Staging Trauma Bodies in Shadow

Staging
Trauma
Bodies in Shadow
Miriam Haughton
Contemporary
Performance
InterActions
Series editors: Elaine Aston

and Brian Singleton
Contemporary Performance InterActions
Series editors
Elaine Aston
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Brian Singleton
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Theatre’s performative InterActions with the politics of sex, race and class,
with questions of social and political justice, form the focus of the
Contemporary Performance InterActions series. Performative InterActions
are those that aspire to affect, contest or transform. International in scope,
CPI publishes monographs and edited collections dedicated to the
InterActions of contemporary practitioners, performances and theatres
located in any world context.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14918
Miriam Haughton
Staging Trauma
Bodies in Shadow
Miriam Haughton
National University of Ireland
Galway, Ireland
Contemporary Performance InterActions

ISBN 978-1-137-53662-4 ISBN 978-1-137-53663-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960964
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Cover illustration: @ Laundry (c) ANU Productions
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This book is dedicated to all the brave storytellers, shining a light on the
bodies in shadow, changing the spaces we know.
About the Cover Image
This is a production shot from Laundry produced by ANU Productions in

2011 as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival programme in
2011. The image was designed and taken by ANU co-artistic director
Owen Boss, and Laundry was directed by ANU co-artistic director Louise
Lowe. The performer is Sorcha Kenny, who researched Magdalene history
in Ireland as part of the dramaturgy of her performance.
vii
Acknowledgements
This book is the culmination of years of support, guidance and inspira-

tion from so many different people and organisations. To everyone at
Palgrave, in particular series editors Elaine Aston and Brian Singleton,
and the editorial team of Tomas René, Vicky Bates, Jen McCall, April
James, and Paula Kennedy, I am so pleased and proud to produce this
work with you.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the O’Donoghue Centre for
Drama, Theatre and Performance at NUI Galway for their enthusiasm,
energy, rigorous research culture and practical assistance. This research
was supported through two grants from NUI Galway, the Research
Incentivisation Scheme (2015), and the Millennium Fund (2016). I
would like to thank the School of Humanities and the College of Arts,
Social Sciences and Celtic Studies for investing in my research. Many of
the concepts central to this project were tested out in symposia and debates
led by the activities of NUI Galway’s Moore Institute, Gender ARC, the
Hardiman Research Building, the Centre for Global Women’s Studies, the
Centre for Irish Studies, the Huston School of Film and Digital Media,
and the Disciplines of English, History and Philosophy, and I must extend
a special thanks to all my colleagues there.
The nuggets for this book were first formed towards the end of my
doctoral research in Drama Studies at University College Dublin, super-
vised by the great Cathy Leeney, with further essential feedback from
Clare Wallace. I wish to extend a warm thank you to many people at
UCD, including Eamonn Jordan, Finola Cronin, Tony Roche, Karen
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Jackman, Gerardine Meaney, Valerie Norton, Emilie Pine and the Irish
Memory Studies Network, and my wonderful peers at the UCD
Humanities Institute, particularly Aoife, Niamh, Kirsten, Treasa and
Emma. These nuggets found time to develop further during my postdoc-
toral research as part of the AHRC project ‘Creative Exchange Northern
Ireland’ at the University of Ulster and Queen’s University Belfast. My
thanks to Karen Fleming and Michael Alcorn for this opportunity in cre-
ative knowledge exchange and the synergies generated from those interac-
tions. I first met the pleasures of theatre research and practice at Queen’s
University Belfast in 2001, pleasures which only increased with time. I
would like to thank my colleagues and educators from Queen’s Drama
past and present, Melissa Sihra, Paul Murphy, Mark Phelan, David Grant
and Aoife McGrath. Recent collaborative work with Maria Kurdi has
tutored me on the journey of publication through our shared collections,
and I greatly appreciate her wisdom and experience.
Part of the research on ANU’S Laundry was first published in the jour-
nal Modern Drama, 57:1 (2014), and I gratefully acknowledge the jour-
nal’s permission to reproduce that work here. The rigorous and inspiring
activities of the Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR), the International
Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), the National
Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI), the Theatre and Performance
Research Association (TaPRA), the International Federation for Theatre
Research (IFTR), and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR)
have afforded multiple opportunities to hone this research through schol-
arly debate, and I am truly grateful for these inclusive and welcoming
communities. In particular, the gender, feminist and community-led
working groups of these organisations have been inspiring to interact
with, and I wish to thank Lisa Fitzpatrick, Aoife Monks and all those who
lead such dynamic and vital networks.
The contemporary context of this research ensures that many of the
theatre-makers under analysis in these case studies are working artists,
and I am so grateful that they took the time to correspond with me,
allowing me a brief peek into their thoughts and worlds. I must thank
especially Louise Lowe, Owen Boss and ANU, Marina Carr, Garry
Hynes and the Druid Theatre, Laura Wade and the Soho Theatre, Teya
Sepinuck and the Derry Playhouse, and all those brave voices involved
with ‘#WakingTheFeminists’. Your stories cannot be measured in aca-
demic critique, but hopefully this critique can highlight the significance
of your stories.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
xi
For those who kept me going with hugs, wine, and walks in Galway,
Dublin and Belfast, I am so grateful. Finally, to my family, who put up
with me, God love them, and keep perspective, thanks for the support and
at times, the dose of reality, when I needed it.
September 2017
Contents
1 Introduction: Staging the Unknowable, the Unspeakable,

the Unrepresentable 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Trauma and Performance 6
1.3 Production Contexts 14
1.4 Selected Case Studies 17
1.5 The Extraordinary Everyday Experience 26
1.6 Performance, Trauma, Trust 30
Bibliography 38
2 Violation: On Raftery’s Hill (2000) by Marina Carr 41

2.1 Introduction: Don’t Blame the Animals 41
2.2 Marina Carr and On Raftery’s Hill: Dramaturgy,
Action, Context 44
2.3 Staging Trauma: Behind Closed Doors 51
2.4 Sexual Abuse and the Nation-State 55
2.5 Scenography: Captivity and the Body 60
2.6 The Politics of Reception: Receiving Shame 70
Bibliography 78
3 Loss: Colder Than Here (2005) by Laura Wade 81

3.1 Introduction: Threshold People 81
3.2 Laura Wade, Colder Than Here, and Writing
for Theatre and Film 86
xiii
xiv Contents
3.3 Staging Trauma: The Big C 90

3.4 Riddled With It: Contaminated Bodies 97
3.5 Slow Violence: Bodies in Shadow101
3.6 The Politics of Reception: Performing Lineage106
Bibliography 116
4 Containment: Laundry (2011), Directed by Louise Lowe 117

4.1 Introducing Laundry: Bodies of the Past, Bodies
of the Present117
4.2 Staging Trauma: Knowing and Not Knowing120
4.3 Performing Silence and Invisibility: Artistic, Political
and Critical Contexts128
4.4 ANU, Laundry, and Irish Theatre132
4.5 Laundry: Shadows of Lives, Shadows of Space135
4.6 The Politics of Reception: From Not Knowing to Knowing147
Bibliography 159
5 Exile: Sanctuary (2013), Directed by Teya Sepinuck 161

5.1 Introduction: Hope161
5.2 Staging Trauma: ‘Acting Out’ and ‘Working Through’169
5.3 Theatre of Witness: Production History and the Politics
of Performance174
5.4 The Performance Environment: Situating Performers,
Audiences, Victims, Perpetrators, Citizens, Others181
5.5 Performing Home: Pathologies of Belonging and Escape185
5.6 The Politics of Reception: Communion195
Bibliography 203
6 Conclusion: Relationality 205
6.1 Staging Trauma, Offering Intimacy205
6.2 Bodies in Shadow, Bodies in Light208
6.3 Revisioning the Family213
6.4 Staging Fourth Wave Feminism: Onwards217
Bibliography 222
B
ibliography 223
I ndex 231
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Staging the Unknowable,

the Unspeakable, the Unrepresentable
1.1 Introduction
To write on the staging of trauma is to write on the staging of suffering. It
is an attempt to identify personal and public, as well as individual and col-
lective, patterns of pain, fear and dissociation that are dramatised or theat-
ricalised for public engagement. Hence, to write on the staging of trauma
is to approach, with trepidation, these shadowed spaces of performance,
knowledge, memory, politics, and experience. This field of analysis neces-
sitates an ambitious and flexible scope for the distinct and case-specific
conditions exploring intention and complicity, perpetrator and victim,
pain and recovery, redress and denial, continuity and rupture, and indeed,
how to navigate and represent these in the live medium of performance,
that which increasingly includes elements of recorded performance within
its medium. More specifically, to interrogate traumatic encounters drawn
from both history as well as myth staged for public performance, which
are by their dissociative contexts considered unknowable, unspeakable and
unrepresentable in varying degrees, is reflective of the very aporia so cen-
tral to any engagement with trauma studies. On this, Jean-François
Lyotard observes, ‘What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but
to this aporia of art and to its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says
that it cannot say it.’1 To write on the staging of trauma, thus, is to accept
from this opening point of theoretical departure that suffering is uniquely
personal, and indeed, complex, not least when it occurs in collective
© The Author(s) 2018 1

M. Haughton, Staging Trauma,
Contemporary Performance InterActions,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1_1
2 M. HAUGHTON
c ontexts. It cannot be known in its totality and this volume does not claim
to know it. As Susan Sontag declares in Regarding the Pain of Others, ‘No
“we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other
people’s pain.’2 Rather, the forthcoming analyses map the fragmented
shards of traumatic histories and stories as staged by the selection of case
studies and reaffirms their worthy significance for global attention in criti-
cal studies of theatre and performance, as well as trauma and memory
studies, cultural politics, and studies of gender and feminism. The case
studies under analysis in this volume each stage a traumatic experience that
speaks to this ‘aporia of art and its pain… [and] says that it cannot say it,’
(1990, 47) yet through the processes of staging, performance and recep-
tion, embroils itself in this effort of limited articulation nonetheless.
The staging involved, particularly via embodied knowledge and viscer-
ally affective encounters, creates a shared space for the unspeakable to
struggle in its desire for articulation and acknowledgment. The compul-
sion, and indeed inherent contradiction, to simultaneously express and
suppress the traumatic is unfaltering in these performance contexts. This
centralising of trauma(s) can manifest via diverse modalities, such as narra-
tive, design, embodiment, gesture, pattern and symptom, and often in
sporadic, non-linear and inconclusive ways, as is customary with perfor-
mance. In Professing Performance, Shannon Jackson notes these areas of
interdisciplinarity, most significantly that ‘Performance conventionally
employs bodies, motion, space, affect, image, and words; its analysis at
times aligns with theories of embodiment, at times with studies of emo-
tion, at times with architectural analysis, at times with studies of visual
culture, and at times with critiques of linguistic exchange.’3 Suzanne Little
draws from much of the critical work across the humanities and social sci-
ences in her astute article ‘Repeating Repetition’ to identify the range of
potential registers one may expect from an encounter with trauma or
shock. She summarises acute conditions such as ‘wordless and affectless
states; loss of the ability to comprehend or use syntax; distortions of vision,
taste, sound and touch and hallucinations’.4 The performance space that
stages trauma must host these states of traumatic play, constantly navigat-
ing the disruptions that emerge as theatre artists draw upon both their
imaginative resources as well as what David Dean, Yana Meerzon and
Kathryn Prince note in History, Memory, Performance, ‘the archives and
repertoires of memory, a notion understood on the one hand in its collec-
tive, national, and public contexts and the other as something acutely per-
sonal, subjective, individual, even idiosyncratic and unreliable’.5
INTRODUCTION: STAGING THE UNKNOWABLE, THE UNSPEAKABLE… 3
The selected case studies in this volume, by staging trauma, confront

intense personal experience dominated by post-traumatic structures of
contradiction, disrupted linearity, compulsive repetition, problematic con-
fusion with Self and Other, ethical murkiness, and a general milieu of
potential vulnerability and disorientation for theatre artists and the audi-
ences who encounter the work. Interestingly, this list of attributes is argu-
ably applicable, though in varying degrees, to the wider performative
politics of staging and liveness. Thus, the very form, immediacy and struc-
tural parallels of performance is linked intersectionally with the interdisci-
plinary discourse of trauma. To highlight the point, I draw from
performance scholar Diana Taylor, who queries, ‘Is performance that
which disappears, or that which persists, transmitted through a nonarchi-
val system of transfer that I came to call the repertoire?’6 It is both. The
embodied moment of live performance (embodied for both performer
and spectator/audience) disappears the moment it manifests, while the
memory of the moment lives on, in flux from the performance environ-
ment to the wider public sphere and is thus subject to the socio-economic
and cultural conditions which interact there. Similarly, is trauma that
which disappears, or that which persists? It is both, and this introductory
chapter will detail debates concerning both originary traumatic experi-
ences and established paradigms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
To unpack this terrain, this introduction utilises certain loci to foreground
the volume’s leading concerns, explored in the sections 1.2, ‘Trauma and
Performance’, 1.3, ‘Production Contexts’, 1.4, ‘Selected Case Studies,’
1.5, ‘The Extraordinary Everyday Experience’, and finally, 1.6,
‘Performance, Trauma, Trust’.
The first question this volume must address is why should one write a
monograph dedicated to this field of contradiction, complexity and
debate? The responses are multiple, and at times, risk generating more
tangents and trajectories the further that they delve. Acknowledging this,
certain points of heightened urgency emerge. To begin on this path of
justification and contextualisation, I argue that the contemporary perfor-
mance culture in Ireland, the north of Ireland and Britain is informed
directly and consciously from urgent societal conditions. This perfor-
mance culture increasingly eschews mythical frameworks to produce dra-
maturgies that are immediately relevant to traumatic experience and
histories, often suppressed or marginalised in centralised public discourse.
Postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmemory
dominate the dramaturgies in this volume and point to parallels in cultural
4 M. HAUGHTON
and social structures as well as historical contexts and experience. In The

Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch suggests that this prevalence
of ‘post’ in recent decades, particularly from the 1980s to the early twenty-
first century, ‘signals more than a temporal delay and more than a location
in an aftermath’.7 Indeed, these ‘posts’, ‘continue to dominate our intel-
lectual landscape’ (2012, 5) and thus ‘inscribe both a critical distance and
a profound interrelation’ (5) between the ‘post’ and its subject. In sum-
mary, they signify a layering of experience and subjectivity, aligning with
‘the practices of citation and supplementarity that characterize them’ (5).
As such, navigating contradiction, disrupted linearity, compulsive repeti-
tion, problematic confusion with Self and Other, ethical murkiness and a
general milieu of vulnerability and disorientation also increasingly embed
the contemporary performance encounter.
For the purposes of this study, ‘contemporary’ refers to the most recent
phase of global neoliberal activity throughout the last five decades approx-
imately, which is indeed, the same cultural moment as the pervasiveness of
the ‘post’ as Hirsch theorised for the context of her particular study. This
timeframe speaks to societies informed by major transnational patterns in
consumption, movement, digitisation and disorientation, which remain
ongoing and in crisis.8 In these contemporary performance encounters,
the disruption of ‘known’ narratives of character-identity and place-history
are foregrounded, illuminating the lesser-known narratives of disposses-
sion of body and space, relying on form as well as theme to challenge
convention, expectation, and a sense of certainty more familiar with
master-narratives of the twentieth-century Western canon. This ideologi-
cal and cultural environment, pervasive throughout Ireland, the north of
Ireland9 and Britain (and not denying these patterns exist elsewhere, but
this remit constitutes the accessible geographical scope for this study),
signals a sphere of conscious and unconscious acknowledgment of perva-
sive traumas. These traumas are contemporary and specific to this culture
while also part of a wider transnational climate that is directly politicised,
permeated by resurgent feminist activity, neoliberal conditioning, glo-
balised experience and personal–political identity disorientation. The per-
formance and interaction of contemporary society is dizzying, anxious and
indeed, traumatic. In unexpected contrast, perhaps, the staging of trauma
in performance environments tends to be an integrated experience. Here,
I do not refer to ‘integrated experience’ in the sense of a totalising repre-
sentative illusion, as indeed the form often precludes ‘a coherent fictive
cosmos’.10 Yet, due to the very apparatuses required of performance and
production, performances that stage traumatic encounters tend to mani-

fest as events that are nuanced, focused and, often, affective in a generative
and collective capacity.
At the risk of repeating the point, I must stress that for any study of
trauma and performance, the consistency and complexity of contradiction
is paramount to the analytical journey. Linearity and logic do not hold
court in the study of traumatic experience, PTSD, and live performance.
Simultaneously however, certain paradigms and parallels of subject matter
and context do become apparent, and thus, demand close inspection. In
these case studies, patterns of trauma and abuse directed at the female
body largely dominate, whether in the form of ‘docudrama’ drawn from
archives, oral histories and/or testimonies, or narrated via a dramatic text
with no formally acknowledged or obvious link to the cultural sphere. In
addition to this pattern, another thread appears: the silencing or ‘shadow-
ing’ of trauma and abuse directed at the female body and female experi-
ence in public discourse and representation. By ‘shadowing’ I contend
that they are not fully silenced events or narratives as with policies of cen-
sorship would dictate, but that they become de-escalated in urgency, iso-
lated from public points of discourse, and somehow associated with threat
or danger so that any individual or institution that may interact with them
is at risk of becoming tainted by association. This volume takes these shad-
owed bodies from the margins and places them as a centre point of enquiry.
The study interrogates not only their traumatic experience but also these
processes of marginalisation and shadowing which seek to underplay the
significance of their narrative and diminish the integrity of their
autonomy.
Throughout the four case studies in this monograph, On Raftery’s
Hill (2000) by Irish playwright Marina Carr in Chap. 2, ‘Violation’,
Colder Than Here (2005) by English playwright Laura Wade in Chap. 3,
‘Loss’, Laundry (2011) directed by Irish director/theatre artist Louise
Lowe for ANU in Chap. 4, ‘Containment’, and Sanctuary (2013)
directed by US director Teya Sepinuck for Derry Playhouse Theatre of
Witness in Chap. 5, ‘Exile’, these points of convergence and contradic-
tion will be scrutinised. First and foremost though, my study must address
this question to proceed: What is trauma? There are many avenues to
theorise this. I choose to begin with Judith Herman’s outline of the trau-
matic event in her seminal treatise Trauma and Recovery, as her research
closely follows traumatic experiences of women and is thus fitting to open
my enquiries:
6 M. HAUGHTON
Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather
because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Unlike
commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life
or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death.
They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror,
and evoke the responses of catastrophe.11
Trauma will be examined in greater detail in the next section,‘Trauma and

Performance’, but this summary regarding the traumatic events and the
affective experience it describes points to the visceral milieu that emerges
in each of the case studies, though as a result of significantly distinct trau-
matic events. It is the space encompassing the actual traumatic event, often
referred to as the originary trauma (sometimes consciously acknowledged
and other times suppressed), the affect of fright, shame and terror that can-
not be emotionally or psychologically processed and integrated into mem-
ory and identity, and the various forms of PTSD, that are imagined and
staged. Thus, once more, contradiction resides in this liminal homeland of
‘working through’ fragmented shards of memories and implicated bodies.
1.2 Trauma and Performance

Research into trauma, dissociation and post-traumatic stress was pioneered
from the nineteenth century at the Salpêtrière Hospital in France, led by
neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues, including Pierre
Janet and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s research oeuvre is deeply informed by
the zeitgeist of his time at the Salpêtrière. His interest in traumatic hyste-
ria, the leading focus there, continued to inform his research and career on
his return to Vienna. The discovery of the time was that traumatic experi-
ence was the underlying condition of hysteria, a significant breakthrough
in psychoanalytic research and medicine. It was at the end of the nine-
teenth century that this circle challenged established thinking on hysteria.
Their claim was that hysteria may in certain cases occur as a result of
degenerative heredity, but, it could also be the result of a traumatic experi-
ence not fully integrated into the psycho-somatic condition, memory and
identity, which thus revisits the person repetitively (via traits now identi-
fied as PTSD), causing hysteria.
In brief, PTSD was established in its current context in the 1980
American Psychiatric Association diagnostic manual, remaining in debate
and conflict ever since. Roger Luckhurst summarises the established domi-
nant traits of PTSD:
Those confronted with an experience involving ‘actual or threatened death

or serious injury, or a physical threat to the physical integrity of the self’
considered to be outside the range of normal experience are diagnosed with
PTSD if they present certain clusters of symptoms. Individuals who experi-
ence wars, disasters, accidents or other extreme ‘stressor’ events seem to
produce certain identifiable somatic and psycho-somatic disturbances. Aside
from myriad physical symptoms, trauma disrupts memory, and therefore
identity, in peculiar ways.12
To return approximately a century previous to this outline of PTSD,

trauma theorists will nod to Freud as a starting point in a non-linear jour-
ney of study that cannot begin and thus does not end.
Freud, considered the father of modern trauma theory, primarily from
his later works Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920), first produced The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896). His ear-
lier claims were based on cases examined specifically at the Salpêtrière, yet
he argued their findings were applicable generally. He later recanted his
initial conclusions due to his discoveries concerning infantile sexuality,
alongside well-documented criticisms from his professional community.
Hilkka Huopainen maps this trajectory from his time at the Salpêtrière,
detailing that, ‘At this point, as a theoretical hypothesis, Freud postulated
that the perpetrators of the sexual abuse were the fathers (Freud
1892–1899).’13 However, from the autumn of 1897, he rejected his initial
hypothesis, when ‘the seduction theory began to fall into the background,
as, for Freud, the aetiology of hysterical neurosis increasingly began to be
explained by infantile sexuality and its adjacent phylogenetically-determined
primal scene fantasies, the drives (Freud 1916–1917)’ (2002, 97).
While the climate pervasive at Salpêtrière produced significant think-
ing, such as childhood sexual abuse being endemic in the family home and
perpetrated by patriarchal structures, this thinking was bypassed in later
debates in this terrain. Once Freud became focused on infantile sexuality,
‘sexual abuse of children for all practical purposes lost its significance as
the aetiology of hysterical neurosis’ (2002, 96). Huopainen notes the
major ramifications this had, citing the infamous case study of ‘Dora’ as
‘the first psychoanalytic case study, [which] has for a century acted as
8 M. HAUGHTON
model for libido interpretations that bypass possible psychic traumas’

(2002, 96). Worryingly, she concludes:
As it was with the 14-year-old ‘Dora,’ whom a pedophile had sexually

harassed, the sexual abuse of children and young people was generally over-
looked in psychotherapy for about a century, even though, as I pointed out
above, the trauma histories of victims of sexual abuse were studied as early
as the nineteenth century at Salpêtrière, where Freud himself studied for
several months. Sexual abuse of children was only gradually rediscovered in
the 1970s and 1980s, chiefly through the activity and openness of the femi-
nist movement (Elliot). (2002, 96)
Furthermore, the climate at the Salpêtrière led by Charcot was inherently

theatrical and performative in its approach to gathering medical evidence
to support its findings. In Patrick Duggan’s insightful and arresting
Trauma-Tragedy, he highlights the specific procedures employed at
Charcot’s famous Tuesday lectures, which again, rely on a disturbing
appropriation of women’s bodies to support findings that are arguably
more ideological than scientific in their claims. Duggan draws from
Georges Didi-Huberman’s Invention of Hysteria to examine Charcot’s use
of hypnosis as part of this therapy. Putting his patients into a hypnotic
trance, ‘his techniques varied from exploding packages of gun-cotton
under patients’ noses’ to ‘masturbating them […] until they could take no
more’ and even to ‘prescriptions for coitus’.14 On these experiments and
Charcot’s use of tactics, Duggan concludes that they maintain little clinical
value. He details that as ‘his methods involved “coaching”, or structured
“playing” that was designed to achieve predisposed or pre-planned
responses, the clinical validity of the experiments is questionable at best
and akin to sanctioned rape or worse’ (2012, 19–20). Indeed, from the
outset in Duggan’s Trauma-Tragedy, he points to the space of nexus dom-
inated by liminality that exists for both performance and trauma. In short,
he offers that, ‘trauma, like performance, is a complex and polysemic phe-
nomenon’ (2012, 5). Duggan argues, drawing from Raymond Williams’
‘structure of feeling’ that a ‘contemporary structure of feeling which is
embodied in a performance mode […] is acutely concerned with address-
ing the traumatic’ (2012, 7). This, he coins, ‘Trauma-Tragedy’ (7).
Luckhurst declares ‘Welcome to contemporary trauma culture’ (2008, 2),
a concerning cultural state of play. His ‘welcome’ explicitly argues that
trauma embeds contemporary Western cultural experience, an argument
fundamental to motivations for this study. If we accept there is validity to

Luckhurst’s assertion, then we must endeavour to investigate via episte-
mological methods and tacit knowledge why this has become so. Why is
traumatic experience so urgent among contemporary Anglophone perfor-
mance? Whether staging an ancient Greek tragedy or the latest live art
encounter, increasingly, spectators are required to intervene consciously
and immediately. These performance encounters rarely offer a pleasant or
easy exit. The questions directed at the audience as a result of the trau-
matic focus tend to be irresolvable, reflecting indeed the stakes of PTSD
according to Huopainen, whereby one ‘remains stuck in their trauma’,
reliving ‘though, emotions, actions and images’ (2002, 93). Why then, do
we stage trauma? More specifically, as foregrounded in Anna Harpin’s
‘Intolerable Acts’:
If, for Cathy Caruth and others, trauma is unknowable, unspeakable and
impossible, if it is in a vector of perpetual return, if it disturbs memory and
inhabits a continuous present, then what are the potentialities and limits of
performance for this subject? How and why might one translate traumatic
experience into the materiality of performance? In short, how does one wit-
ness aporia?15
Perhaps Harpin’s questions cannot be answered comprehensively or satis-

factorily. However, they may be able to act as an analytical guide for
engaging with the motivations and consequences of staging trauma in the
contemporary moment, levelling what we know with what we know we do
not know.
Dominick LaCapra teases out the tensions in meaning, association and
employment of trauma terminology and theory in his many writings on the
subject. In particular, he draws from Freud’s theorisation of mourning and
melancholia to investigate the distinctions and crossover in characterisations
of absence and loss, and the practices of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’.
These practices and theories are examined more specifically in Chap. 5,
‘Exile’, applied to the rehearsal processes that shape the performance of
Sanctuary (2013). In his seminal article ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’,16
LaCapra reflects on these theories and processes in specified non-binary
terms. His formulation of Freud’s position is that ‘melancholia’ is charac-
teristic of ‘an arrested process in which the depressed, self-berating, and
traumatized self, locked in compulsive repetition, is possessed by the past,
faces a future of impasses, and remains narcissistically identified with the
10 M. HAUGHTON
lost object’ (1999, 713). This can lead to ‘acting out’ or compulsive repeti-
tion without a sense of conclusion or change. Mourning, on the other
hand, offers possibility. It engages the traumatic event or encounter and
can include ‘acting out’ through such engagement, but in a mode in which
one can attend consciously to the present and anticipate a future. This
process constitutes ‘working through’. Indeed, any binary characterisation
would dismiss the potential for shared territory between ‘acting out’ and
‘working through’. While their paths converge they also mutate and unfold
in various distinct directions, depending on the specificity of the case in
hand. Thus, for the performance environment, where repetition is central
to rehearsal and a production run, theatre artists whose subject matter is
the traumatic narrative, whether from the fictional past or realist present,
must identify and assess the stakes implicit in this art-led process of repeti-
tion. These stakes vary hugely, depending on the type of narrative, its pro-
cess of construction and form of delivery, the audiences who experience it
live, and the links it may present to the immediate community and culture.
In the case studies in this volume, any easy suggestion that a traditional
‘play’ derived from myth and character-led in a theatre building is neces-
sarily at a remove from a traumatic context is naïve. Marina Carr’s On
Raftery’s Hill is testament to the heightened discomfort an audience can
experience when confronted with a traumatic encounter, whether ‘fic-
tional’ or not, as outlined in detail in Chap. 2, ‘Violation’.
Unpacking this process in greater complexity, LaCapra suggests that
mourning:
[…] be seen not simply as individual or quasi-transcendental grieving but as

