and the cultural and
biopolitical practices of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism as it plays
out in contemporary culture is best understood as a series of economic
political practices that conceptualize unfettered and deregulated markets
as the optimum method of progressing human well-being. Thus, free
markets, free trade, and unregulated entrepreneurial freedom are not only
promoted but also shored up by structures of governance that simul-
taneously provide strong property rights. These economic institutional
frameworks should, in theory, provide the much-lauded ‘trickle down
economics’ (Harvey, 2005, 20); the assumption being that through state-
engineered mechanisms which make the wealthy even wealthier, they will
in turn become ‘job creators’. Simultaneously, citizenship morphs into
consumership as ordinary working people bolster their local economies
22 C. O’BRIEN
by spending the money they earn from the job creators. ‘Neoliberalism’,
then, as Colin Crouch states:
has many branches and brands. But behind them stands one dominant
theme: that free markets in which individuals maximise their material inter-
ests provide the best means for satisfying human aspirations, and that
markets are in particular to be preferred over states and politics, which
are at best inefficient and at worst threats to freedom. (2011, 11)
However, neoliberalism’s supposed conservative ethos is paradoxical.

At surface level it claims to provide economic liberty to corporations
and businesses which then engenders both jobs and consumer choice.
However, this is an economic practice that relies heavily—albeit quite
underhandedly—on government intervention. First, the wealth of the so-
called job creators does not trickle down because, without heavy-handed
State involvement the like of which we have yet to see, the wealthy are
free to create jobs on their own terms. Nefarious employment practices
such as zero-hours contracts, banning trade unions, denial of health and
other insurance benefits, and hiring workers as freelancers who must pay
their own taxes, are now so ordinary that they pass without comment.
Further iterating the paradoxical relationship between freedom and
government control within neoliberalism, the State must ensure a
viable currency and underwrite any failures in the banking system. The
State should also shore up the integrity and functioning of financial
markets, especially (as we saw with the 2008 financial crisis) when the
actors of those markets overextend their remit and crash the market.
Furthermore, where markets did not before exist they must be created.
Therefore, public services which were previously financed through wage-
earners’ taxes—social housing, water, education, health care, environ-
mental protection—are now brought to market. However, and herein
lies the crux of neoliberalism’s shill of ‘freedom’, beyond creating these
markets, the State should have no say in their operations.
As my elaborations above highlight, the underlying principles of
neoliberalism—entrepreneurial freedom, economic liberty, social policing,
property rights, and harsh individualism—are particularly patriarchal char-
acteristics. These characteristics, when coupled with neoliberalism’s cham-
pioning of markets and creation of hyper-consumers mean that, in its
cultural manifestations such as media events and the products stocked in
retail outlets, only the most profitable representations of gender prevail.
Masculinity and femininity have thus become narrowly commodified and

sold to the consumer under the aegis of ‘free choice’.
However, and much more insidiously, given neoliberalism’s fundamen-
tally conservative ethos coupled with its push to create markets where
none had before existed, the commodification of gender is regressive,
polarized, and relies increasingly on an overtly sexualized iconography
that objectifies femininity while glorifying overdetermined masculinity.
Furthermore, by virtue of its essentialized commodification of gender,
neoliberalism is inextricably bound up in the cultural phenomenon of
‘post-feminism’—the conservative, media-driven ‘received knowledge’
that feminism is over, its work done. Women, according to this discourse,
having now somehow and contrary to all evidence achieved equality,
should feel free to ‘empower’ themselves by embracing and purchasing
traditional modes of feminine submission.
Perhaps one of post-feminism’s most sinister cultural conduits is the
misaligned conflation of individual sexual freedom with women’s polit-
ical and social empowerment whereby women are encouraged to believe
that by making themselves sexually available to men they have somehow
improved their socio-political status. Hence, within neoliberal cultural
practices, sexism and misogyny are marketed as ‘hip’ and ‘ironic’, pushing
the idea that if feminism has indeed achieved its goals, then it is accept-
able to be sexist and misogynistic as long as it is cloaked as a jokey
guise designed to sell more gendered products. The darker side of this,
of course, is the promulgation of some very skewed notions of what
sexual consent means, with some men choosing to believe that a woman’s
refusal to participate in sex is merely a coy augmentation of her seduc-
tion. This has engendered a heightened awareness of what is commonly
known as ‘rape culture’ whereby certain factions of patriarchal men, most
commonly in the dark underbelly of the online ‘Manosphere’, promul-
gate the ‘right of men to rape women’ (Ging 2017). Galvanizing this
horrifying misogynistic culture are regressive notions of male superiority
operating alongside a skewed discourse of reified female sexuality that
‘had it coming’ or ‘was begging for it’, a discourse which is echoed in the
lenient sentencing of rapists in Ireland (Quigley 2019).
Irish theatre has responded to the political and cultural entrench-
ment of neoliberalism in several ways. In terms of dramaturgy, the
classical, three-act, realist play has been abandoned in favour of what
Patrick Lonergan identifies as the ‘reduction of the importance of spoken
language in favour of visual spectacle, the compression of action into
24 C. O’BRIEN
shorter scenes, the homogenization of setting and dialogue, and the

increasing use of monologue’ (2010, 4). Mainstream women playwrights
such as Marina Carr and Deirdre Kinahan have intervened into the
neoliberal commodification of gender with realist ‘critique-by-depiction’
narrative dramas. Queer and feminist theatre makers working primarily on
the Fringe scene have created challenges to neoliberalism, in particular
its narrow paradigms of manhood, both gay and straight, via a radi-
cally reimagined dramaturgy that questions the fixity of both masculinity
and realist theatrical form. Throughout, this book aims to unpack the
correlations and dissonances inherent in the ever-changing and yet symbi-
otic relationships between the performance of masculinities in drama
and society, and socio-economics, politics, neoliberal capitalism, and Irish
theatrical culture and history.
5 The ‘Crisis Ordinariness’

of Masculinity in Crisis
The notion of ‘masculinity in crisis’ has taken centre stage in popular
culture since the early 1990s. However, the idea that men are in crisis
is not confined to turn-of-the-millennium angst. Since the advent of
second-wave feminism in the 1960s, both popular media and gender
studies have discussed the concept of the socially displaced heterosexual
man, discursively positioned as redundant by virtue of the social, legisla-
tive, and cultural gains made by feminism and LGBTQ rights movements
as well as the incumbent changes in labour practices and family structures
engendered by these movements. As exemplified by doom-laden news-
paper articles asking if men are now ‘the second sex’, or if gender equality
signals ‘the end of men’ (Rosin 2010), this media-driven discourse exists
in a binary whereby if equality is gained by one biological sex, it must
be lost by the other. Or, as Imelda Whelehan puts it, ‘The struggle for
gender equality, rather than being pictured as a pair of scales, is more
like a see-saw: if women go up, men must hit rock bottom’ (2000, 113).
Significantly, this discourse promulgates the idea that masculinity (always
in the singular, never pluralized) is ‘in’ crisis. By these discursive terms
masculinity is not ‘having’ nor ‘going through’ a crisis, which would imply
a temporary state that will pass; nor does it ever ‘cause’ a crisis, because
that would, as I discuss below, negate the very reasons for the crisis in
the first place. Instead, the generalized and essentialized signifier of ‘mas-
culinity’, and thereby, one is to assume, every man currently alive, is ‘in’
crisis, thus denoting an urgent need to repair something that, unless fixed,
will remain in a permanent state of disarray.
Yet masculinity in crisis as a concept is rather vague, somewhat
ambiguous, and means different things to different people: critics, jour-
nalists, playwrights, online content producers, and everyday working
men alike. Importantly, it is not restricted to contemporary times or
without historical precedent. Scholars cite advances in combat technology,
originally mobilized during the First World War (1914–18), as the cata-
lyst for our modern century-long discourse of crisis-ridden manhood
(Braudy 2005). The Great War saw a seismic shift from ‘chivalrous’
modes of scheduled bayonet and shotgun combat, to the machine-driven,
perpetual stalemate of industrialized trench warfare from which hand-
to-hand fighting was significantly absent. Coupled with the increasingly
active roles on the home- and battle-fronts that women played in the
Great War, as well as the parallel rise and success of the Suffragette move-
ment, several bastions of manliness—combat, national protection, and
franchise—were challenged and disrupted, thus triggering modernity’s
crisis of masculinity.
Historically in Ireland, colonization is understood to have thrown Irish
manhood into crisis; as Gerardine Meaney puts it, ‘a history of colo-
nization is a history of feminisation’ (1991, 6). Colonial empires cast
traditionally feminine characteristics on those nations they rule: colonized
populations are discursively promulgated as helpless, meek, in need of
leadership and direction, overly romantic, and ruled by their passions. In
modern Irish drama one can identify overdetermined tropes of resistance
to such feminization of Irish manhood; from the revival dramas of Yeats
in which he drew his male characters from ancient heroes of Celtic myth
such as Cuchulainn, through Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan’s early
and mid-twentieth-century freedom fighters and rebel heroes, onto Tom
Murphy and Brian Friel’s 1960s and 1970s anti-heroes who railed against
the feminization inherent in the dual-control of an authoritarian fledgling
State and the Catholic Church.
Since the 1990s, however, the discourse of Irish masculinity in crisis is
media-driven, ubiquitous on chat shows, reality TV, and an overtly sexual-
ized advertising culture. Furthermore, as discussed above, since the early
2010s, this discourse has moved online to social media and digital plat-
forms where self-labelling men lament the loss of their privilege while
blaming this loss on women and feminism. Most prominently before
the upsurge of social media, Irish masculinity in crisis was performed via
26 C. O’BRIEN
the conduit of the opinion columns of national newspapers. Columnists