a homeopathic socialization or ritualization of the repetition compulsion
that attempts to turn it against the death drive and to counteract compul-
siveness […] by re-petitioning in ways that allow for a measure of critical
distance, change, resumption of social life, ethical responsibility, and
renewal. (1999, 713)
Thus, mourning, which speaks to this idea and process of ‘working

through’ foregrounds notions of possibility, anticipation and change.
Again, these are conditions the performance event is often keen to gener-
ate. Leaving space for mystery, question and tension, thus defying neat
conclusion or resolution is commonplace not only to the ‘well-made play’
but also to non-linear performance encounters. This is often analysed in
terms of the postdramatic as theorised in Postdramatic Theatre by Hans-
Thies Lehmann, where the audience is invited to write part of the perfor-
mance, leaving endings open and willing to shift in the course of
production. Yet, Liz Tomlin argues persuasively in Contemporary British
Theatre that prevailing ideas of theatre acceptable under Lehmann’s con-
ditions of postdramatic can indeed be limiting. She suggests instead that
‘acknowledgment of the plurality of the contemporary dramatic then
enables us to ask more rigorous and ideological questions about form and
content in the context of each individual piece of work’ (2013, xii).
Reading from both Lehmann and Tomlin, this study treats each perfor-
mance and production context individually, drawing from both playwright-
driven dramas and forms of ensemble-led documentary theatre.
It is essential to navigate these processes of mourning and melancholia
as antecedent to a study of key trauma conditions of absence and loss. The
common conflation of absence and loss, argues LaCapra, and the conse-
quences of such misuse, pose danger not only to ‘intellectual clarity and
cogency, but they also have ethical and political dimensions’ (1999, 697).
For example, the consequences of blurring the distinctions in terms and
processes yield unattainable expectations for resolution while also creating
conditions for the repetition of disruptions such as disorientation, agita-
tion and confusion. He details:
When absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of mis-
placed nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified
community. When loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately
generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse of endless melan-
choly, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process
of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prema-
turely aborted. (1999, 698)
Thus, LaCapra summarises, ‘Paradise absent is different from paradise

lost’ (706). When distinctions are not called upon to mitigate these condi-
tions, the blurred landscape of the contemporary ‘trauma culture’ looms
threateningly, whereby the potential for misplaced victimhood is apparent,
specific historical traumas become generalised, and traumatic experience is
rendered as symbolic capital, personally and socially.
Cathy Caruth highlights the potent nexus between the arts and expres-
sions of trauma, specifically referring to Freud and literature in her sum-
mative example. She notes, ‘If Freud turns to literature to describe
traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is inter-
12 M. HAUGHTON
ested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing.’17 This
monograph builds on Caruth’s assertion, but chooses to utilise live perfor-
mance rather than literature, to stress the focus and relevance on the per-
formance processes of creation and collaboration to investigate this
complex relation between knowing and not knowing. The space of enquiry
I examine is the same, the avenue I choose to travel there is parallel in
parts, and the spatio-temporal context of my research is that which I
belong to as an individual and a scholar. I partly accept the common criti-
cism that analysis of the contemporary forbids the confidence of historical
insight. However, I do not accept that this conclusion justifies avoiding
the contemporary period as a timeframe of study and all the potential sig-
nificances such focused research may achieve. As Vicky Angelaki pithily
summarises in response to shifts in theatre-making in contemporary
Britain, ‘hindsight is not necessarily the most apt means of providing reso-
nant commentary’.18 Indeed, in terms of theatre and performance as cul-
tural intervention and political activism, addressing the present is an
essential motive for cultural engagement and impact.
The ‘wound,’ the initial formulation of trauma as a physical piercing
and cognitive shock of some kind has mutated through modernity to
become more commonly associated with the impact of psychological and
emotional scars and ruptures, interacting with the physical. Caruth
considers this trajectory of the unknown and how trauma thus points us
not only to material culture, but elements of anthropology and philosophy
not yet fully conquered by the episteme. She states that trauma is much
more than a pathology or illness, rather:
[…] it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that address in us that
attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This
truth, in its delayed appearance and belated address, cannot be linked only
to what is known, but also what remains unknown in our very actions and
our language. (1996, 4)
Thus, the call to engage with the unknown is central to the staging of
trauma.
For performance then, the conditions of mourning and melancholia,
absence and loss, acting out and working through, and structural trauma
and historical trauma, play pivotal roles in the construction of texts, liter-
ary and performance, modern and postmodern. For forms of verbatim
theatre or docudrama where the stakes extend to the ‘real’ people whose
traumatic past is presented in live performance as well as the audience who

come to engage, whether as conscious witness or unwitting spectator,
identifying the presentation of trauma as specific and in situ is fundamental
to its narrative arc and ethical dissemination in the public sphere. In each
of these case studies, such immediacy is afforded to the analysis of dra-
matic narrative, performance form and the event of production. At the
same time, however, the production enters the spectrum of performance
history and cultural engagement, which can lead to the identification of
paradigm insights.
Moving to unpack further the performance stakes of staging trauma,
the interventions by theatre and performance scholars such as Harpin and
Duggan are directly relevant to this study. In terms of reception and sce-
nographic scope, Harpin succinctly outlines the dynamics in play regard-
ing Marina Abramović’s The Lips of Thomas (1975, 2005). These dynamics
however, are deeply pertinent to the dialogue of trauma and performance
that this monograph addresses, including ‘The palpability of reciprocal
gaze, the sentient collectivity of affective engagement, and the erratic
momentum of the social event coalesce in a dynamic of possibility in live
performance’ (2011, 103). While I would contend that the case studies
under analysis here do not directly question the ‘limits of viewing some-
one else’s pain’ (103) as in the case with Abramović’s performance art, the
activities of the ‘reciprocal gaze’, the ‘collectivity of affective engagement’,
and the ‘erratic momentum of the social event’ are central aspects of
meaning making and artistic intent, as well as personal and cultural affect
that occur in the moments of live performance and exist thereafter.
Mick Wallis and Duggan consider how performance can operate as a
‘privileged site for the exploration of trauma’.19 Attending to the interdis-
ciplinarity so foundational to both performance studies and trauma stud-
ies, they argue that ‘western academic, artistic, journalistic, psychiatric,
psychoanalytic and cultural discourses’ (2011, 1) are increasingly engaged
in the study of traumata. This, indeed, suggests trauma can also operate a
‘privileged route’ from ‘which to examine cultural issues of experience,
memory, the body and representation—especially in the fields of history,
literature, cultural studies and fine art. Importantly […] the genealogy of
modern trauma theory, including the psycho-medical, is rich in instances
that might productively be considered under the rubric of performance’
(2011, 1).
14 M. HAUGHTON
1.3 Production Contexts

This monograph did not set out to only or predominantly investigate the
staging of feminist politics, woman-centred traumas, or female-led the-
atre artists. By focusing on the staging of trauma as the central research
question, particularly regarding the bodies most often side lined from
the public sphere of discourse, this study became confronted with, and
at times overwhelmed by, the magnitude of theatre and performance
which tell of crimes against women. Though pervasive in the arts and
pervasive in the everyday, the politics of epistemology, of patriarchy, of
neoliberal capitalism—manoeuvred by the long arm of history—create a
network of value- systems which dictate women-centred traumas are
somehow less real, marginal in numbers, not urgent in centralised public
discourse, not relevant to the political and economic dynamic of a nation
and, thus, easy to diminish in voice, visibility and potentially, bypass
politically and thus, socially. Hence, the traumas staged become two-fold
in narrative arc; telling of the traumatic encounter at the heart of the
performance, and telling of the traumatic context of women’s experience
being ignored, dismissed, and de-valued. On this, Judith Herman con-
cluded that, ‘Not until the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s
was it recognized that the most common post-traumatic disorders are
those not of men in war but of women in civilian life’ (1992, 28). This
disturbing insight reaffirms the significance of these case studies and the
conditions of suppression they speak to historically, though their impact
remains active in the present.
In Chap. 2, ‘Violation’, the consequences of feminist research and
activism are explored in greater detail led by Herman’s work. At this point
however, the dismissal of such violations largely directed at the female
body must be noted to set forth a clear link to the selection of case studies.
Milija Gluhovic calls on ‘the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of con-
fronting bodies from the past, bodies which retain the marks of politics,
history, and reverence’.20 I utilise his thinking here in terms of women’s
bodies most specifically, both the dishonest and ill-qualified writing of
their histories under the remit of patriarchal structures, as well as the dis-
respect paid to their experiences as dramatised in these selected case stud-
ies. These performances render these bodies as inescapably problematic in
terms of the iterability of their historicity and subsequent narrativisation,
whether biographical or fictional in construction. In some of the case
studies, the bodies referred to are those from history, marked by politics
and yet side lined to the shadows of political priorities. They reflect incu-
bators of suppressed memories and marginalised histories. In others, they
are imagined narratives yet resonate potently with wider socio-cultural
conditions. In all contexts however, they speak to violence, and, as world
literature scholar Sorcha Gunne pithily summarises drawing from trans-
continental paradigms concerning rape narratives, this violence ‘is at once
both intensely political and intensely personal’.21 In terms of interrogating
the forms and impact of violence that is enacted in each of these case stud-
ies, this volume draws from Patrick Anderson’s and Jisha Menon’s con-
vincing arguments in Violence Performed, that one must not reproduce
any simplified binary of perpetrator/ victim in the analyses of contempo-
rary violence, particularly that which is state-sanctioned and central to the
strengthening of global networks and alliances. Declaring that ‘violence
dominates our visual field’22 in terms of the spectacle that globalisation can
facilitate, they warn that at the same time ‘it remains intensely localised in
its enactment’ (2009, 4–5). Most significantly, a violent act is ‘acutely felt
at the level of the inexorably mortal human body’ (4–5). The registers of
violence, while specific to those imbricated, link directly to those of
trauma. For example, Anderson and Menon refer to experience of violence
as ‘binding, affective’ (5) (original emphasis) and thus, as with trauma,
‘crosscuts the domain traditionally registered and distinguished as the
physical, the psychic and the social’ (5). This binding power of violence,
they assert, may lead to ‘a future-history of trauma that does not merely
describe, but performatively produces power relations’ (5). As one of the
most central aspects of PTSD is the compulsion for repetition, therein lies
the threat that the violence often associated with a traumatic encounter
does indeed initiate a ‘future-history’, as the editors identify. This is not
necessarily a predetermined outcome however, and this volume will inter-
rogate what the staging of trauma may signify both in terms of the agency
of storytelling and the potential for reception.
This project did identify from the outset its point of theatrical and
performative departure from a contemporary context in Ireland, the
north of Ireland and Britain, whereby the landscape of globalisation and
neoliberalism engulf the performance event, whether a play in a theatre
building, a performance in a civic environment, or a mash-up of diverse
elements and forms of performance and place. By landscape of globalisa-
tion and neoliberalism I refer to dominant strands of contemporary
experience over the past five decades approximately. Throughout the UK
and Ireland, Cool Britannia, Cool Hibernia, migration, emigration,
16 M. HAUGHTON
interculturalism and the complex and varying conditions of globalisa-

tion, of which the speedy dominance of social networks and digital infor-
mation age are part, have fundamentally altered everyday paradigms of
daily lived experience, cultures of belonging, and access to professional
and social engagement. However, I do not suggest that neoliberal capi-
talism and globalisation emerged only in recent decades, rather I argue
that in recent decades contemporary experience is overwhelmed by their
heightened nexus in a manner that shifts from dominant twentieth cen-
tury national politics and dynamics of cultural engagement, such as state-
led shifts in ideology that actively applauds the treatment of citizens as
consumers.
In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey declares that neolib-
eralism is in its first instance ‘a theory of political economic practices’
which proposes that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating
individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets
and free trade’.23 While this theory of ‘political economic practices’ can
market itself as a driving force of ‘freedom,’ leading proponents of neolib-
eral policies in modern times, such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan among others, ensured its impact on first world economic and
political policies resulted in ‘increasing social inequality’ and ‘the restora-
tion of class power’ (2005, 16). Harvey warns of the ‘creative tension
between the power of neoliberal ideas and the actual practices of neoliber-
alization that have transformed how global capitalism has been working
over the last three decades’ (2005, 19).
Furthermore, in Performance and the Blockades of Neoliberalism,
Maurya Wickstrom outlines a more recent adaptation of neoliberal activ-
ity, that which aligns itself with ideologies of humanitarianism and leftism
to carry out its agenda. She reflects on the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP) in 2000, jointly conceived by the UN and international
financial institutions (IFIs), and that such institutional alignment pro-
duced a narrative almost appearing to be legitimated by the poor, yet
which enacts a form of support that remains dependent on property rights
of the powerful. Reading from Aihwa Ong, Wickstrom considers how
‘neoliberalism is the newest and most thorough form of biopolitical tech-
nique, a “politics of subjection” marked by diverse and plentiful strategies
for remaking the human’.24 This differs from the ‘hard’ neoliberalism of
the 1990s, which IFIs considered as failed and thus requiring rebranding.
Wickstrom’s concern is that the contemporary operation of political
power, the ‘politics-as-is’ (2) as she refers to it, supports forms of humani-
tarian theatre which advocates giving ‘voice to the voiceless’ (2–3), though
in actuality, implicates the performance as part of this most recent framing
of the neoliberal agenda. The questions she raises are important and com-
plex, and so, are addressed in relation to the contexts of the selected case
studies, as outlined in this introduction.
Often, forms of documentary theatre and performance could be criti-
cised as attempting to ‘give voice to the voiceless’ (2012, 2–3), whether as
radical intervention or misguided effort. Two case studies in Chaps. 4 and
5 of this volume, Laundry and Sanctuary, rely on ‘real’ documentary and
archival histories and objects to bring forth experiences that have either
been suppressed or mistreated by official channels of centralised public
discourse. Yet reading from Carol Martin’s work in Theatre of the Real, her
research locates altogether different motives for the emergence of theatre
of the real as a globally popular dramaturgical paradigm in recent decades.
While theatre of the real does not necessarily require a humanitarian link
or motive, forms of documentary performance or life storytelling often
develop from events of personal and political intensity. Martin finds that
‘the phrase “theatre of the real” identifies a wide range of practices and
styles that recycle reality, whether that reality is personal, social, political,
or historical. In using the phrase, I aim to note theatre’s participation in
today’s addiction to and questioning of the real as it is presented across
media and genres.’25 In some cases, theatre of the real thus points to the
structures of artifice and narrative manipulation that Wickstrom finds so
problematic in those humanitarian-political structures for artistic expres-
sion of vulnerable groups and individuals. As with the study of trauma,
these issues are unique in each production. Hence, a case-specific analysis
must be undertaken to critique these agendas and assess personal, artistic
and socio-political value.
1.4 Selected Case Studies

On Raftery’s Hill stages rape and incest within the traditional family unit
in the context of pastoral and patriarchal twentieth-century Roman
Catholic Ireland. Its subject matter is traumatic in and of itself, but its
place and impact in the Irish dramatic canon could also be considered
traumatic. Carr dramatises the violent act of rape and histories of incest as
deeply embedded practices in Irish culture, and not as something that
occurs as an isolated incident, provoking public outrage or the force of the
18 M. HAUGHTON
law. The virginal body of youngest daughter Sorrel Raftery is spread-

eagled on the kitchen table centre stage and violated by her father in his
drunken rage, abuse he has enacted previously with his eldest daughter
Dinah. All family members know of the abuse and do not intervene. There
are also suggestions of sexual abuse occurring in previous generations of
the family and throughout the wider community in the play. By the play’s
end, the cycle of repetition within the dramatic reality is confirmed, and
thus, no hope or potential for change is offered by the play. The premiere
production of this play toured to established city centre venues in Ireland,
the UK and the United States. It was staged in venues where targeted
marketing is directed at mainstream popular audiences, and the ramifica-
tions of this tour leads to a wealth of debate for this study. The analysis not
only considers the staging of trauma in this play, but the political staging
of theatrical institutions and programming in contemporary neoliberal
contexts, and the performativity of Irishness in national and global
contexts.
In The Politics of Irish Memory, Emilie Pine analyses the ‘distance
between culture and reality’.26 Particularly, her study investigates the per-
formativity of remembrance culture and the navigation of memory
throughout the last 30 years in Ireland, concluding ‘We are not who we
thought we were, or put another way, we remember ourselves differently
now’ (2011, 3). Pine is referring to a cultural shift away from the domi-
nant cultural imagery and discourse pervasive in nineteenth and twentieth
centuries that focus on Ireland’s historical past. This historical past is
largely framed by the aftermath and impact of the Great Famine and colo-
nisation by the British Empire, conditions of collective trauma that the
island of Ireland suffered. Consequently, during the struggle for indepen-
dence and the creation of the Irish state in the early twentieth century, the
promotion and protection of a specific performativity of Irishness became
prominent, nurtured significantly through cultural events such as the Irish
Literary Revival and many other subsequent positive cultural articulations
of national identity. However, from the 1990s onwards, memories of
lesser-known and suppressed histories became foregrounded in centralised
public discourse which told of systemic child abuse in Irish institutions
and systemic domestic abuse in Irish families. This type of violence—
against women and children in the main—has dominated news cycles
since. Both On Raftery’s Hill and Laundry dramatise and re-enact these
forms of violence, disrupting and destabilising previously accepted repre-
sentations and narratives of Irish history. In contemporary representations
and narratives of Irish history, Ireland’s structures and institutions become

the perpetrator of violence, not the victim. It is this shift in national cul-
tural consciousness regarding the recent past that Pine’s study considers,
and that these case studies deal with, in distinct yet dialogical ways.
Colder Than Here also presents the traditional English family unit cen-
tre stage, the Bradleys, located in a middle-class town dotted with Marks
and Spencer stores and eco-friendly graveyards. The play dramatises a fam-
ily on the brink of interpersonal collapse. The protagonist, the mother
Myra, keeps everyone just about together, but she is diagnosed with termi-
nal bone cancer. Death of the family in capitalist societies thus provides the
opening premise. Its initial impact may seem like a polite dramatisation of
terminal cancer, so traumatic in subject matter but not necessarily trau-
matic in staging. On closer reading of the text and consideration of the
significant scenographic potential in performance however, the depth of
this play’s engagement if not indirect advocacy for environmental trauma
as social trauma, infusing personal and political experience, becomes
apparent. Terminal disease acts as the mark of how industrialised Western
communities have put in place a process of self-destruction. While there is
hope for some renewal in the play, there is also an acceptance that one
must seek solace in a good death as certain elements of damage cannot be
undone.
Central to this analysis is Duggan’s claim that PTSD is a ‘false definition
of trauma symptoms because they are anything but past’ (7). This position
frames the analysis of trauma as a result of impending grief as outlined in
Colder Than Here. As Myra’s husband and daughters attempt to live with
the promise of this death over her final few months, ‘Time collapses for
the traumatised’ (2011, 3), as Wallis and Duggan conclude. Yet this play
further complicates Duggan’s position. In the play, the traumatic experi-
ence, the death of a loved one, has not yet happened. Regardless, the
symptoms associated with traumata and PTSD emerge in each of the fam-
ily members as they await the end of the linear and logical life that they
had taken for granted to the point of Myra’s diagnosis. Alongside this,
Wade paints a devastatingly beautiful image of the fragility of the environ-
ment and sacred presence of natural habitats as the backdrop to this family
crisis. Indeed, if, as Christina Wald declares in Hysteria, Trauma and
Melancholia, ‘the employment of trauma as a cultural trope has on the one
hand risked its generalization to the point of meaninglessness’27 then the
daily destruction of finite resources and landscape adds to the book of
evidence that supports it. Neoliberal capitalist interests which dictate
20 M. HAUGHTON
overnance and the rhythms of the social footprint continue to destroy

g
the eco-systems we are dependent on, day by day.
If Wade does harbour dramatic political intent, she articulates it implic-
itly through the play’s symbolic and scenographic potential, where the
living are dying, families are failing, and crises are met by awkward dia-
logue. In Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain, Amelia Howe Kritzer
considers what could be perceived as apathy or disengagement with ideol-
ogy and politics by the wider British public in recent decades, as the impact
of Thatcher and Tory-led governments undo the tapestry of socialism and
activism more prevalent throughout the 1970s. Writing in 2008 during
the emergent energies of New Labour, she notes the complexity of politi-
cal impact and ambitions of playwrights, stating ‘Political drama in Britain
today cannot rely upon familiar oppositions; instead, it must structure and
define a political landscape, before it can stake out positions.’28
Furthermore, ‘As Max Stafford-Clarke asserted in a discussion reported by
Michael Billington, ‘In the ’80s we all knew who the enemy was. Now we
are not so sure’ (2001). The current political environment, dominated by
the deliberately vague surface of New Labour politics, has created an ideo-
logical vacuum that serves to disable activism and foster cynicism’ (7).
While in one sense, Colder Than Here is presented as a family drama and
not politically motivated, in a more reflective study, one can argue that the
landscapes it visualises are those inscribed by decades of Tory-led agendas
and related disengaged electorates. The dramatic world of Colder Than
Here is one of neoliberal political governance, where the sanctity and
integrity of living organisms and habitats is no longer assured, but rather,
mid-collapse.
Laundry, a site-specific performance speaking to the histories of specific
Magdalene penitents institutionalised in Dublin’s city centre Gloucester
Street laundry throughout the twentieth century, provides a harrowing
encounter with religious-led state-sanctioned violence targeting female
autonomy largely via staging strategies of silence and observation. This
production highlights what Anderson and Menon identify as part of ‘our
historical moment [which] has witnessed the increasing mediatization of
violence saturating the public sphere and creating new spectacular forms
of non-state terror while rendering banal institutional forms of state ter-
ror’ (2009, 3). In this production, the audience’s gaze is returned and
their bodies interact with the surroundings of those once incarcerated
there. The contemporary political context informing this performance,
and, how this performance continues to inform contemporary politics in
Ireland as well as globally, requires digging up, literally and metaphori-

cally, history’s victims, or as Gluhovic referred to ‘the simultaneous diffi-
culty and necessity of confronting bodies from the past’ (2013, 1). In
recent decades, societies in Ireland and the north of Ireland, face ‘discov-
eries’ of historical abuse and human remains related to the activities of
Ireland’s reliance on institutionalisation throughout the twentieth-
century. As the respectability and power of these state-sanctioned religious-
led institutions collapsed in recent years, the public sphere is dominated
with the emerging traumas of those who suffered as a result of the ideolo-
gies informing the time, and struggling to enact accountability and redress.
In Ireland, Gluhovic’s ‘bodies from the past’ include institutionalised
bodies, such as those who were considered as disruptive to the historical
narrative of symbolic Mother Ireland and ancient Celtic Irish heritage, the
popular narrative of Irish history. Laundry questions the totality of this
historical narrative, showcasing how Irish women and mothers were
treated following the birth of symbolic Mother Ireland. It was marriage or
precarity. If they did not enter [heterosexual] marriage, and if their hus-
bands/ fathers/ brothers could not support their presence in the family
home, they could be ‘sent to the home’, a colloquial expression that refers
to institutionalisation. Ireland’s population in the twentieth century is the
most institutionalised population in the world, with 1 per cent of citizens
being sent to Magdalene laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, orphanages,
workhouses and psychiatric asylums.29 These are not all women, but many
of these institutions operated as a result of the Irish state’s control of wom-
en’s bodies, lives, legal rights and stringently monitored application of
ideals of motherhood.30 The remaining legacy of the everyday reality for
women, and indeed children, is outlined in the most recent Women’s Aid
report. The most dangerous place for women and children in c ontemporary
times is within their homes (and not on the streets in the middle of the
night) in case of attack from a person known to them.31
Sanctuary, performed by real people throughout the north of Ireland,
bridges the history of English colonisation and empire with its postcolo-
nial aftermath. Applying a performance process where theatre is the vehi-
cle for social change, Sanctuary draws together people from various
continents, dealing with distinct traumas, to create strength from this
shared space of life storytelling and suffering. This breaking down of geo-
graphical and personal borders in live performance illuminates and rein-
forces the power of community-building—a theme well known by
audiences in the north of Ireland—as one of the greatest strengths pos-
22 M. HAUGHTON
sessed by theatre and performance. Sanctuary’s scenes tell of experiences

of mental illness, war, institutional abuse, and processes of asylum through-
out the north of Ireland, Britain, and Africa. While geographical location,
citizenship, age and gender vary they are bound by a previous loss of
personal agency in their social experience and a moment of destruction to
their family and/or community. At the point of performance, these indi-
viduals stage the moment of their acceptance of the past and desire for a
future with potential. They tell of trauma, but they stage hope.
In the forthcoming case studies, Wickstrom’s question is most relevant
in chapters Containment and Exile. Both Laundry and Sanctuary cen-
tralise ‘victims’ as a result of state policies on institutionalisation and
migration, and state-implicated violence in relation to identity politics.
Indeed, national and international funding schemes have been employed
to support these performances. However, both performances are created
directly with those one might consider ‘victims’, or, in dialogue with their
family members when the people themselves have passed away. The devel-
opment processes occurred directly in dialogue with the communities
referred to in these performances. In Laundry, which draws primarily
from twentieth-century history in Ireland, very few words are spoken.
Audience participants are invited to engage with the daily activities of the
incarcerated bodies and encouraged to continue their engagement with
this experience post-performance, via the production gifting them a bar of
carbolic soap, tagged with their name and date of attendance. In Sanctuary,
the performers play themselves, telling of their own experiences in a
rehearsed and stylised format, following months of dialogue, therapy and
consultation. As in Laundry, the post-performance efficacy of the audi-
ence member attending Sanctuary is explicitly foregrounded as part of the
performance. They are directly encouraged to remain involved in the
wider issues raised in performance, and offered pre-drafted letters to send
to the UK Home Secretary at the time, Theresa May, among other invita-
tions for further action. Thus, while Wickstrom’s concerns are indeed rel-
evant in terms of the analysis of these productions, I would argue that they
do not ring hollow (2012, 2–3) in the way she describes and could possi-
bly contribute to this ‘new politics, particularly at its intersection with
performance’ (1) that she seeks.
Perhaps, with this increase in the neoliberal individualisation of society,
which may liberate, manipulate, isolate or engage in all strategies, the
increased ‘social turn’32 in contemporary performance can then be viewed
as an artistic response or challenge. The ‘social turn’ certainly tends to
foreground the body, the community and humanitarian values in contem-

porary Western societies. In Fairplay: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism,
Jen Harvie suggests that there is a desire and a need for social engagement
in contemporary culture, evidenced by the form and theme apparent in
contemporary performances, artworks and modes of storytelling. She
argues that:
We need some ‘fellow feeling’, some social sympathy, to check unreserved

self-interest. We also need social engagement to sustain democracy, people’s
shared exercise of power. All of these essentials of social life are jeopardized
by contemporary cultural trends which damage communication and priori-
tize self-interest.33
At the same time, Harvie warns against unchecked investment in any auto-
matic acceptance that all artistic ventures which may declare themselves as
socially-driven actually are, as Wickstrom’s study exposes. She speaks of
artistic practices which can be ‘complicit with the agendas of neoliberal
capitalist culture’ but are ‘passed off as critical social interventions when
they are actually nourishing to neoliberalism’s inequalities’ (2013, 2–3).
The cases studies driving this monograph each display registers of con-
temporary neoliberal politics and culture, which tend to impact not only a
culture of individualisation but one of isolation, further disempowering a
subject already vulnerable. Chapter 5, ‘Exile’, is arguably the most directly
involved in processes of social and critical intervention. Consequently, it
most harshly illuminates the failures of neoliberal political and economic
practices, showcasing those who are drastically isolated and vulnerable to
the extent that one must question the very function and role of commu-
nity in contemporary times. Chapter 4, ‘Containment’, provides a histori-
cal lens through which to observe the relationship between the politics of
economics and citizens whom the Irish state deems unprofitable, or not
useful, essentially ‘docile’ in Foucauldian terms. Chapter 3, ‘Loss’, exam-
ines the impact of grief, the cost of the dead to the living, and indeed, the
depletion of habitat and environment by neoliberal capitalism. In Wade’s
Colder Than Here, the Bradley family at the centre of the narrative tell us
that the lineage of family and community are in crisis, as the consequences
of social infrastructure continue to spoil the soil. In a Brexit context,
Wade’s provocations are deeply politically and socially resonant. Chapter
2, ‘Violation’, interrogates the personal dangers associated with strin-
gently monitored tropes of cultural myth, and Carr dramatises the unfor-
24 M. HAUGHTON
giving consequences for those who threaten the ongoing stability of

established cultural identity, at any cost.
Both Chaps. 4 and 5, ‘Containment’ and ‘Exile’, refer to or focus on
stagings of ‘real people’ and ‘true’ stories of injustice led by the hands of
state power. Both Chaps. 2 and 3, ‘Violation’ and ‘Loss’, utilise the
potency of land and landscape to comment on the failures of hereditary
familial structures, patriarchal politics and Westernised economics. All four
case studies centre on, either via the written text or performance text,
female theatre artists and depict experiences of vulnerability, wrongdoing
and side lined subjects. While they differ enormously in theme and form,
one can perhaps conclude that what motivates these theatre artists then,
on some level, is acknowledging trauma that is traditionally suppressed,
denied, or marginalised in public space. In that they take a risk with recep-
tion, a key focus of this study. By drawing attention to the stories of the
vulnerable or dispossessed, they inevitably signal the failure of social mech-
anisms and indeed, the failure of society to intervene at times. Such pro-
ductions inherently demand reaction and responsibility, necessitating a
debate on relationality in contemporary society, which will be the leading
concept of this volume’s concluding chapter. These are extremely
demanding and overtly politicised reception contexts. Artistic and social
appreciation for these productions may lead to a sense of satisfaction, but
enjoyment is less accessible. Herman considers this kind of public engage-
ment with the trauma of another, pointing to useful parallels here for the
theatre audience:
To study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events.