such as Kevin Myers, David Quinn, Breda O’Brien, Patricia Casey, and
John Waters lamented the erosion of heterosexual male privilege. This
they attributed to increasing gains made by feminism and LGBTQ rights
and the subsequent dissolution of Catholic morals, while simultaneously
displaying an anti-intellectual bias by decrying any rigorous criticism as
university-bred ‘political correctness’. Waters and Myers have in recent
years stopped writing for their respective newspapers, The Irish Times and
The Irish Independent with Myers retiring his public profile. Waters, on
the other hand, has a prominent digital presence and, having aligned
himself with various far-right movements, has been vocal in his objections
to Equal Marriage rights while taking an anti-feminist position particu-
larly with regard to the repeal of the 8th amendment in 2017 which saw
abortion legalized in Ireland.
Such volatile and skewed media pieces and online discourses promote
and entrench increasingly polarized gender roles, the roots and reasoning
of which are to be found in notions of biological determinism and class
essentialism. Waters in particular authorizes much of his output with refer-
ences to the genetic destiny of ‘the deep masculine’ as promulgated by
Robert Bly’s book Iron John (1990). Bly’s premise, which draws from
Jungian ‘warrior’ archetypes, is avowedly essentialist and unashamedly
patriarchal. Criticising the ‘soft men’ who have renounced their inner
warrior by succumbing to the lure of gender equality, Bly posits that
the righting of social wrongs will occur naturally once men reclaim the
lost power that indulgence in feminine traits such as sensitivity, emotion-
ality, or indecision has usurped. Yet, Bly’s writing and the mythopoetic
men’s movement it amplified (Shiffman, 1987), indeed, the whole media
frenzy regarding crisis-ridden, middle class, heterosexual men, wilfully
avoids any critical interrogations of the social and subjective effects of
socio-economic status, poverty, ethnicity, education (or lack thereof),
and sexuality—both compulsory and counter-normative—on entrenched
paradigms of hegemonic masculinity and the men who try to live by them.
Furthermore, and highlighting not only the discursive nature of this
media-driven crisis but also its misplaced anxieties, while well-positioned
journalists and online content producers lament their perceived disso-
lution of privilege, male suicide rates in Ireland are alarmingly high,
indicating that some ordinary everyday men are experiencing crisis of
the worst sort. The National Suicide Research Foundation reports 439
male deaths by suicide in 2011, a disturbingly high prevalence rate of
19.3% per capita of 100,000 which, thankfully, had dropped to 12.1%

per capita by 2018 (the most recent available dataset). According to a
2013 government report on suicide in Irish men, ‘gender has also been
implicated […] highlight[ing] that although gender roles have shifted,
male gender roles remain more toxic and more limiting in terms of
health potential’ (Richardson et al. 2013, 37). The report further critiques
entrenched paradigms of hegemonic masculinity and concomitant male-
peer surveillance, particularly in socially deprived and rurally isolated
areas, as detrimental to young men’s emotional well-being:
it was also found that the impact of more dominant or hegemonic

masculinity constructs encouraged these men to deny their emotions, and
to feel shame if they could not live up to such ideals. In addition, it
was found that this form of masculine identification maintained a local
importance, and was upheld by other men in the area. (49)
What I want to argue, therefore, is that masculinity in crisis in Ireland

plays out on two opposing platforms or social schemas. On one hand,
there is the media- and online-driven discourse that promotes and
encourages paradigms of victimized, emotionally thwarted, misogynistic
masculinity. Counter to this, on the other hand, there is an actual lived
crisis, an epidemic of suicide, happening among primarily young working-
and under-class men and those who live in rural isolation. Finding them-
selves unable to embody the very models of hetero-patriarchal masculinity
that proponents of the discursive crisis promote, these men take their own
lives. Thus the discursive crisis of masculinity, combined with hegemonic
patriarchy, exacerbates the lived crisis.
The historical prevalence of continual masculinity in crisis, discussed
here since the early twentieth century,2 coupled with both the discur-
sive crisis and ongoing epidemic of suicide, resonates with what Lauren
Berlant calls ‘systemic crisis’ or ‘crisis ordinariness’. For Berlant, ‘crisis is
not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in
the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelm-
ing’ (2012, 10). Essentially, under the terms of crisis ordinariness, if media
and governance tell someone, or a group of people, that they are in crisis,
while concurrently shoring up both the discourse and social conditions
2 Scholars such as Claire Colebrook trace masculinity in crisis back as far as the
Enlightenment.
28 C. O’BRIEN
of crisis, then those groups and individuals will find ways of accepting,
of living through, or dying within, that crisis. Simultaneously, the elon-
gated time frame of crisis ordinariness means that those living or dying
in crisis accept it as a permanent state of being and so abandon ideas of
looking to government for assistance, and become reticent in questioning
any government actions to manage their crisis. ‘We have’, Berlant argues,
‘allowed the traumatic event to be self-evident both in its autopoesis (we
know it when we know it) and in its denial of self-mastery (we know that
we cannot possess a trauma, but are possessed by it)’ (80). The perpetual
discursive crisis coupled with high male suicide rates means, therefore,
that masculinity in crisis becomes normalized, accepted, and, crucially,
is ongoing. Yet, while Berlant finds that most individuals formulate a
‘logic of adjustment’ to crisis—‘In the impasse induced by crisis, being
treads water; mainly it does not drown’ (10)—clearly this ‘logic of adjust-
ment’ fails to manifest for those men who see suicide as their only way to
navigate that which overwhelms them.
It becomes clear, then, that several currents of power underwrite
masculinity in crisis as it plays out in cultural discourses (including the
creative industries), while media events simultaneously elide the lived
crises of marginalized men. When the creators of the discursive crisis pay
attention to the epidemic of suicide, they mobilize it to further demo-
nize feminism and gay men, and, significantly, to promulgate notions
of class essentialism. Conservative columnists, social media pundits, and
politicians call crisis on behalf of marginalized men, thus claiming to
give voice to the voiceless. And yet the register of their commentary,
citing the causes of the suicide epidemic as ‘a collapse of old authority
structures’, a lack of ‘strong father figures’, and a ‘natural’ abundance
of testosterone-fuelled aggression left unchecked, while suggesting solu-
tions such as incarceration or psychotropic medications (Gaffney 2004),
fundamentally enforces their class hegemony.
This raises questions about the patriarchal roots of any crisis that oper-
ates through discourse, as opposed to lived crises rooted in immediate
reality. Fintan Walsh interrogates the power structures at the roots of
masculinity in crisis discourses by deconstructing the very nature of crisis
itself. ‘We might infer’, Walsh asserts, ‘that there are active agents of crisis,
and agents in whose interest crisis acts. We might even deduce that crisis
somehow distributes agency’ (2010, 1). Walsh further maintains ‘that the
discourse of masculinity in crisis is itself highly performative, in a manner
that both shapes and illuminates a wide spectrum of cultural activity’ (2).
Walsh thus argues that a discursive crisis in masculinity can be understood