When the events are natural disasters or ‘acts of God,’ those who bear wit-
ness sympathize readily with the victim. But when the traumatic events are
of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between
victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this
conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. (1992, 7)
Audiences are not forced to ‘take sides’ in these productions, but they are
directly faced with scenes of gross wrongdoing which exist in the present
moment. This present moment is the reality that awaits them outside the
theatre doors or place of performance.
The subtitle of this book ‘Bodies in Shadow’ reflects the research gath-
ered from this selection of female-led productions that stage a traumatic
event or encounter often centring on female embodied experiences of
trauma. The ‘shadow’ refers to the conditions informing the contexts of

their reception. This is not coincidental. Thousands of years of patriarchy
leaves its structurally embedded legacies of discrimination to ensure the
operations of language, law, economics and governance prioritise the patri-
archal and the capitalist, which are intertwined and interdependent, to the
detriment of the rest. Histories written down and thus legitimised reflect
such agendas. In this context, performance can act as a radical method of
retrieval and significantly, operate as a language not wholly constructed
from, and thus embedded in, that agenda. As Taylor asserts, ‘Performance,
for me, functions as an episteme, a way of knowing, not simply an object
of analysis’ (2003, xvi). Taylor makes this point in relation to her own
research specialisms in performance studies and Latin/o American (hemi-
spheric) studies. I do not intend to fold the politics of that field neatly or
conveniently onto the politics of this study, but I will state that there is
relevant and useful crossover in her argument that, ‘If performance did not
transmit knowledge, only the literate and powerful could claim social
memory and identity’ (2003, xvii). Her argument is supported by Dean,
Meerzon and Prince, who theorise the functions of memory in perfor-
mance and memory as performative, particularly relating to the body. They
offer that, ‘Since memory is a vital link between our biographical selves and
the world beyond our bodies, it becomes a tool to re-insert forgotten time
into present narrative […] Memory—as personal, collective, imagined,
generational, and historical experience—is the most actively interrogated
issue that theatre of testimony and witness explore’ (2015, 12–13).
Furthermore, they emphasise the scope of embodied memory in perfor-
mance, as ‘the body is a dynamic archive that changes within the space of
theatrical communication and that theatre practitioners continuously
explore through performers’ physical and oral expressions,’ while at the
same time, the performative body is specific yet fleeting, thus ‘impossible
to record or restore, this archive remains local, specific to each particular
culture, social, historical, interpersonal, and linguistic exchange’ (12–13).
Multiple paradigms of female histories, experiences and narratives
become conditioned to exist at the margins and lurk along the periphery
of social consciousness, cultural practice and political policy. These are the
shadowed spaces of public discourse. Evidently, contemporary theatre and
performance reside in the margins too, due not least to the contemporary
precarity of the arts in society and the humanities in institutions. Thus, a
communion, if not solidarity, among the staging of suppressed or under-
valued experience cannot be seen as a surprise among those who dedicate
26 M. HAUGHTON
their time to the intersections of the arts, philosophy, history and politics.
Not all the case studies are driven by feminist politics, but feminist con-
cerns do become the leading parallel among these case studies, and
unapologetically so. If this monograph can draw specific attention to the
unbearable atrocities experienced by women that have become so nor-
malised that they are rarely acknowledged or treated with sufficient atten-
tion socially, culturally and politically, then it has achieved a major aim. To
help it achieve this aim, it identifies the scenography34 of the performance
event, with a specific focus on the body in performance and the cultural
politics of reception, as central to the theatrical deployment of the trau-
matic narrative.
Indeed, how does one design the unknowable, perform the unspeak-
able, and stage the unrepresentable? How does one stage narratives and
experiences historically consigned to shadow? How does one critique
these encounters and spaces? On this fundamental failure of representa-
tion and reference for trauma and storytelling, Caruth asserts that decon-
struction and poststructuralist criticism have already shown us how we can
become stuck in ethical and political paralysis, though she largely draws
from literary examples. Again, what to do? One must accept these limits of
inevitability and go forth anyway, as there is always an unchartered space
of the unknown that promises possibility and potential for growth, change
or debate. One must attempt to dip a toe into this space, as dangerous and
discomforting as it may be. In the end, the only thing worse than trying
and failing is not trying. Caruth also points to the knowledge that can be
gained from addressing traumatic experiences that do not fit into estab-
lished Western structures of historical or representative paradigms. She
argues that through the notion of trauma, ‘we can understand that a
rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituat-
ing it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise
where immediate understanding may not’ (1996, 10–11).
1.5 The Extraordinary Everyday Experience

Let us return to Herman’s conclusion that the characteristics of PTSD are
more prevalent in the experience of female civilian life than returned male
war veterans. This finding conflates the extraordinary and the everyday.
Immediately, one must return to Freud’s initial research claims that argued
sexual abuse is endemic in the family home and largely directed at women,
research he later refuted following the hostile reception it received from
the wider medical community, whose approval his career and reputation
were reliant upon. Through application of the statistical evidence later
unveiled in the 1970s due to the pioneering work of feminists globally as
outlined in Herman’s monograph,35 one may conclude that the most
dangerous place for women and children is in the home. This extraordi-
nary and everyday threat that characterises female experience in contem-
porary Ireland and the UK has been recently reaffirmed through research
carried out by the charity Women’s Aid36 in Ireland and the Crime Survey
of England and Wales37 (CSEW) led by Professor Sylvia Walby (Lancaster
University). Both studies confirm that the recent rise in domestic crimes
against women and children are related to recent austerity policies as well
as the wider cultural consumption of materials depicting women as sex
objects. Vivienne Hayes, chief executive of the Women’s Resource Centre,
commented in relation to the CSEW findings that:
While we are deeply saddened by the results of Walby’s research, we are not
surprised. […] Research from a range of sources strongly suggests that over
the last few years our societal view of women, from violent pornography,
violent computer games, street harassment and everyday sexism, to the lack
of women in positions of leadership and the attempt to remove women’s
contribution to political progress in the A level curriculum, is creating a view
of women which nurtures and normalises our violation. (‘Hidden Rise in
Violent Crime against Women,’ 2016)
Thus, within the home, politically, socially and culturally sanctioned forms
of physical, sexual, emotional and psychological violence and abuse is pri-
vately ritualised and normalised, while publically denied and dismissed.
The representation and imagery of violence against women and children,
specifically with the domestic sphere, is historically, not what leads news-
paper headlines. While examining the role of photography most specifi-
cally, Sontag considers how general social awareness regarding suffering is
built up, day by day:
Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars hap-

pening elsewhere is something constructed. […] Creating a perch for a par-
ticular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from
everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of foot-
age about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have
not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of those images.
(2003, 17–19)
28 M. HAUGHTON
Thus, wars in nations and among nations are led by men in the main.
Women and children may become the victims, and in terms of the circula-
tion of war imagery, part of the wider spectacle of war. Yet women are not
the protagonists and will not be centralised in this daily newspaper imag-
ery as heroes or villains. The war women face does not get photographed,
framed, and reproduced, day by day, across the globe. Women’s suffering
assumes a secondary place in the hierarchy and legitimating value systems
of pain.
While Sontag locates a historical trajectory for this dynamic, this is not
a situation reflective only of medieval times but of contemporary times.
Harpin notes the recent context for the engagement with ‘sexual abuse’ as
both crime and concept to be dealt with in public life. She notes that
while ‘the abuse itself was not a contemporary invention, […] its avail-
ability as a lay topic of debate and concern was’ (2011, 106). Furthermore,
Harpin reminds us that the term ‘sexual abuse’ is not used prior to the
second half of the twentieth century and for Britain specifically, it was not
until the 1980s that ‘placed child sexual abuse permanently on the social
agenda’ (106).
Why did the social agenda overlook it in the first place? Leading femi-
nist scholar Sara Ahmed argues that histories which become associated
with ‘bad feelings’ are thus at risk of becoming invisible. Indeed, the his-
tory of the abuse against women and children in societies governed by
male-dominated power via politics, business and religion, still must fight
its way to centre points of socio-cultural consciousness. Ahmed’s influen-
tial essay ‘Happy Objects’ offers useful provocations to question canonisa-
tion, programming, marketing, and audience studies throughout the field
of theatre and performance. She declares that:
I would argue that it is the very assumption that good feelings are open and
bad feelings are closed that allows historical forms of injustice to disappear.
The demand that we be affirmative makes those histories disappear by
reading them as a form of melancholia (as if you hold onto something that
is already gone). These histories have not gone: we would be letting go of
that which persists in the present. To let go would be to keep those histories
present.38
It is thus the duty of every scholar, not only self-identified feminist schol-
ars, to de-normalise and make strange these patterns, disrupting these
cycles through their research, activism and education. It is the duty of
scholarship to make this history, and this reality, known. In Staging

International Feminisms, Jill Dolan’s feminist manifesto suggests a posi-
tive launch-pad of action in practice and do-able terms. She declares, ‘For
me, both personally and politically, feminist performance’s ability to point
us towards a better world remains an intractable principle of faith.’39
Dolan’s manifesto bridges the horrors of the female past and present with
paths towards the future, illuminating how each individual action and faith
can contribute to the whole:
My own manifesto is an exhortation to stave off the easy cynicism of con-

temporary politics and public life, and to continue to develop feminist per-
formance as an avenue toward fluid, every-changing, never-fixed, but
constantly available utopias, better worlds that remain ‘no place’ (the literal
meaning of ‘utopia’). I imagine the ‘we’ in this manifesto as people who
practice feminism however their national and local political circumstances
allow, and who believe, as I do, that performance inspires us to social change.
(2007, 214)
These performances may well have inspired social change as urged by

Dolan, but they also act as examples in themselves of social change. Staging
performances that depict rape, incest, unlawful imprisonment, persecution
and terminal illness not only suggest the abilities of artists to engage with
these traumatic narratives and in many cases, histories, but the readiness of
audiences to listen. Listening to the stories of the dispossessed is a major
act of personal engagement. In this way, the arts offer spaces of engage-
ment that cross the historical, psychological, political and emotional,
humanising the Other. This is by no means a recent phenomenon, indeed,
in terms of stories depicting trauma, as Huopainen notes, ‘the earliest
accounts can be found in the time of Hippocrates, 466–377 b.c.’ (2002,
94). The case studies in this monograph are recent however, and as such
are scrutinised in relation to recent cultural phenomena and politics, yet
also clearly depict ideological inheritance from deep-rooted historical
contexts.
To summarise, I identify my approach to research as deeply informed
and motivated by contemporary feminist politics. I do not assume the
theatre artists under analysis here would own this approach equally. In
Elaine Aston’s study of contemporary feminist performance, ‘Feeling the
Loss of Feminism,’40 she historicises the ‘angry young women’ playwrights
from the 1970s, a time when the Women’s Liberation Movement became
30 M. HAUGHTON
visibly fashionable. Aston speaks of ‘feminist residue’ and ‘patriarchal left-

overs’ that characterise the dismantling of the ‘personal as political’ among
the collective to the benefit of neoliberalism’s individual heroes of contem-
porary times. Reading from Caryl Churchill’s dramaturgy in This is a Chair
and Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism, Aston argues that:
[…] Churchill dis-illusions the spectator of a healthy feminine by gesturing

to a disempowered feminine at the patriarchal table. McRobbie’s analysis of
‘post-feminist disorders’ and of the ‘illegible rage’ of young women still
confined to the patriarchal table though without recourse to a feminist poli-
tics now lost to the postfeminist ‘illusion of positivity and progress’ affords
a persuasive diagnosis of Muriel’s trouble. How are young women to cope
with the patriarchal ‘leftovers,’ given the loss of feminism? (2010, 579)
How are young women to cope, indeed? The problems—violation, con-

tainment, loss, exile—to name only a handful, remain, as the statistics
depressingly confirm and as this study attempts to document. One step in
the direction of truth in a post-truth moment is to acknowledge and value
the traumatic experience of the everyday for women which remains
embedded in the contemporary moment as well as the historical past. On
this, Kim Solga argues in Theatre and Feminism that ‘inequality can be
insidious in ways that are deeply felt, yet not immediately visible’41 and
thus, ‘If many women feel, day-to-day, free and equal, how can it be that
a feminist politics they associate with their mothers and grandmothers is
not only not outmoded but also still necessary?’ (2016, 7–8).
1.6 Performance, Trauma, Trust