as a cultural performative rather than an epistemological state. Which is to
say, the crisis is brought into being by performing or doing it, or stating
that it is happening, rather than by any ontological essence of monolithic
manliness that can never—rather than does not want to—comprehend
female, LGBTQ, working-class, or ethnic demands for rights and support.
Throughout this book I map Walsh’s and Berlant’s thinking across
theatrical performances of masculinity in crisis, and thus uncover a
primary problematic of hegemonic patriarchy as it plays out in Irish
drama: Namely, the agents of masculinity in crisis (or those who call
crisis), and those who the resolution of crisis should benefit (or those
to whom the crisis should distribute agency), are one and the same;
they are, in fact, the very patriarchs who claim to be in crisis. Thus it
becomes apparent that patriarchy, as many of my analyses in the book
will illustrate, shifts from an epistemology of power into a performance of
crisis and victimhood when that power is challenged. It is not, therefore,
masculinity that is in crisis, but patriarchy. As Anthony Clare puts it, ‘It
is true that patriarchy has not been overthrown, but its justification is in
array’ (2000, 8).
Performances of masculinities in crisis are writ large across contem-
porary Irish drama. Both Joe and Frank in On the Outside, and Joe
in No Romance have reached moments of crisis primarily by virtue of
political and economic conditions beyond their control. Yet their crises
are also existential, caught up in the search for a fulfilling sense of
masculine selfhood that, by virtue of reified hegemonic models, remains
asymptotic. Importantly, as their anxieties about women, both real and
fantastical, illustrate, these are crises of stultified sexual expression, exac-
erbated by culturally constructed notions of objectified feminine sexuality.
Most crucially, all aspects of their crises are undergirded by a lack of
emotional maturity and an inability to articulate, and thus comprehend
and move beyond, the affects of their anxieties. That these performances
span the time frame of Acting the Man situates the majority of patriarchal
performances in Irish drama in crisis ordinariness. Coming from a discur-
sive site of crisis in order to call crisis and thus gain the benefits of any
resolution to the crisis, one might indeed argue that hetero-patriarchy is
always already and can only ever be in crisis.
30 C. O’BRIEN
6 Irish Masculinities Onstage

Although the majority of analyses presented in this project are of drama as
a literary genre, the book discusses, wherever possible and within context,
the onstage performance of masculinities in Irish drama and thereby
gives relevant consideration to the spectator’s reception of performed
paradigms of manhood. The spectator’s decoding of masculinities in
performance is always, to a great degree, determined by the context of the
performance. Of course, the context of any given performance is multi-
faceted, reliant on many different onstage sign systems, metatheatrical
elements, the theatre space in question, and will vary from spectator to
spectator even when they are sitting beside each other watching the same
show.
For the spectator, theatre is a ritual: tickets must be booked, paid for,
collected, friends are rallied as companions, many go for dinner before or
after a show. Interval and post-show drinks, buying a programme, even
finding a numbered, financially categorized seat in a darkened space, are
all ritualized practices. These ritualistic aspects of the theatre event mean
that spectators will invest and garner much more meaning in and from
engaging with theatrical performance than they would from, say, televi-
sion drama, or a novel that they read at home. Indeed, one can infer from
these preparatory rituals that certain degrees of meaning have already
been generated before the performance begins. Operating in tandem with
these meanings of ritual is the Irish spectator’s special relationship with
theatre. The National Theatre—the Abbey—was founded as part of and
played an instrumental role in the struggle for Irish independence from
the British Empire; hence live performance culture in Ireland has, for over
a century, been associated with metatheatrical, socially didactic purposes.
More so than in many other countries, people in Ireland pay attention
to and talk about what happens in theatre, recognising its symbolic,
metatheatrical functions.
In examining how Irish spectators decode masculinities in perfor-
mance, I bring together Laura Mulvey’s work on the masculinization
of spectatorship, and Martin Esslin’s widely acknowledged articulation
of onstage semiotics, or sign systems, as working on a tripartite level of
‘icon’, ‘index’, and ‘symbol’ (1987, 43–51). For Mulvey, within patri-
archal cultures the spectator has been traditionally conditioned to look
to male performers in order to explicate the narrative drama’s meaning
and message. Therefore, it is men in performance who produce meaning,
women are merely the ‘bearer[s] of meaning, not maker[s] of meaning’,

and thus perform within the spectatorial frame of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’
(1975, 8). For Esslin, following Charles Sanders Peirce’s late Victo-
rian work on semiotics, everything onstage, including actors, operates
at any or all of his three levels of meaning of icon, index, or symbol.
An ‘icon’—from the Greek word for picture—stands for exactly what
it is. Joe in No Romance, at an iconic level of signification, represents
Joe, a fifty-something, gone-out-of-businessman, undergoing some sort
of crisis while fighting with his wife over his mothers’ dead body in a
funeral home. An index—like an index finger—points to something else.
Thus Joe, as an indexical sign, points to broader cultural discourses of,
say, masculinity in crisis, the long-recession during which the play was
produced and how older couples dealt with it, online pornography, the
sex industry, and the disconnect between children and their parents. On a
symbolic level, however, Joe’s relationship of signification with the spec-
tator is much more abstracted, arbitrary, sophisticated, and subjective. Joe
could be symbolic, for one spectator, of their father, while for another,
he is a symbol of the ‘Fatherland’ of Ireland, and yet, for another, by
virtue of his objectification of women, he might symbolize either femi-
nism or those who mobilize against it. He could even, depending again
on any individual spectator’s experience, symbolize rape, rapists, and the
discourse of rape culture.
In decoding this polysemic kaleidoscope of meanings happening
onstage before them, the spectator will create a hierarchy of signs, the top
level of which is occupied by the actor. Discussing how the actor is the
meeting point for both spoken dialogue (haupttext ) and stage directions
(nebentext ) Elaine Aston and George Savona articulate the performer as
a ‘density of signs’ (1991, 104–105). Within this density are the meta-
textual meanings that Irish spectators bring to the theatre event, the icons,
indexes, and symbols they read from the actor in performance, and any
didactic social message they take away from the event. Thus, as Aston
and Savona put it, ‘we can refer to the performer as a locus of multiple
interconnecting sign-systems’ (105).
Bringing Mulvey and Esslin’s thinking to the notion of the actor as
a locus of interconnecting sign systems I therefore conceptualize the
performer in Irish theatre as a masculine sign system. Crucially this
happens regardless of their biological sex or the gender of the character
they are portraying. This system of masculine signification operates not
only at all three levels of Esslin’s formulation, but also in light of Mulvey’s
32 C. O’BRIEN
thinking this occurs within the dialectic of spectatorship. In terms of male