In this ‘vector of perpetual return’, (2011, 106) Harpin queries what
could be the limits and potentialities for performance that engage with
trauma. Similarly, in Wallis’s and Duggan’s special issue of Performance
Research, their editorial ‘On Trauma,’ declares that the issue seeks to
‘explore ways in which performance practice can address trauma, how per-
formance can be a critical frame for considering trauma in culture, and
trauma theory and the traumatic as a productive means of thinking about
performance and as a potentially potent creative force’ (2011, 1). These
theorists are addressing multiple queries, but foundational to all of them
is this question: what can performances addressing trauma do? This mono-
graph responds to this question, honing in directly on the staging of the
trauma in social, political and cultural contexts in contemporary Ireland

and the UK. An initial finding posits that there is an abundance of con-
temporary theatre and performance led by female theatre artists focusing
on traumas directed at the body (and often, the female body) as a site of
ideological and physical appropriation. The second major insight is that
these bodies, centralised through the apparatuses of staging, are more
often than not shadowed in public discourse and cultural consciousness as
a result of historical, political, social and cultural agendas. Finally, the sig-
nificance of these productions lies in the dialogue they initiate with their
audiences. Each case study in this volume speaks of explicitly political
issues urgently relevant in the contemporary moment. Thus, the reception
of the staging of trauma constitutes a political act by those in attendance,
regardless of intentionality. The efficacy of this performance encounter,
however, depends on the relationship of trust that occurs between the
performance and audience within the scope of the event. In summary,
what the staging of trauma can do is plural and deeply reliant on its pro-
cesses of rehearsal and conditions of production as analysis of these case
studies reveal. Yet even through these layers of plurality and complexity,
there remains some clarity of purpose. Based on the analysis of these case
studies, this study argues that the staging of trauma seeks to acknowledge,
illuminate, navigate, and deal with stories and histories of trauma that
while deeply distinct and unique in each context, remain troubling and
exposing for the society to whom they speak. They constitute art in and of
themselves but also become performative beyond their initial iteration. In
a wider social context, they act as stepping-stones along a jagged journey
of cultural articulation of traumatic tensions, seeking to be known, to be
spoken, and to be represented.
To speak at all, these productions must earn some sense of trust from
their audiences, and so, the conditions of the performance environment
are central to creating a live encounter where Harvie’s ‘fellow-feeling’ can
be generated. Drawing from seminal South African theatre artist and the-
orist Jane Taylor, a sense of sincerity from the performance must become
apparent to begin a fruitful engagement between performance and audi-
ence. Taylor theorises:
The very idea of the ‘performance of sincerity’ seems a contradiction, in that

sincerity cannot stage itself. It is something of an intangible precisely in that
its affects and effects must remain beyond calculation, must exceed rational
description and instrumental reason. Sincerity cannot be deployed.
32 M. HAUGHTON
Anywhere that ‘sincerity’ names itself, it ceases to exist. It is a value that is

vouched for through a circuit of social consensus in which it cannot itself
trade.42
This ‘circuit of social consensus’ extends beyond the immediate event of

performance and production as the case studies draw from the past and
query the present. Theatre is unique in its capacity not only to signal plural
temporalities simultaneously but to gesture to their liveness even on death.
As Aoife Monks confirms, ‘anecdotes and objects maintain the presence of
the dead in the theatre’.43 The future belongs to the audience. This mix of
urgencies only becomes possible and potent through the live encounter of
living bodies. Duggan expands on this to argue that, ‘The immediacy of
the embodied reaction indicates an authenticity of experience’ (2012, 34).
Thus, this unique and immeasurable power of performance, unashamedly
political due to the energies inextricably linked with communal live events
is what keeps theatre as well as multidisciplinary arts, returning to stage
the traumatic: the unspeakable, the unknowable and the unrepresentable.
Against all the neoliberal odds and postmodern cynicism stacked against
it, the live performance environment offers Harpin’s potentialities, and
indeed, limits; a space for release, a space for recognition, and hopefully, a
space for sincerity at times. It can lead to debate, consensus, misinterpreta-
tion, clarity, joy, and meditative transformation that can make change, psy-
chologically, socially, culturally, and, thus, politically. In this, the live
performance environment which stages trauma is a utopian space. As
Dolan asserts in Utopia in Performance, there is a:
[…] potential of different kinds of performance to inspire moments in

which audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and with a broader,
more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the
possible, rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential.44
Perhaps the need for the live performance encounter has never been so
urgent?
Indeed, contemporary theatre and performance in Ireland and the UK
is not only addressing but intervening in experiences of public and private
trauma. Increasingly, theatre artists are pushing established forms of stag-
ing to facilitate encounters between performer and audience/spectator/
participant that are intimate, discomforting, political and visceral. Often,
the material makes direct links to events of crisis in the socio-cultural
sphere, provoking dialogue and debate regarding how society reads and
receives these personal and public events of trauma. This book examines
critically the role staging plays in transmitting these traumatic events which
the plays and performances tell, and the impulse(s) behind such stagings;
it does not argue that trauma theories offer conclusive answers or universal
modes of understanding these case studies, though in many cases trauma
theory does set a wide yet focused parameter to the field of enquiry.
Rather, it identifies that these plays and performances derive from contem-
porary neoliberal English-speaking north European cultures, and fore-
ground a radically intense personal traumatic encounter through the live
public medium of theatre and performance. In each of the case studies,
the scope for radical staging possesses an energy that traverses notions of
liberation, exposure and transgression. The crossovers that occur between
these distinct plays and performances relate to the current appetite by
theatre artists and audiences to stage and encounter events of trauma.
Particularly, major ground-breaking plays and performances under a nalysis
in this monograph present experiences of trauma located through the
body with strong and direct cultural reverberations.
One may argue that the increasing employment of the discipline of
theatre and performance as a medium to gain direct and immediate access
to the public with the goal of transmitting a traumatic memory or myth
implicates theatre and performance in the wider dialogue of PTSD. In
summary, the nature of PTSD as a condition dominated by the feature of
recurrence consistently identified in victims of trauma after the event bears
links with the nature of performance, staged again and again, night after
night. Psychiatrists and theorists foreground their patients’ compulsion to
retell and revisit their experiences as their psychologies attempt to com-
prehend the incomprehensible, to identify the unrepresentable, and to
know the unknowable. Luckhurst summarises:
In essence, the psyche constantly returned to scenes of unpleasure because,

by restaging the traumatic moment over and over again, it hoped belatedly
to process the unassimilable material, to find ways of mastering the trauma
retroactively. (2008, 9)
Luckhurst expands that this ‘repetition compulsion’ has become increas-

ingly common in Western culture, warning that ‘individuals, collectives and
nations risk trapping themselves in cycles of uncomprehending repetition
unless the traumatic event is translated from repetition to the healthy ana-
34 M. HAUGHTON
lytic process of ‘working through’ (2008, 9). This point is also put forth by
Caruth, who considers the impact of trauma and how it enters narratology,
‘far from telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from
its referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on life’ (1996, 7).
While this argument is applicable in certain cases, in this monograph and
relating to these identified case studies, the nature of production processes
and artistic impulses ensure these staged encounters remain demarcated
from cycles of uncomprehending repetition. The process and motivations
of theatre and performance are predominantly led by the negotiations
between the artistic impulse and the material context. For instance, the
stories staged for performance are acutely investigated and reimagined in
relation to decisions and processes of the theatre artists, the material condi-
tions of the performance venue, the pressures of the budget, and the expec-
tations of the target audience. Furthermore, the complexities of making
performance require a team of individuals who must negotiate different
artistic impulses over an intensive workshop, rehearsal and performance
timeframe. In many instances of performance, the artists or community
facilitators involved are highly educated and qualified in the creative and/or
community arts, and possess a heightened awareness of the ethics of repre-
sentation, storytelling and public engagement. Indeed, this is testament to
the extraordinary impact of tertiary education in the arts throughout the
UK and Ireland in recent decades. On this pressing context, Duggan details
‘performance can hold the spectator in a state of flux between a sense of the
‘reality’ of a performance and an understanding/recognition of mimesis’
(2012, 9). Staging trauma also affords the opportunity for engaging with
catharsis to an extent. Duggan draws from Herman on this, that ‘a cathartic
experience (in relation to trauma therapy) is less a purging but rather an
“integration” through a “process of reconstruction”’ (2012, 10).
Significantly, outside the theatre and performance spaces, an opposing
social paradigm of reducing live interactions and interfaces in public space
gathers enormous pace as neoliberal economic cultures and digital spaces
drastically alter everyday living practices, both by democratising those
practices and containing them. Again, this can be read as the furthering of
modernity and indeed postmodernity, which trauma theory regards as
contributing to the foundations of trauma so prevalent in transdisciplinary
discourses today. Luckhurst expands on the socio-cultural dynamics of
modernity, inextricably linked to the foundations of contemporary trauma
culture, which impacts and alters the somatic and psycho-somatic condi-
tion, ‘The intrinsic ambivalences of modernity—progress and ruin, libera-
tion and constraint, individualization and massification—are perhaps best

concretized by modernity’ (2008, 20). Hence, the performance space, in
the tense and contradictory political and cultural climates throughout
Ireland and the UK, increasingly embodies a sense of urgency, intensity,
unity and visceral experience not easily accessible in the postmodern, post-
industrial, digitally-driven Western landscape. Thus, the performance
space offers alternative experience and potential for expression, embodi-
ment, transformation and affect.
In conclusion, I return to Herman’s guiding treatise, that ‘The conflict
between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them
aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma’ (1992, 1). The live
performance environment is one such space which permits this contradic-
tory moment in time, central to human experience. It does not only toler-
ate this contradiction and recognise it, but offers response, and thus, hope,
or at least, potential. In Dolan’s finely-crafted thinking, such utopia is
‘processual, as an index to the possible, to the “what if,” rather than a
more restrictive, finite image of the “what should be”’ (2005, 13). Trauma
does not lead to hope or to the “what if”, but maybe the staging of trauma,
shining light on those bodies not usually centre stage, can pierce through
the shadows. What if?
Notes
1. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews, Trans. Andreas Michel and
Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1990), 47.
2. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), 6.
3. Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from
Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 13.
4. Suzanne Little, ‘Repeating Repetition: Trauma and Performance’,
Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 20:5 (2015), 45.
5. David Dean, Yana Meerzon and Kathryn Prince, eds., History, Memory,
Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 2.
6. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory
in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), xvii.
7. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture
After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5.
8. For further context on patterns of globalisation in relation to theatre spe-
cifically, see Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in
the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
36 M. HAUGHTON
9. ‘Ireland’ refers to the twenty-six-county state of Ireland and is governed by

the Constitution of Ireland (1937), the successor of the Constitution of
the Irish Free State (1922), and the Constitution of Dáil Éireann (1919).
The north of Ireland refers to the six-county state of Northern Ireland
(NI), located on the island of Ireland, but which remains part of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK). NI is gov-
erned by the Northern Ireland Assembly established by the ‘Belfast
Agreement’ or ‘Good Friday Agreement’ of 10 April 1998. The Northern
Ireland Assembly ‘which has full legislative and executive authority for all
matters that are the responsibility of the Northern Ireland Government
Departments and are known as transferred matters. Excepted matters
remain the responsibility of the Westminster Parliament’. See: http://
www.niassembly.gov.uk/about-the-assembly/general-information/his-
tory-of-the-assembly/ Accessed 6 September 2017.
10. Liz Tomlin, ‘Foreword: Dramatic Developments’, in Contemporary British
Theatre: Breaking New Ground, ed. Vicky Angelaki (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2013), xiii.
11. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political
Terror (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 33.
12. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 1.
13. Hilkka Huopainen, ‘Freud’s View of Hysteria in Light of Modern Trauma
Research’, The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 25:2 (2002), 94.
14. Patrick Duggan, Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 19.
15. Anna Harpin, ‘Intolerable Acts’, Performance Research: A Journal of the
Performing Arts, 16:1 (2011), 104.
16. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry, 25:4
(1999), 696–727.
17. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3.
18. Vicky Angelaki, ‘Introduction’, in Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking
New Ground, ed. Vicky Angelaki (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 2.
19. Mick Wallis and Patrick Duggan, ‘Editorial: On Trauma’, Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 16:1 (2011), 1.
20. Milija Gluhovic, Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 1.
21. Sorcha Gunne, Space, Place, and Gendered Violence in South African
Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), viiii.
22. Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, Eds. Violence Performed: Local Roots
and Global Routes of Conflict (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 4–5.
23. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 2.
24. Maurya Wickstrom, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism:

Thinking the Political Anew (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 5.
25. Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 5.
26. Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in
Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 2.
27. Christina Wald, Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies
in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 3.
28. Amelia Howe Kritzer, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New
Writing 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 7.
29. Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell, Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients,
Prisoners, and Penitents (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 9.
30. See Frances Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylum in Ireland
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); James M. Smith, Ireland’s
Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
31. Women’s Aid most recent media release finds that ‘Women more likely to
be killed at home and by an ex-partner, according to new Women’s Aid
Femicide Report’, 25 November 2016. See: https://www.womensaid.ie/
about/newsevents/news/2016/11/25/media-release-women-more-
likely-to-be-killed-at-ho/ Accessed 25 November 2016.
32. Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’
(ArtForum: 2006). https://artforum.com/inprint/id=10274 Accessed
22 September 2016.
33. Jen Harvie, Fairplay: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2013), 2.
34. Though not in print at the time of writing, early extracts of Siobhan
O’Gorman’s Theatre, Performance and Design: Scenographies in a
Modernizing Ireland (Palgrave, forthcoming) have been a source of schol-
arship on staging and scenography for this volume.
35. Herman provides an overview of the ‘speakouts’ in the 1970s which led to
victims coming forward. She details that, ‘In the 1970s, the speakouts of
the women’s liberation movement brought to public awareness the wide-
spread crimes of violence against women. Victims who had been silenced
began to reveal their secrets. As a psychiatric resident, I heard numerous
stories of sexual and domestic violence from my patients. Because of my
involvement with the women’s movement, I was able to speak out against
the denial of women’s real experiences in my own profession and testify to
what I had witnessed. My first paper on incest, written with Lisa Hirschman
in 1976, circulated “underground,” in manuscript, for a year before it was
published. We began to receive letters from all over the country from
women who had never before told their stories. Through them, we real-
ized the power of speaking the unspeakable and witnessed firsthand the
38 M. HAUGHTON
creative energy that is released when the barriers of denial and repression
are lifted’ (1992, 2).
36. The 2015 report confirms that 22,341 reports of domestic abuse against
women and children were made to Women’s Aid in 2015. The full ‘Impact
Report 2015’ can be accessed from their website. https://www.women-
said.ie/about/newsevents/impact-2015.html Accessed 12 July 2016.
37. Data collected by the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) carried
out between 1994 and 2014 ‘contradicts the official message that violent
crime has been in decline since the mid-90s’ and finds that ‘women are
bearing the brunt of an invisible rise in violent crime’, as reported by
Damien Gayle in ‘Hidden Rise in Violent Crime Against Women’, The
Guardian, 13 January 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/soci-
ety/2016/jan/13/hidden-rise-violent-crime-growth-violence-against-
women Accessed 12 July 2016.
38. Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg
and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 50.
39. Jill Dolan, ‘Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto’, in Staging
International Feminisms, eds. Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case
40. Elaine Aston, ‘Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” and
an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting’,
Theatre Journal, 62:4 (2010), 579.
41. Kim Solga, Theatre and Feminism (London: Palgrave, 2016), 7.
42. Jane Taylor, ‘Reform, Perform: Sincerity and the Ethnic Subject of
History’, Address at Plenary Session IFTR 2007, South African Theatre
Journal, 22:1 (2008), 9.
43. Aoife Monks, ‘Collecting Ghosts: Actors, Anecdotes and Objects at the
Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23:2 (2013), 147.
44. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann
Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2005), 2.
Bibliography
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and Global Routes of Conflict. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Aston, Elaine. 2010. Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” and an
Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting. Theatre
Journal 62 (4): 575–591.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Dean, David, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince, eds. 2015. History, Memory,
Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor:
Michigan University Press.
———. 2007. Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto. In Staging
International Feminisms, ed. Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case, 212–221.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Duggan, Patrick. 2012. Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gluhovic, Milija. 2013. Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics.
Harpin, Anna. 2011. Intolerable Acts. Performance Research: A Journal of the
Performing Arts 16 (1): 102–111.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Harvie, Jen. 2013. Fairplay: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political
Terror. London: HarperCollins.
Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual
Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
Huopainen, Hilka. 2002. Freud’s View of Hysteria in Light of Modern Trauma
Research. The Scandinavian Pyschoanalytic Review 25 (2): 92–107.
LaCapra, Dominick. 1999. Trauma, Absence, Loss. Critical Inquiry 25 (4): 696–727.
Lonergan, Patrick. 2008. Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic
Tiger Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1990. Heidegger and the Jews. Translated by Andreas
Michel and Mark Roberts. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Pine, Emilie. 2011. The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in
Contemporary Irish Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Solga, Kim. 2016. Theatre and Feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory
in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.
Tomlin, Liz, ed. 2013. Foreword: Dramatic Developments. In Contemporary
British Theatre: Breaking New Ground, ed. Vicky Angelaki, viii–xxvi.
Wallis, Mick, and Patrick Duggan. 2011. Editorial: On Trauma. Performance
Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 16 (1): 1–3.
Wickstrom, Maurya. 2012. Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking
the Political Anew. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
CHAPTER 2
Violation: On Raftery’s Hill (2000)

by Marina Carr
Druid/Royal Court Co-production, Premiere
Directed by Garry Hynes
‘Now, this is how ya gut a hare.’

Red Raftery, On Raftery’s Hill1
2.1 Introduction: Don’t Blame the Animals

Contemporary Irish playwright Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill is arguably
one of the most traumatic plays that premiered in Ireland, the UK and the
United States in 2000, co-produced by the West of Ireland’s Tony award-
winning Druid Theatre and London’s Royal Court Theatre. Yet within
such significant traumatic dramatic activity and scope for staging, what is
the central trauma among the multiple traumas enacted and signalled?
One’s likely initial instinct is to respond by furiously pointing to the rape
scene which concludes Act I, written to be performed centre stage followed
by a blackout and thus lights up on the audience for the interval. Surely, the
father’s rape of his virginal daughter is the central trauma of the play? Surely,
the naturalistic staging of the rape on the kitchen table (stabbing the kitchen
table with a knife to signal penetration) was the most traumatic theatrical
staging? Violence, torture, incest, abuse, humiliation and despair: the list of
actions and emotions that can exist under the umbrella terms of ‘violation’
and ‘trauma’ can go on. In this case, as is generally the case, the trauma is
both physical and psychological. While the traumatic act of rape is commit-

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1_2
42 M. HAUGHTON
ted by a single perpetrator in this scene, the crime is protected by the com-
plicit silence staged in the dramatic world, which could be argued as
significantly traumatic as the act of violation, though this analysis does not
intend to provide any crude hierarchy of suffering. This violation alongside
the general familial and cultural complicity speaks to the histories of patri-
archal social structures that continue to normalise and safeguard domestic
abuse that are part of the wider dramatic reality, and indeed, clearly reso-
nant with contemporary society. For the audiences attending this play, this
drama offers easy recognition of the contemporary time, space, and stylised
gestures of dialogue and communication. This community depicted on
stage is the one ‘we’2 can relate to, and, the one ‘we’ continue to build.
History does not provide a buffer nor protection. The only technique Carr
utilises to convey some potential psychological distance between the realist
social forces underpinning the narrative and its contextual cultural param-
eters is the questioning of the evolution of humans from animals, and the
potential heredity consequences of this evolution.
Carr’s play questions the nature–nurture dialectic. How much can the
influence of civilisation, philosophy, politics and socialisation do? What
can be considered a basic human drive? It does not exaggerate this tension
to offer an escape route to the characters or the audience. The play employs
it, I argue, to question the escape routes society has built to hide and dis-
miss (and consequently, facilitate), certain patterns of violence that are
interlinked with the power structure in place. Yet, as the action of the play
sinks in, further realisations become apparent. Firstly, the family’s (and by
extension society’s, as the family in this instance operates as a microcosm
of the wider community values and codes of conduct) facilitation of the
rape and dismissal of the rape may be as traumatic to the victim-character
as the rape itself. Secondly, humans are not animals. Animals arguably are
less (or not at all) consciously brutal, cruel, manipulative and complicit in
the reproduction of culturally designed traditions of terror. On rape and
trauma, Herman tells us that:
The essential element of rape is the physical, psychological, and moral viola-
tion of the person. Violation is, in fact, a synonym for rape. The purpose of
the rapist is to terrorize, dominate, and humiliate his victim, to render her
utterly helpless. Thus rape, by its nature, is intentionally designed to pro-
duce psychological trauma.3
We, the audiences, artists and critics, must keep digging and forgo the
escape routes.
VIOLATION: ON RAFTERY’S HILL (2000) BY MARINA CARR… 43
This chapter interrogates and interweaves trauma theory, performance

analysis, feminism and Irish cultural politics to reveal the multifaceted
impact that Carr’s play and Druid/ Royal Court’s co-production gener-
ated theatrically and culturally during their premiere and international
tour in 2000. It will also signal the impact the play continues to produce.
A potentially flawed summary of the central action and traumas encoun-
tered in Carr’s playtext is thus: The father, Red Raftery, rapes his virginal
daughter, Sorrel, on the kitchen table (placed centre stage washed in spot-
light) prior to her wedding to neighbour Dara Mood. During the rape,
her mother/ sister Dinah is believed4 to be hiding behind a door and does
not intervene. This traumatic event is barely digested by an audience when
Carr throws the next punch. The relationship between Red and eldest
daughter, Dinah, is introduced. This began as incestuous rape by the
father of the daughter from the tender age of 12, the beginning of Dinah’s
puberty, one assumes. This has since morphed into a complex incestuous
sexual relationship between them as adults. Dinah, sacrificed by her
mother (who has since died), was delivered to Red to satisfy his nocturnal
appetite. The mother, traditionally perceived and prescribed as the role of
the nurturer within the family unit, clearly wished to avoid the fulfilment
of these ‘marital obligations’ as is required of the performative role of wife.
Instead, she delegated the responsibility to her eldest daughter. Dinah is
later revealed to be Sorrel’s mother in the dramatic text.5 Red is signalled
to be the product of further incestuous relations between Red’s mother
and his grandfather. Red’s ‘perverse rages’ (2000, 32) suggest he may
have been the victim of abuse and incest at one point in the past also. His
son, Ded, struggles to speak, interact with others, and live as a ‘civilised’
human. He is traumatised by his parents’ parenting, as well as the memory
of delivering Sorrel as a baby in the cowshed where he now hides from
Red and remains alienated from the rest of the family. While the visual
spectacle of Ded and the description of his shadowed existence in the shed
initially suggests he lives less well than his siblings, by the end of the play,
one may conclude that he survives the best.
Carr’s play consistently references the animal kingdom, questioning
that ‘we’ are human animals and the Raftery family relies on this to defend
themselves as nothing but ‘gorillas swinging in the trees’ (2000, 58),
implying their behaviour is on some level, natural and to be expected. The
lingering question that these comments and indeed excuses pose is how
much can socialisation do? Is society closer to identifying where nature
ends and nurture begins? The action in On Raftery’s Hill, which takes
44 M. HAUGHTON
place behind closed doors and up high on a hill, away from the prying eyes
of community or twitching curtains of neighbours, brutally attacks mod-
ern notions of civilisation. Yet, as I previously outline, I would challenge
the Raftery family’s defence that they are akin to animals. Not all mothers
sacrifice their young. Not all fathers attack their children. Leave the ani-
mals out of this, and let the analysis interrogate the characters, action and
general dramaturgy of the play and premiere production in the material
cultural context in which it was set and staged. This staging is both in and
of contemporary Ireland, a place containing rural and urban experience,
informed by strong historical traditions and the politics of contemporary
globalised social experience.
This chapter will travel to many areas of interdisciplinary study as part
of its analysis of trauma. Firstly, Marina Carr’s dramaturgy, as well as On
Raftery’s Hill’s action and context will be examined. Following this, an
analysis of how trauma operates and is reproduced through shame and
blame will be presented. The wider historical context for the privileging
and punishment of certain traumas will be theorised, informed by the
work of Judith Herman. Finally, the staging, touring and reception of the
Druid/ Royal Court co-production of On Raftery’s Hill will be explored
to consider and reveal the culturally specific tensions evident through the
audience and critical reception in the different places it played.
2.2 Marina Carr and On Raftery’s Hill:

Dramaturgy, Action, Context
Marina Carr (1964–) suggests that ‘most of the world would agree about
the world’s inability to finish any work of art’.6 Hence, any study of her
dramaturgy can be considered in terms of continual potential and possibil-
ity rather that fixed conclusions. From Offaly, a region in Ireland’s mid-
lands, she was raised in a rural setting dominated by deeply conservative
patriarchal and Catholic sensibilities. Perhaps her desire to return to the
Greeks is thus no surprise, as they allow for greater philosophical explora-
tions and ‘that desire for the light, for advancement and improvement’.
(2001, 59) Leading scholarship on Carr’s dramaturgy by Melissa Sihra
succinctly contextualises her dramaturgical oeuvre according to two main
directions, though they cross-pollinate and interweave regularly. Sihra
outlines that Carr’s early dramas ‘explore themes of love, sex, life and
death in surreal, absurdist and comic ways while her more recent works
focus on the fraught relationship between woman, family and home in
rural Irish settings’.7 The Midlands Trilogy, comprising The Mai (1994),
Portai Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998) became critically
successful internationally. In these plays, Sihra situates their tensions, not-
ing that ‘While geopathy is synonymous with the crucial lack of female
subjectivity in each of Carr’s plays in the 1990s, her most recent works are
also concerned with the painful politics of location and selfhood, with an
emphasis on both women and men in the rural familial setting’. (2007,
212). The Midlands Trilogy precedes On Raftery’s Hill, which marked a
slight shift in the heightened realism that brought her such global appeal.
With this play, she forbids the potential for resolution, hope, and renewal.
On Raftery’s Hill is a much less popular play. However, it is a deeply sig-
nificant work, which challenges the embedded patriarchal privileges of
both modern Ireland and modern Irish drama,8 symptomatic, indeed, of
wider Western histories more generally, painting a picture of the intensity
of destruction that such structures cause.
Dinah’s declaration, ‘We’re just tryin to live like everywan else, don’t ya
know how hard thah is sometimes… just to live’ (2000, 55) summarises
the key tragedy pervading Carr’s dramaturgy. It is the struggle to live that
dominates the tensions and tragedies that occur throughout Carr’s work.
The will to live becomes the goal, not only the mechanics for survival.
However, this struggle to live is also because Carr forbids their death. Of
On Raftery’s Hill, Carr summarises the characters’ destiny as ‘worse than
death’ (2001, 60). Sihra explores that ‘discomfort and often derision’
(2007, 214) from critics regarding the lack of resolution offered by the
play, but concludes that ‘in a society where historical processes of female
oppression have only begun to be seriously acknowledged in the social,
political and academic fora of the last decade or so, painful narratives need
to be addressed before transformations can occur’. (212) One of the con-
texts that addresses these painful narratives is contemporary Irish theatre
and performance, and often, before any official domain of political activity
will offer equal focus.
While this play is contemporary, the issues it explores, as Sihra signals, are
connected to Irish culture, traditions and beliefs prevalent in postcolonial
and precolonial times. The treatment of the female body and the dominance
of the family structure is central to this play and its traumatic underpinning
and affect. In On Raftery’s Hill, the steadfast and dominating position of
the father as family chief tells of the hegemonic patriarchal cultural tradition
from the time of Attic drama to our present postmodern tendency.9 Though
patriarchal rule is prevalent throughout the play, it does not result in a
46 M. HAUGHTON
reductive demonised construction of its male characters. Rather, the net-