actors portraying male characters, by virtue of the performative nature
of gender no matter how much a male actor attempts to start with a
blank slate and build a character from scratch, he will always imbue the
role with some of his own psychically entrenched aspects of masculine
performativity. And as social performances of Irish masculinities shift and
evolve (or remain in stasis), this is reflected in what a male actor brings to
his performance as well as in the meanings of masculinity that the spec-
tator decodes. Moreover, as outlined above, Irish theatre is a patriarchal
system—not only in playwriting and practice, but also as an industry that
functions as part of a larger web of the many systems of patriarchy that
constitute Ireland, both North and South. What I argue here, then, is that
the internalization of multitudinous patriarchal systems—State, nation,
family, media, institutional—incites the spectator into decoding the actor
as a masculine sign system, as a bearer of masculine meaning and narra-
tive. For female actors, (and this explored in Chapter 4) by virtue of
performing onstage in a patriarchal theatre system—itself a sub-system
of patriarchal socio-political structures—signs and symbols of hegemonic
patriarchy will operate on and through their performing bodies, while
simultaneously the spectator will decode them as the bearers of mascu-
line meaning and narrative. Thus the female actor operates as a masculine
sign system on the level of icon, index, and symbol: at once an icon of a
character who must interact with and be controlled by men, as an index
of a female actress working within a patriarchal theatre system, and as a
symbol of women in Ireland dominated by men in the everyday, and at
institutional and State levels.
My above conceptualizations of the semiotics of masculinities in
performance need further unpacking in terms of genre and dramaturgy,
particularly when, as has been the case over the last two decades in
Ireland, theatre makers break away from the dramatic form of narra-
tive realism. Narrative dramatic realism that tells a complete story with a
cathartic ending is not only deeply entrenched in Irish theatrical culture,
it is also the genre for which Irish drama is globally renowned. This
millennia-old tradition and love of storytelling imbricates across all of
Irish culture and society, not just in drama, but also in song, folklore,
literature, and painting; it is, indeed, part of everyday life and is often
mobilized to political aims. For example, storytelling was employed to
great effect during the campaign for marriage equality whereby many pro-
marriage campaigners—both ordinary citizens and public figures, with
some coming out as gay or lesbian for the first time—disclosed their life-
narratives, performing testimonials of lives marked, sometimes ruined by
homophobic attitudes and violence. And while two of these coming out
narratives, that of then-Minister for Health, Leo Varadker and prominent
political journalist, Ursula Halligan, received huge media coverage; it was
the life stories of ordinary LGBTQ citizens, performed on social media
and, importantly, on strangers’ doorsteps on the campaign trail, that
moved many hearts and minds towards voting Yes for Equal Marriage.
Likewise, it was the stories of women who spoke out about their lonely
journeys overseas to obtain abortions—particularly in cases of fatal foetal
abnormality—that swayed many Irish people who previously identified as
‘pro-life’ towards voting Yes to repeal the 8th Amendment.
And yet narrative dramatic realism is not without its constraints. The
‘critique-by-depiction’ model of dramatic realism can only ever tell a story
from the point of view of the characters on stage, while the need for
cathartic resolution can create binaries of characterizations with good
versus bad sometimes so sharply delineated that there is little room for
psychological nuance or development. More importantly, in terms of
theatrical representation of those whose lives have been marginalized or
silenced by hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy, particularly women and
queer subjects, narrative realism carries an overarching assumption that
such lives are easily represented and can fit neatly into the categoriza-
tions and compartments demanded by both the genre and patriarchal
culture. We can infer then, that narrative dramatic realism is, at its essence,
a masculinist theatrical genre. Given, as I argue above, that the actor
is decoded as a masculine sign system, and that Ireland is a patriarchal
society, then we can surmise that as a socio-normative theatrical genre,
narrative dramatic realism will, to a large degree, shore up the patriar-
chal status quo. Unless as we see with female dramatists such as Marina
Carr, and with Nancy Harris’ characterization of Joe in No Romance, the
playwright in question is making deliberate interventions into patriarchy.
Above all, what narrative dramatic realism does not always reveal with any
great ease are the social and cultural structures that subtend and support
patriarchal systems—both socially and in the theatre industry. Little
surprise, then, that Irish feminist and queer theatre makers have sought
out new modes of dramaturgical representation that expose those very
structures by veering towards postmodern or ‘postdramatic’ theatrical
forms. However, when performed and written in an Irish context, these
34 C. O’BRIEN
new dramaturgical structures and forms do not fall in line fully with post-
dramatic paradigms, which leads me to postulate them as being ‘queer
dramaturgy’, which I explicate below.
Postdramatic theatre, as Hans-Thies Lehmann intellectualizes it in his
eponymous landmark book, is both a term that signals a fundamental
shift in the ways in which contemporary theatre is structured and staged,
and also a genre of radical, postmodern theatrical performance. Postdra-
matic theatre, the origins of which Lehmann locates in the 1960s with
other critics (myself included) understanding the genre as stemming from
Bertolt Brecht’s Epic theatre, signals a move away from the narrative
dramatic text as the most central and important element of the theatre
event. Thus the play text, and with it the central premises of Aristotelian
narrative drama—those unities of time, place, and action—are no longer
prioritized but rather understood ‘only as one element, one layer, or as a
“material” of the scenic creation, not as its master’ (2006, 17). Postdra-
matic theatre is a theatre makers’ theatre (rather than a writer’s theatre),
one that disavows the rules of naturalism and social realism, and mobi-
lizes strategies above and beyond narrative: theatre no longer has to tell
a story with fictional characters moving through what Lehmann calls the
‘fictive cosmos’ of linear time and narrative from beginning to middle to
end. The age-old elements of drama—situation, conflict, exposition, and
resolution—are eschewed in favour of a non-linear, fragmented, polysemic
performative experience that amplifies other, previously less-noticed, more
sensory elements of theatre, such as lighting and sound, even smell and
touch. At its heart, postdramatic theatre is anti-narrative, or, at least, anti-
linear narrative; and it follows then that if narrative is de-centralized, so
too is characterization. An actor can move fluidly from being a central
protagonist to being a face in a crowd, with actors-as-commentators
being a common strategy, as is the tactic of actors embodying popular
media personality tropes such as the television presenter or the public
intellectual.
Certainly, while it cannot be said that Irish theatre has any strong
tradition of postdramatic performance, several theatre companies, such
as Dead Centre, Broken Horse, and Anú Productions, encompass certain
aspects or elements of the genre. And yet, much of the work of these
new century Irish theatre artists—including, Broken Talkers, THISIS-
POPBABY, as well as spoken word artists like Oisin McKenna, Veronica
Dyas, and Neil Watkins—certainly relies on a central narrative, usually
an aspect of marginalized identity politics or the State of the Nation.
What I move towards in this book, then, is a new and specifically Irish
cultural contextualization of postdramatic theatre, whereby my analyses
of radical dramaturgical strategies in Irish theatre (and this is particu-
larly evident in Chapters 5 and 6) take into account the ways in which
recent theatre makers embrace elements of the postdramatic while still
remaining cognizant of, even paying homage to, the Irish cultural tradi-
tions of narrative storytelling. This brings me to conceptualize such
radical dramaturgical strategies in an Irish context not as postdramatic
theatre, but rather as ‘queer dramaturgy’. In this sense we can under-
stand queer dramaturgical strategies in Irish theatre as not only disrupting
tropes and stereotypes of gendered identity, but also as challenging the
national narratives of patriarchy.
Whether in the context of traditional dramatic narrative or queer
dramaturgical strategies, throughout this book I interrogate the ways in
which masculinities in Irish drama do not always and solely reside in the
male body, but are woven into the performances of all the actors onstage,
thereby mapping masculinity across the dialectic of spectatorship and thus
inflecting the spectators’ reception and understanding of manhood in the
broader culture. The performances of actors, and the spectators’ reac-
tions to and decoding of masculinities, are important components of my
arguments as they chart the dominance of patriarchal hegemony and the
reification of hegemonic masculinity’s ideals. Spectatorship offers oppor-
tunities to critique the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity via peer
surveillance and violence, which means that spectators can bear critical
witness to the frustrations levelled at any character attempting to break
out of these systems by bucking hegemonic trends. But finally, Acting the
Man considers the possibilities of change signified by the challenges and
reimagined dramaturgies of feminist and queer theatre, which stands in
opposition to so many of the pillars of patriarchy, and therefore discover
new ways to act the man.
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Another random document with
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Obviously there was no time to lose, and before either Mr.
Shuttleworth or Emily could make a remark I had left them standing,
and had quickly mixed my insignificant personality with the passers-
by.
I strolled down Leather Lane quite leisurely; you see, my face was
unknown to the Piattis. They had only seen dim outlines of me
behind very dirty window-panes.
I did not go to the flat. I knew Mr. Shuttleworth would take care of
Emily, so that night I slept at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross, leaving
the next morning by the 9.0 a.m., having booked my berth on the
Orient Express as far as Budapest.
3
Well, you know the saying: It is easy to be wise after the event.
Of course, when I saw the older Piatti standing in the hall of the
Hotel Hungaria at Budapest I realised that I had been followed from
the moment that Emily and I ran out of the house at Bread Street.
The son had obviously kept me in view whilst I was still in London,
and the father had travelled across Europe, unperceived by me, in
the same train as myself, had seen me step into the fiacre at
Budapest, and heard me tell the smart coachman to drive to the
Hungaria.
I made hasty arrangements for my room, and then asked if “Mrs.
Carey,” from London, was still at the hotel with her maid—for that
was the name under which Mrs. Tadworth was to travel—and was
answered in the affirmative. “Mrs. Carey” was even then supping in
the dining-room, whence the strains of beautiful Hungarian melodies
played by Berkes’ inimitable band seemed to mock my anxiety.
“Mrs. Carey’s maid,” they told me, was having her meal in the
steward’s room.
I tried to prosecute my hasty inquiries as quietly as I could, but
Piatti’s eyes and sarcastic smile seemed to follow me everywhere,
whilst he went about calmly ordering his room and seeing to the
disposal of his luggage.
Almost every official at the Hungaria speaks English, and I had no
difficulty in finding my way to the steward’s room. To my chagrin
Lady Molly was not there. Someone told me that no doubt “Mrs.
Carey’s maid” had gone back to her mistress’s room, which they told
me was No. 118 on the first floor.
A few precious moments were thus wasted whilst I ran back
towards the hall; you know the long, seemingly interminable,
corridors and passages of the Hungaria! Fortunately, in one of these
I presently beheld my dear lady walking towards me. At sight of her
all my anxieties seemed to fall from me like a discarded mantle.
She looked quite serene and placid, but with her own quick
perception she at once guessed what had brought me to Budapest.
“They have found out about the coat,” she said, quickly drawing
me aside into one of the smaller passages, which fortunately at the
moment was dark and deserted, “and, of course, he has followed
you——”
I nodded affirmatively.
“That Mrs. Tadworth is a vapid, weak-kneed little fool,” she said,
with angry vehemence. “We ought to be at Cividale by now—and
she declared herself too ill and too fatigued to continue the journey.
How that poor Shuttleworth could be so blind as to trust her passes
belief.”
“Mary,” she added more calmly, “go down into the hall at once.
Watch that idiot of a woman for all you’re worth. She is terrified of the
Sicilians, and I firmly believe that Piatti can force her to give up the
proofs of the crime to him.”
“Where are they—the proofs, I mean?” I asked anxiously.
“Locked up in her trunk—she won’t entrust them to me. Obstinate
little fool.”
I had never seen my dear lady so angry; however, she said
nothing more then, and presently I took leave of her and worked my
way back towards the hall. One glance round the brilliantly-lighted
place assured me that neither Piatti nor Mrs. Tadworth was there. I
could not tell you what it was that suddenly filled my heart with
foreboding.
I ran up to the first floor and reached room No. 118. The outer door
was open, and without a moment’s hesitation I applied my eye to the
keyhole of the inner one.
The room was brilliantly lighted from within, and exactly opposite,
but with his back to me, stood Piatti, whilst squatting on a low stool
beside him was Mrs. Tadworth.
A trunk stood open close to her hand, and she was obviously busy
turning over its contents. My very heart stood still with horror. Was I
about to witness—thus powerless to interfere—one of the most
hideous acts of cowardly treachery it was possible to conceive?
Something, however, must at that moment have attracted Piatti’s
attention, for he suddenly turned and strode towards the door.
Needless to say that I beat a hasty retreat.
My one idea was, of course, to find Lady Molly and tell her what I
had seen. Unfortunately, the Hungaria is a veritable maze of
corridors, stairs and passages, and I did not know the number of her
room. At first I did not wish to attract further attention by again asking
about “Mrs. Carey’s maid” at the office, and my stupid ignorance of
foreign languages precluded my talking to the female servants.
I had been up and down the stairs half a dozen times, tired,
miserable, and anxious, when at last, in the far distance, I espied my
dear lady’s graceful silhouette. Eagerly I ran to her, and was
promptly admonished for my careless impetuosity.
“Mrs. Tadworth is genuinely frightened,” added Lady Molly in
response to my look of painful suspense, “but so far she has been
able to hoodwink Piatti by opening my trunk before him instead of
hers, and telling him that the proofs were not in her own keeping. But
she is too stupid to keep that deception up, and, of course, he won’t
allow himself to be put off a second time. We must start for Cividale
as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the earliest train is not till 9.15 to-
morrow morning. The danger to that unfortunate young man over at
Palermo, brought about by this woman’s cowardly idiocy and the
father’s misguided trust, is already incalculable.”
It was, of course, useless for me to express fear now for my dear
lady’s safety. I smothered my anxiety as best I could, and, full of
deadly forebodings, I bade her anon a fond good-night.
Needless to say that I scarcely slept, and at eight o’clock the next
morning I was fully dressed and out of my room.
The first glance down the corridor on which gave No. 118 at once
confirmed my worst fears. Unusual bustle reigned there at this early
hour. Officials came and went, maids stood about gossiping, and the
next moment, to my literally agonised horror, I beheld two
gendarmes, with an officer, being escorted by the hotel manager to
the rooms occupied by Mrs. Tadworth and Lady Molly.
Oh, how I cursed then our British ignorance of foreign tongues.
The officials were too busy to bother about me, and the maids only
knew that portion of the English language which refers to baths and
to hot water. Finally, to my intense relief, I discovered a willing porter,
ready and able to give me information in my own tongue of the
events which had disturbed the serene quietude of the Hotel
Hungaria.
Great heavens! Shall I ever forget what I endured when I grasped
the full meaning of what he told me with a placid smile and a shrug
of the shoulders!
“The affair is most mysterious,” he explained, “not robbery—oh,
no! no!—for it is Mrs. Carey who has gone—disappeared! And it is
Mrs. Carey’s maid who was found, stunned, gagged and
unconscious, tied to one of the bedposts in room No. 118.”
4
Well, why should I bore you by recounting the agonised suspense,

the mortal anxiety, which I endured for all those subsequent weary
days which at the time seemed like so many centuries?
My own dear lady, the woman for whom I would have gone
through fire and water with a cheerful smile, had been brutally
assaulted, almost murdered, so the smiling porter assured me, and
my very existence was ignored by the stolid officials, who looked
down upon me with a frown of impassive disapproval whilst I
entreated, raged and stormed alternately, begging to be allowed to
go and nurse the sick lady, who was my own dearest friend, dearer
than any child could be to its mother.
Oh, that awful red tapeism that besets one at every turn, paralyses
and disheartens one! What I suffered I really could not describe.
But if I was not allowed to see Lady Molly, at least I was able to
wreak vengeance upon her cowardly assailants. Mrs. Tadworth, by
her disappearance, had tacitly confessed her participation in the
outrage, of that I had no doubt, but I was equally certain that she
was both too stupid and too weak to commit such a crime unaided.
Piatti was at the bottom of it all. Without a moment’s hesitation I
laid information against him through the medium of an interpreter. I
accused him boldly of being an accessory to the assault for
purposes of robbery. Unswervingly I repeated my story of how I had
seen him in close conversation the day before with Mrs. Carey,
whose real name I declared to be Mrs. Tadworth.
The chief object of the robbery I suggested to be a valuable gold
watch and chain, with initials “A. C.,” belonging to my friend, who had
travelled with Mrs. Carey to Budapest as her companion, not her
maid. This was a bold move on my part, and I felt reckless, I can tell
you. Fortunately, my story was corroborated by the fact that the floor
valet had seen Piatti hanging about the corridor outside No. 118 at
an extraordinarily early hour of the morning. My firm belief was that
the wretch had been admitted into the room by that horrid Mrs.
Tadworth. He had terrorised her, probably had threatened her life.
She had then agreed out of sheer cowardice to deliver to him the
proofs of his own guilt in the Palermo murder case, and when Lady
Molly, hearing the voices, came out of her own room, Piatti knocked
her down lest she should intervene. Mrs. Tadworth thereupon—weak
and silly little fool!—was seized with panic, and succeeded, no doubt
with his help, in leaving the hotel, and probably Budapest, before the
outrage was discovered.
Why Piatti had not done likewise, I could not conjecture. He seems
to have gone back quietly to his own room after that; and it was not
till an hour later that the chambermaid, surprised at seeing the door
of No. 118 slightly ajar, had peeped in, and there was greeted by the
awful sight of “the maid,” gagged, bound and unconscious.
Well, I gained my wish, and had the satisfaction presently of
knowing that Piatti—although, mind you, he emphatically denied my
story from beginning to end—had been placed under arrest pending
further inquiries.
The British Consul was very kind to me; though I was not allowed
to see my dear lady, who had been removed to the hospital. I heard
that the Hungarian police were moving heaven and earth to find
“Mrs. Carey” and bring her to justice.
Her disappearance told severely against her, and after three days
of such intense anxiety as I never wish to live through again, I
received a message from the Consulate informing me that “Mrs.
Carey” had been arrested at Alsórév, on the Austro-Hungarian
frontier, and was even now on her way to Budapest under escort.
You may imagine how I quivered with anxiety and with rage when,
on the morning after that welcome news, I was told that “Mrs. Carey”
was detained at the gendarmerie, and had asked to see Miss Mary
Granard from London, at present residing at the Hotel Hungaria.
The impudent wretch! Wanting to see me, indeed! Well, I, too,
wanted to see her; the woman whom I despised as a coward and a
traitor; who had betrayed the fond and foolish trust of a stricken
father; who had dashed the last hopes of an innocent man in danger
of his life; and who, finally, had been the cause of an assault that had
all but killed, perhaps, the woman I loved best in the world.
I felt like the embodiment of hate and contempt. I loathed the
woman, and I hied me in a fiacre to the gendarmerie, escorted by
one of the clerks from the Consulate, simply thirsting with the desire
to tell an ignoble female exactly what I thought of her.
I had to wait some two or three minutes in the bare, barrack-like
room of the gendarmerie; then the door opened, there was a rustle
of silk, followed by the sound of measured footsteps of soldiery, and
the next moment Lady Molly, serene and placid and, as usual,
exquisitely dressed, stood smiling before me.
“You have got me into this plight, Mary,” she said, with her merry
laugh; “you’ll have to get me out of it again.”
“But—I don’t understand,” was all that I could gasp.
“It is very simple, and I’ll explain it all fully when we are on our way
home to Maida Vale,” she said. “For the moment you and Mrs.
Tadworth will have to make sundry affidavits that I did not assault my
maid nor rob her of a watch and chain. The British Consul will help
you, and it is only a question of days, and in the meanwhile I may tell
you that Budapest prison life is quite interesting, and not so
uncomfortable as one would imagine.”
Of course, the moment she spoke I got an intuition of what had
really occurred, and I can assure you that I was heartily ashamed
that I should ever have doubted Lady Molly’s cleverness in carrying
through successfully so important, so vital a business as the righting
of an innocent man.
Mrs. Tadworth was pusillanimous and stupid. At Budapest she
cried a halt, for she really felt unstrung and ill after the hurried
journey, the change of air and food, and what not. Lady Molly,
however, had no difficulty in persuading her that during the enforced
stay of twenty-four hours at the Hungaria their two rôles should be
reversed. Lady Molly would be “Mrs. Carey,” coming from England,
whilst Mrs. Tadworth would be the maid.
My dear lady—not thinking at the time that my knowledge of this
fact would be of any importance to her own plans—had not
mentioned it to me during the brief interview which I had with her.
Then, when Piatti arrived upon the scene, Mrs. Tadworth got into a
real panic. Fortunately, she had the good sense, or the cowardice,
then and there to entrust the coat and watch and chain to Lady
Molly, and when Piatti followed her into her room she was able to
show him that the proofs were not then in her possession. This was
the scene which I had witnessed through the keyhole.
But, of course, the Sicilian would return to the charge, and equally,
of course, Mrs. Tadworth would sacrifice the Shuttleworths, father
and son, to save her own skin. Lady Molly knew that. She is strong,
active and determined; she had a brief hand-to-hand struggle with
Mrs. Tadworth that night, and finally succeeded in tying her, half
unconscious, to the bedpost, thus assuring herself that for at least
twenty-four hours that vapid little fool would be unable to either act
for herself or to betray my dear, intrepid lady’s plans.
When, the following morning, Piatti opened the door of No. 118,
which had purposely been left on the latch, he was greeted with the
sight of Mrs. Tadworth pinioned and half dead with fear, whilst the
valuable proofs of his own guilt and young Shuttleworth’s innocence
had completely disappeared.
For remember that Lady Molly’s face was not known to him or to
his gang, and she had caught the first train to Cividale even whilst
Piatti still believed that he held that silly Mrs. Tadworth in the hollow
of his hand. I may as well tell you here that she reached the frontier
safely, and was quite sharp enough to seek out Colonel Grassi and,
with the necessary words of explanation, to hand over to him the
proofs of young Shuttleworth’s innocence.
My action in the matter helped her. At the hotel she was supposed
to be the mistress and Mrs. Tadworth the maid, and everyone was
told that “Mrs. Carey’s maid” had been assaulted, and removed to
the hospital. But I denounced Piatti then and there, thinking he had
attacked my dear lady, and I got him put under lock and key so
quickly that he had not the time to communicate with his associates.
Thanks to Colonel Grassi’s exertions, young Shuttleworth was
acquitted of the charge of murder; but I may as well tell you here that
neither Piatti nor his son, nor any of that gang, were arrested for the
crime. The proofs of their guilt—the Irish-tweed coat and the
murdered man’s watch and chain—were most mysteriously
suppressed, after young Shuttleworth’s advocate had obtained the
verdict of “not guilty” for him.
Such is the Sicilian police. Mr. Shuttleworth, senior, evidently knew
what he was talking about.
Of course, we had no difficulty in obtaining Lady Molly’s release.
The British Consul saw to that. But in Budapest they still call the
assault on “Mrs. Carey” at the Hotel Hungaria a mystery, for she
exonerated Lady Molly fully, but she refused to accuse Piatti. She
was afraid of him, of course, and so they had to set him free.
I wonder where he is now, the wicked old wretch!
IV.
THE FORDWYCH CASTLE MYSTERY
Can you wonder that, when some of the ablest of our fellows at the
Yard were at their wits’ ends to know what to do, the chief
instinctively turned to Lady Molly?
Surely the Fordwych Castle Mystery, as it was universally called,
was a case which more than any other required feminine tact,
intuition, and all those qualities of which my dear lady possessed
more than her usual share.
With the exception of Mr. McKinley, the lawyer, and young Jack
d’Alboukirk, there were only women connected with the case.
If you have studied Debrett at all, you know as well as I do that the
peerage is one of those old English ones which date back some six
hundred years, and that the present Lady d’Alboukirk is a baroness
in her own right, the title and estates descending to heirs-general. If
you have perused that same interesting volume carefully, you will
also have discovered that the late Lord d’Alboukirk had two
daughters, the eldest, Clementina Cecilia—the present Baroness,
who succeeded him—the other, Margaret Florence, who married in
1884 Jean Laurent Duplessis, a Frenchman whom Debrett vaguely
describes as “of Pondicherry, India,” and of whom she had issue two
daughters, Henriette Marie, heir now to the ancient barony of
d’Alboukirk of Fordwych, and Joan, born two years later.
There seems to have been some mystery or romance attached to
this marriage of the Honourable Margaret Florence d’Alboukirk to the
dashing young officer of the Foreign Legion. Old Lord d’Alboukirk at
the time was British Ambassador in Paris, and he seems to have had
grave objections to the union, but Miss Margaret, openly flouting her
father’s displeasure, and throwing prudence to the winds, ran away
from home one fine day with Captain Duplessis, and from
Pondicherry wrote a curt letter to her relatives telling them of her
marriage with the man she loved best in all the world. Old Lord
d’Alboukirk never got over his daughter’s wilfulness. She had been
his favourite, it appears, and her secret marriage and deceit
practically broke his heart. He was kind to her, however, to the end,
and when the first baby girl was born and the young pair seemed to
be in straitened circumstances, he made them an allowance until the
day of his daughter’s death, which occurred three years after her
elopement, on the birth of her second child.
When, on the death of her father, the Honourable Clementina
Cecilia came into the title and fortune, she seemed to have thought it
her duty to take some interest in her late sister’s eldest child, who,
failing her own marriage, and issue, was heir to the barony of
d’Alboukirk. Thus it was that Miss Henriette Marie Duplessis came,
with her father’s consent, to live with her aunt at Fordwych Castle.
Debrett will tell you, moreover, that in 1901 she assumed the name
of d’Alboukirk, in lieu of her own, by royal licence. Failing her, the title
and estate would devolve firstly on her sister Joan, and subsequently
on a fairly distant cousin, Captain John d’Alboukirk, at present a
young officer in the Guards.
According to her servants, the present Baroness d’Alboukirk is
very self-willed, but otherwise neither more nor less eccentric than
any north-country old maid would be who had such an exceptional
position to keep up in the social world. The one soft trait in her
otherwise not very lovable character is her great affection for her late
sister’s child. Miss Henriette Duplessis d’Alboukirk has inherited from
her French father dark eyes and hair and a somewhat swarthy
complexion, but no doubt it is from her English ancestry that she has
derived a somewhat masculine frame and a very great fondness for
all outdoor pursuits. She is very athletic, knows how to fence and to
box, rides to hounds, and is a remarkably good shot.
From all accounts, the first hint of trouble in that gorgeous home
was coincident with the arrival at Fordwych of a young, very pretty
girl visitor, who was attended by her maid, a half-caste woman, dark-
complexioned and surly of temper, but obviously of dog-like devotion
towards her young mistress. This visit seems to have come as a
surprise to the entire household at Fordwych Castle, her ladyship
having said nothing about it until the very morning that the guests
were expected. She then briefly ordered one of the housemaids to
get a bedroom ready for a young lady, and to put up a small camp-
bedstead in an adjoining dressing-room. Even Miss Henriette seems
to have been taken by surprise at the announcement of this visit, for,
according to Jane Taylor, the housemaid in question, there was a
violent word-passage between the old lady and her niece, the latter
winding up an excited speech with the words:
“At any rate, aunt, there won’t be room for both of us in this
house!” After which she flounced out of the room, banging the door
behind her.
Very soon the household was made to understand that the
newcomer was none other than Miss Joan Duplessis, Miss
Henriette’s younger sister. It appears that Captain Duplessis had
recently died in Pondicherry, and that the young girl then wrote to her
aunt, Lady d’Alboukirk, claiming her help and protection, which the
old lady naturally considered it her duty to extend to her.
It appears that Miss Joan was very unlike her sister, as she was
petite and fair, more English-looking than foreign, and had pretty,
dainty ways which soon endeared her to the household. The
devotion existing between her and the half-caste woman she had
brought from India was, moreover, unique.
It seems, however, that from the moment these newcomers came
into the house, dissensions, often degenerating into violent quarrels,
became the order of the day. Henriette seemed to have taken a
strong dislike to her younger sister, and most particularly to the
latter’s dark attendant, who was vaguely known in the house as
Roonah.
That some events of serious import were looming ahead, the
servants at Fordwych were pretty sure. The butler and footmen at
dinner heard scraps of conversation which sounded very ominous.
There was talk of “lawyers,” of “proofs,” of “marriage and birth
certificates,” quickly suppressed when the servants happened to be
about. Her ladyship looked terribly anxious and worried, and she and
Miss Henriette spent long hours closeted together in a small boudoir,
whence proceeded ominous sounds of heartrending weeping on her
ladyship’s part, and angry and violent words from Miss Henriette.
Mr. McKinley, the eminent lawyer from London, came down two or
three times to Fordwych, and held long conversations with her
ladyship, after which the latter’s eyes were very swollen and red. The
household thought it more than strange that Roonah, the Indian
servant, was almost invariably present at these interviews between
Mr. McKinley, her ladyship, and Miss Joan. Otherwise the woman
kept herself very much aloof; she spoke very little, hardly took any
notice of anyone save of her ladyship and of her young mistress, and
the outbursts of Miss Henriette’s temper seemed to leave her quite
unmoved. A strange fact was that she had taken a sudden and great
fancy for frequenting a small Roman Catholic convent chapel which
was distant about half a mile from the Castle, and presently it was
understood that Roonah, who had been a Parsee, had been
converted by the attendant priest to the Roman Catholic faith.
All this happened, mind you, within the last two or three months; in
fact, Miss Joan had been in the Castle exactly twelve weeks when
Captain Jack d’Alboukirk came to pay his cousin one of his
periodical visits. From the first he seems to have taken a great fancy
to his cousin Joan, and soon everyone noticed that this fancy was
rapidly ripening into love. It was equally certain that from that
moment dissensions between the two sisters became more frequent
and more violent; the generally accepted opinion being that Miss
Henriette was jealous of Joan, whilst Lady d’Alboukirk herself, for
some unexplainable reason, seems to have regarded this love-
making with marked disfavour.
Then came the tragedy.
One morning Joan ran downstairs, pale, and trembling from head
to foot, moaning and sobbing as she ran:
“Roonah!—my poor old Roonah!—I knew it—I knew it!”
Captain Jack happened to meet her at the foot of the stairs. He
pressed her with questions, but the girl was unable to speak. She
merely pointed mutely to the floor above. The young man, genuinely
alarmed, ran quickly upstairs; he threw open the door leading to
Roonah’s room, and there, to his horror, he saw the unfortunate
woman lying across the small camp-bedstead, with a handkerchief
over her nose and mouth, and her throat cut.
The sight was horrible.
Poor Roonah was obviously dead.
Without losing his presence of mind, Captain Jack quietly shut the
door again, after urgently begging Joan to compose herself, and to
try to keep up, at any rate until the local doctor could be sent for and
the terrible news gently broken to Lady d’Alboukirk.
The doctor, hastily summoned, arrived some twenty minutes later.
He could but confirm Joan’s and Captain Jack’s fears. Roonah was
indeed dead—in fact, she had been dead some hours.
2
From the very first, mind you, the public took a more than usually
keen interest in this mysterious occurrence. The evening papers on
the very day of the murder were ablaze with flaming headlines such
as:
THE TRAGEDY AT FORDWYCH CASTLE

MYSTERIOUS MURDER OF AN IMPORTANT WITNESS
GRAVE CHARGES AGAINST PERSONS IN
HIGH LIFE
and so forth.
As time went on, the mystery deepened more and more, and I
suppose Lady Molly must have had an inkling that sooner or later the
chief would have to rely on her help and advice, for she sent me
down to attend the inquest, and gave me strict orders to keep eyes
and ears open for every detail in connection with the crime—
however trivial it might seem. She herself remained in town, awaiting
a summons from the chief.
The inquest was held in the dining-room of Fordwych Castle, and
the noble hall was crowded to its utmost when the coroner and jury
finally took their seats, after having viewed the body of the poor
murdered woman upstairs.
The scene was dramatic enough to please any novelist, and an
awed hush descended over the crowd when, just before the
proceedings began, a door was thrown open, and in walked—stiff
and erect—the Baroness d’Alboukirk, escorted by her niece, Miss
Henriette, and closely followed by her cousin, Captain Jack, of the
Guards.
The old lady’s face was as indifferent and haughty as usual, and
so was that of her athletic niece. Captain Jack, on the other hand,
looked troubled and flushed. Everyone noted that, directly he
entered the room, his eyes sought a small, dark figure that sat silent
and immovable beside the portly figure of the great lawyer, Mr.
Hubert McKinley. This was Miss Joan Duplessis, in a plain black stuff
gown, her young face pale and tear-stained.
Dr. Walker, the local practitioner, was, of course, the first witness
called. His evidence was purely medical. He deposed to having
made an examination of the body, and stated that he found that a
handkerchief saturated with chloroform had been pressed to the
woman’s nostrils, probably while she was asleep, her throat having
subsequently been cut with a sharp knife; death must have been
instantaneous, as the poor thing did not appear to have struggled at
all.
In answer to a question from the coroner, the doctor said that no
great force or violence would be required for the gruesome deed,
since the victim was undeniably unconscious when it was done. At
the same time it argued unusual coolness and determination.
The handkerchief was produced, also the knife. The former was a
bright-coloured one, stated to be the property of the deceased. The
latter was a foreign, old-fashioned hunting-knife, one of a panoply of
small arms and other weapons which adorned a corner of the hall. It
had been found by Detective Elliott in a clump of gorse on the
adjoining golf links. There could be no question that it had been used
by the murderer for his fell purpose, since at the time it was found it
still bore traces of blood.
Captain Jack was the next witness called. He had very little to say,
as he merely saw the body from across the room, and immediately
closed the door again and, having begged his cousin to compose
herself, called his own valet and sent him off for the doctor.
Some of the staff of Fordwych Castle were called, all of whom
testified to the Indian woman’s curious taciturnity, which left her quite
isolated among her fellow-servants. Miss Henriette’s maid, however,
Jane Partlett, had one or two more interesting facts to record. She
seems to have been more intimate with the deceased woman than
anyone else, and on one occasion, at least, had quite a confidential
talk with her.
“She talked chiefly about her mistress,” said Jane, in answer to a
question from the coroner, “to whom she was most devoted. She told
me that she loved her so, she would readily die for her. Of course, I
thought that silly like, and just mad, foreign talk, but Roonah was
very angry when I laughed at her, and then she undid her dress in
front, and showed me some papers which were sown in the lining of
her dress. ‘All these papers my little missee’s fortune,’ she said to
me. ‘Roonah guard these with her life. Someone must kill Roonah
before taking them from her!’
“This was about six weeks ago,” continued Jane, whilst a strange
feeling of awe seemed to descend upon all those present whilst the
girl spoke. “Lately she became much more silent, and, on my once
referring to the papers, she turned on me savage like and told me to
hold my tongue.”
Asked if she had mentioned the incident of the papers to anyone,
Jane replied in the negative.
“Except to Miss Henriette, of course,” she added, after a slight
moment of hesitation.
Throughout all these preliminary examinations Lady d’Alboukirk,
sitting between her cousin Captain Jack and her niece Henriette, had
remained quite silent in an erect attitude expressive of haughty
indifference. Henriette, on the other hand, looked distinctly bored.
Once or twice she had yawned audibly, which caused quite a feeling
of anger against her among the spectators. Such callousness in the
midst of so mysterious a tragedy, and when her own sister was
obviously in such deep sorrow, impressed everyone very
unfavourably. It was well known that the young lady had had a
fencing lesson just before the inquest in the room immediately below
that where Roonah lay dead, and that within an hour of the discovery
of the tragedy she was calmly playing golf.
Then Miss Joan Duplessis was called.
When the young girl stepped forward there was that awed hush in
the room which usually falls upon an attentive audience when the
curtain is about to rise on the crucial act of a dramatic play. But she
was calm and self-possessed, and wonderfully pathetic-looking in
her deep black and with the obvious lines of sorrow which the sad
death of a faithful friend had traced on her young face.
In answer to the coroner, she gave her name as Joan Clarissa
Duplessis, and briefly stated that until the day of her servant’s death
she had been a resident at Fordwych Castle, but that since then she
had left that temporary home, and had taken up her abode at the
d’Alboukirk Arms, a quiet little hostelry on the outskirts of the town.
There was a distinct feeling of astonishment on the part of those
who were not aware of this fact, and then the coroner said kindly:
“You were born, I think, in Pondicherry, in India, and are the
younger daughter of Captain and Mrs. Duplessis, who was own
sister to her ladyship?”
“I was born in Pondicherry,” replied the young girl, quietly, “and I
am the only legitimate child of the late Captain and Mrs. Duplessis,
own sister to her ladyship.”
A wave of sensation, quickly suppressed by the coroner, went
through the crowd at these words. The emphasis which the witness
had put on the word “legitimate” could not be mistaken, and
everyone felt that here must lie the clue to the, so far impenetrable,
mystery of the Indian woman’s death.
All eyes were now turned on old Lady d’Alboukirk and on her niece
Henriette, but the two ladies were carrying on a whispered
conversation together, and had apparently ceased to take any further
interest in the proceedings.
“The deceased was your confidential maid, was she not?” asked
the coroner, after a slight pause.
“Yes.”
“She came over to England with you recently?”
“Yes; she had to accompany me in order to help me to make good
my claim to being my late mother’s only legitimate child, and
therefore the heir to the barony of d’Alboukirk.”
Her voice had trembled a little as she said this, but now, as
breathless silence reigned in the room, she seemed to make a
visible effort to control herself, and, replying to the coroner’s
question, she gave a clear and satisfactory account of her terrible
discovery of her faithful servant’s death. Her evidence had lasted
about a quarter of an hour or so, when suddenly the coroner put the
momentous question to her:
“Do you know anything about the papers which the deceased
woman carried about her person, and reference to which has already
been made?”
“Yes,” she replied quietly; “they were the proofs relating to my
claim. My father, Captain Duplessis, had in early youth, and before
he met my mother, contracted a secret union with a half-caste
woman, who was Roonah’s own sister. Being tired of her, he chose
to repudiate her—she had no children—but the legality of the
marriage was never for a moment in question. After that, he married
my mother, and his first wife subsequently died, chiefly of a broken
heart; but her death only occurred two months after the birth of my
sister Henriette. My father, I think, had been led to believe that his
first wife had died some two years previously, and he was no doubt
very much shocked when he realised what a grievous wrong he had
done our mother. In order to mend matters somewhat, he and she
went through a new form of marriage—a legal one this time—and my
father paid a lot of money to Roonah’s relatives to have the matter
hushed up. Less than a year after this second—and only legal—
marriage, I was born and my mother died.”
“Then these papers of which so much has been said—what did
they consist of?”
“There were the marriage certificates of my father’s first wife—and
two sworn statements as to her death, two months after the birth of
my sister Henriette; one by Dr. Rénaud, who was at the time a well-
known medical man in Pondicherry, and the other by Roonah
herself, who had held her dying sister in her arms. Dr. Rénaud is
dead, and now Roonah has been murdered, and all the proofs have
gone with her——”
Her voice broke in a passion of sobs, which, with manifest self-
control, she quickly suppressed. In that crowded court you could
have heard a pin drop, so great was the tension of intense
excitement and attention.
“Then those papers remained in your maid’s possession? Why
was that?” asked the coroner.
“I did not dare to carry the papers about with me,” said the
witness, while a curious look of terror crept into her young face as
she looked across at her aunt and sister. “Roonah would not part
with them. She carried them in the lining of her dress, and at night
they were all under her pillow. After her—her death, and when Dr.
Walker had left, I thought it my duty to take possession of the papers

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Masculinities and Manhood in

Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the

The EU, Irish Defence Forces and Contemporary Security

Theatres of Dust: Climate Gothic Analysis in

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's

The Passenger Cormac Mccarthy

Contemporary Issues on Governance, Conflict and

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British

Contemporary Irish Popular Culture: Transnationalism,

A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry,

ISBN 978-3-030-84074-7 ISBN 978-3-030-84075-4 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

Cover credit: Fiona Morgan

While I am sure to accidentally omit some names, I endeavour here

of stand-alone thanks is Marta Cook, who provided new insights into

1 Introduction: Acting the Man 1

Introduction: Acting the Man

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

In Noel O’Donoghue’s and Tom Murphy’s 1959 play, On the Outside,

which Ireland underwent several periods of profound social, political,

Acting the Man also interrogates the contemporary notion of ‘masculinity

1 Contexts and Concepts of Masculinities

Drawing from the work of linguistics scholar, J. L. Austin, gender

As several post-colonial scholars have elaborated, when former colonies

cultural practices as a means of legitimizing and sanctioning heterosexual

masculinity tend to become viewed as essential qualities […] how

Indeed, it is possible to trace a through-line of hegemonic masculinity

to increase their economic, social, and political power (O’Neill 2015; De

Men can dodge among multiple meanings according to their interactional

3 Patriarchy and Its Dividends

successful in terms of forcing change in the Abbey’s programme as well as

the imaginations of Irish theatre practitioners, playwrights especially, have

4 Irish Manhood and the Market

Indeed, social and theatrical performances of Irish masculinities have

However, neoliberalism’s supposed conservative ethos is paradoxical.

Masculinity and femininity have thus become narrowly commodified and

shorter scenes, the homogenization of setting and dialogue, and the

5 The ‘Crisis Ordinariness’

the conduit of the opinion columns of national newspapers. Columnists

19.3% per capita of 100,000 which, thankfully, had dropped to 12.1%

it was also found that the impact of more dominant or hegemonic

What I want to argue, therefore, is that masculinity in crisis in Ireland

Walsh thus argues that a discursive crisis in masculinity can be understood

6 Irish Masculinities Onstage

women are merely the ‘bearer[s] of meaning, not maker[s] of meaning’,

thinking this occurs within the dialectic of spectatorship. In terms of male

Austin, J. L. 2010. “Performative Utterances.” In The Norton Anthology of

Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics,

Well, why should I bore you by recounting the agonised suspense,

THE TRAGEDY AT FORDWYCH CASTLE

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