work of oppression, repression and self-destruction is informed and safe-
guarded by all characters. Rhona Trench comments on Carr’s ability to
mingle postcolonial sensibilities with postmodern traits, ‘in the sense that it
[Carr’s body of work] presents the dislocation of the individual from a
received and shared sense of community, society and culture in terms of
value systems’.10 In On Raftery’s Hill, the characters present a paradox: they
certainly appear dislocated from any notion of civilised society through their
violent and incestuous actions, and yet, on closer scrutiny, they are very
precisely located within notions of civilised community enshrined in Irish
and Western law and dynamics. In these characters’ worlds, they suffer pun-
ishment after punishment resulting from the crippling traditions and ideolo-
gies that have determined the limits of their lives and experience.
Drawing from the theory of abjection extrapolated by Julia Kristeva,
Clare Wallace identifies Carr’s characters from The Midlands Trilogy as
‘haunting because of their chronic inability to imagine freedom’.11 This
inability to be free or strive for freedom results in notably dark and deso-
late dramatic landscapes and Wallace warns ‘It is into this dark realm that
Carr delves—a realm of the self, of passionate obsession, violence and
despair’ (2001, 436). This sense of tragic fate and destiny continues
throughout Carr’s later works, including On Raftery’s Hill. In these plays,
the audience bears witness to the parts of family life that are quite simply
not supposed to happen, or at the very least, not supposed to be acknowl-
edged in the public sphere of discourse. The actions of incest, rape,
betrayal, loveless marriage, madness, imprisonment and death without
afterlife are anathema to the purpose of the family, the principal unit of
civilisation which is deemed to be a protective force and the guarantor of
the family line and wealth. In relation to these instances of devastation and
horror, Trench also draws useful analysis from Kristeva’s hypothesis con-
cerning the abject. Trench observes:
In some of the plays, the reactions are responses to abject corporeal materi-
als such as corpses, overgrown toenails, filth, breast milk or the acrid smell
of rotting carcasses. The confrontation of such materiality re-charges what is
essentially a nascent response to the state before the existence of a separate
self, and a return to the time when individual abject identity was first cre-
ated. (2010, 16)
Carr’s dramaturgy is deeply reliant on an understanding of power relations

in culture and society, and she exploits her instinctive awareness of what is
considered inappropriate for public observation and discussion by staging

these ‘abject’ instances or notions. This is not for a gratuitous end but as
a mode of freeing personal, political and mythical burdens through the
somewhat protected arena of theatre and performance. The mixed reac-
tions to some of Carr’s work resulting from her dark depictions of family
life and ‘Irishness’ note this tension between representation and reception,
particularly in relation to notions of identity and authenticity among not
only Irish audiences but internationally, and perhaps acutely so among the
diaspora.12
On Raftery’s Hill is set in a kitchen on family farmland in rural Ireland
but disrupts any nostalgia for cosy Irish homesteads that may be pro-
voked on introduction to this setting. The Raftery home is a broken
home and the audience act as witness to intergenerational abuse and
despair that is played out in two acts. While the artistic sensibility of
Carr’s dramaturgy is most often considered as influenced by Beckettian
landscapes, in this play, living appears as a nightmare that will not end,
resonating more with James Joyce’s infamous dictum on history in Ulysses
through his haunted protagonist Stephen Dedalus.13 The sense of impris-
onment is overpowering; there are animal carcasses rotting in the sur-
rounding fields and the living human bodies appear to be rotting inside
the house. Four generations of women remain in the house, from the
grandmother Shalome to the great-grandaughter Sorrel, and possibly
five generations if Sorrel is pregnant by the end of the play, as is hinted,
ensuring the next generation will be as traumatised as this current one.
Ded, the brother, hides in the cowshed from their tyrant father, and to all
intents and purposes lives according to his name. Red Raftery, the father,
both villain and victim, roams the fields torturing baby animals as he
tortures his own young.
Initially, the Rafterys are introduced at the play’s open as a representa-
tion of a potentially conventional rural Irish family onstage; respectable
through land ownership and historical roots in the region, welcoming
regular visits by neighbours and with a forthcoming wedding of the
youngest child to prepare. However, by the end of the play, it is quite dif-
ficult to identify the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers
and sisters through the revelations of incest and abuse that have domi-
nated the family line and reproduction. It is not a place of family but of
familial torture, where departure from the house, the land and tradition is
impossible. There is almost an irony to such a dynamic, as for centuries
previous the Irish colonial struggle represented in big family dramas was
48 M. HAUGHTON
to remain in the house, on the land, and protect tradition and heritage.
Thus, Carr challenges the canon of modern Irish drama, and modern
Ireland as a state, through appropriating certain established conventions
to subvert them, inscribing them with meanings which do not further any
nationalist cause, postcolonial concerns or patriarchal power. Indeed, the
play signals that these forces are often used in the creation of violence, not
the protection of people, as such structures claim. In relation to Irish
experiences of womanhood throughout the twentieth century, living one’s
life contained by the walls of the family home reflects a culture of limited
freedoms and major inequality inextricably linked to constitutional law.14
Consequently, women who choose or find themselves living outside the
traditional family home and unit are socially ridiculed and punished,
resulting in a ‘lose–lose’ dynamic. It is this ‘lose–lose’ dynamic that much
creative and artistic work centralising female experience identifies and
articulates in Irish theatre and performance, as well as literature, dance,
film and performance art.15 In this context, On Raftery’s Hill belongs to a
certain lineage of work which illuminates the specifics of female suffering
rendered silent and shadowed in public imagery and discourse as a result
of historical, constitutional, religious and social patriarchal violence
inscribed into law and custom. Contemporary feminist interventions
through arts, media, and scholarship among others become part of the
effort of retrieval of women’s history and acknowledgment of traumas
enacted by the Irish state, or with its complicity.
No characters escape the homestead on the Hill. Carr forbids it, simul-
taneously forbidding the audience and critics to find an exit from this hor-
ror and from its links to the cultural sphere. The staging thus enacts a form
of captivity. Herman’s research considers the family as a potential site of
control, where a perpetrator may continually operate:
When the victim is free to escape, she will not be abused a second time;
repeated trauma occurs only when the victim is a prisoner, unable to flee,
and under the control of a perpetrator. Such conditions obviously exist in
prisons, concentration camps, and slave labor camps. These conditions may
also exist in religious cults, in brothels and other institutions of organized
sexual exploitation, and in families. (1992, 74)
By signalling the family home to operate as a place of captivity, informed

by history and protected by Irish laws and customs, Carr makes the links
with prisons, concentration camps, labour camps, religious cults, brothels
and other institutions of organised sexual exploitation, as Herman asserts.

These organisations are significantly different and distinctive to each
context, as are their victims’ suffering. What Carr and Herman foreground
as a link is the operational processes of institutional and culturally embed-
ded violence and the related consequences of captivity.
Mapping at least four generations of incest and abuse in the Raftery
family, On Raftery’s Hill is a play that is both brave and unsettling.
Culturally, the play can be read as a defiant response to a dominant social
milieu of fear, silence and complicity in relation to the public discussion of
incest, rape, domestic abuse and reproduction in any context. Thus, these
issues, experiences and histories do not often or easily enter mainstream
public discourse or representation. Consistent revelations of abuse in
Ireland,16 most famously, the Ryan Report (2009), the Murphy Report
(2009), the Cloyne Report (2011) and most recently (and problemati-
cally, analysed further in Chapter 4, ‘Containment’), the McAleese Report
(2013), provide chilling information on the systemic sexual abuse, vio-
lence and incest in the domestic sphere as well as in state and religious
institutions. The establishment of these commissions of inquiry, most
recently in the north of Ireland ‘the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry’
(2017, analysed further in Chapter 5, ‘Exile’) have dominated Irish media
since the 1990s. Moreover, the efforts to keep this information hidden
have also been revealed, as have the major legal difficulties that exist in
attempting to prosecute cases of rape and incest. Madeleine Leonard
reviews how rape cases in the courtroom become engulfed by the history
of patriarchal law-making and interpretation which in the end, condones
rape as a way of keeping women in their subjugated place. Her research
concludes, ‘[…] interacting with other patriarchal social structures, rape
functions as a mechanism of social control to keep women in their place.
Through rape myths, the state and male ideologies legitimate and conceal
male violence against women.’17 In On Raftery’s Hill, the rape of the
Raftery daughters by their father certainly keeps them imprisoned within
the home.
By placing the act of abuse centre stage, Carr and Druid/Royal Court
have staged an Irish national taboo, yet one which resonates with the his-
torical violence against women that is embedded into Western civilisation.
However, it is essential to note that On Raftery’s Hill was premiered
almost a decade prior to the publication of these state inquiries in Ireland,
illuminating how theatre and performance can express hidden narratives
before ‘official’ culture deems it appropriate. It is also essential to note
50 M. HAUGHTON
that the play is not about clerical abuse or state failings; it is a play about a
family that cannot escape its history and find a new way to live. The issues
of abuse, family and silence are central both to conventions in the play and
conventions in modern Irish culture and thus, a powerful link between the
two becomes apparent.
Characters are introduced in a way that ties them irrevocably to the
farm and family history. Dinah, Red’s eldest daughter, appears old before
her time and indeed in Hynes’s production,18 her costume of dressing
gown and wellington boots throughout the day from noon to night,
alongside her gruff manners, confirm she has no time for performative
feminine delicacies or fanciful dreams of the future. Her world is one
based on survival in this isolated house on the farm in the countryside.
Keeping her body covered and keeping herself busy managing the house
are the key aspects of Dinah’s character, which liken her more to the pre-
scribed role of a mother/ wife character instead of a daughter. On this, she
laments, ‘I had no summer in me life’ (2000, 27).
Red, Dinah’s father, enters the stage as a formidable force in Hynes’s
production; easily over six feet tall, dressed in a black suit with a dead hare
slung over his shoulder and carrying a shotgun. His booming voice,
upright stance and tendency to bark orders ensure his place as head of the
family is immediately evident. Sorrel, Red’s youngest child, is present in
the kitchen from the opening of Act 1 donning a flowery fitted dress and
a lavender cardigan which clings to her curves while the v-neckline exposes
the contour of her cleavage. Her hair falls loosely around her face, and she
speaks lovingly to her other family members, her appearance and manners
not yet bearing the burden of the Raftery family secrets.
Ded’s animal-like appearance at the doorway, with a strong yellow oth-
erwordly light behind him, fulfils two functions. It brings a sense of theat-
ricality into the playing area, signalling there could be space yet for Carr’s
signature underpinnings of Greek tragic myth, and it also highlights the
oppressive blackness of Tony Walton’s set. These colours are telling of an
overpowering darkness in the Raftery home with no sense of exit or escape.
Finally, Shalome, Red’s mother, enters the gloomy kitchen bringing the
comic relief so desperately needed following the introduction of Dinah,
Red, Ded and innocent Sorrel, who is evidently in a precarious position by
being young, innocent and happy. Shalome performs ‘madness’,19 and
repeatedly attempts to leave the house in her nightgown and hat, but
never makes it beyond the driveway. Her repetition further illuminates the
pervasiveness of her traumatic past; in constant flight and return, unable
to escape but unable to stay. Carr and Hynes have signalled much in her
character. Firstly, she wears her nightgown, as does Dinah (but not
Sorrel—yet) and we begin to understand night and day do not enter their
lives; indeed any sense of natural time does not enter this household.
Secondly, she wants to escape from being inside the house, but, like Dinah,
she cannot. The repetition of her escape attempts show us not only her
madness, but foregrounds the sense of unbreakable ties and repetitious
history that is inextricably linked to the Raftery household and their trau-
matic situation. The repetition compulsion so central to victims of trauma
and a dominant part of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) dis-
course that has emerged since the 1980s in the United States and Europe,
and detailed in the introduction and forthcoming chapters, is also relevant
to this dynamic in this play. The abuse continues without interruption,
their self-loathing continually increases and Carr refuses an exit point or
ending point to this life of despair and violence. Aristotelian catharsis does
not find a home here, though tragedy most certainly does.
While On Raftery’s Hill may have provoked tense reactions from the-
atre audiences throughout its international tour, it is very much rooted in
Ireland’s dramatic tradition, not just its cultural present. Most probably,
its ability to shock and upset stems equally from an established cultural
practice of silence and denial in relation to the widespread problems of
incest and domestic violence, not only this repulsive dramatisation of an
Irish family. Melissa Sihra links On Raftery’s Hill to the very first play pre-
miered at the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, declaring ‘In the
final year of the twentieth century, this play is a radical rewriting of
Gregory’s and Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902).’20 Parallels may be
drawn between these plays, such as the steadfast place of woman inside the
home, and the ideological and imagistic conflation of woman and home,
and home and nation. These conflations result in trauma for the woman,
who is sacrificed to the functions of image, symbol and metaphor.
2.3 Staging Trauma: Behind Closed Doors

This play stages the trauma of violation and the trauma of social conditions
that suppress, though silence and shadow, the significance and prevalence
of violation. As Herman declares, ‘There is no public monument for rape
survivors’ (1992, 73). The violation includes the lack of intervention that
legitimates the initial act of violation, thus spawning a wider web of sec-
ondary traumas. The violation occurs in many forms and there are conse-
52 M. HAUGHTON
quently multiple (active and passive) perpetrators and victims, though

binary categorisations of characters do not provide useful insights into this
dark dramatisation and staging. First and foremost, the action that occurs
in the scenic space, visible to audiences (as opposed to traumas referred to
in dialogue that occur in these characters’ pasts), is the violation of Sorrel
by her father through the act of rape. As Herman reveals, this violation
results in a physical and sexual attack, but also, a moral and psychological
attack. She has been terrorised, dominated and humiliated by her father.
The basic sense of identity, developed since birth through notions of self,
family, and society, are ridiculed and destabilised through this violation.
The violation extends further than the act of rape to the act of complic-
ity engaged in by her family and community. Such examples of family,
friends and community refusing to acknowledge victims’ experiences of
rape and sexual assault are widely reported, and indeed, Herman histori-
cises the attitudes and laws which support these conditions of denial and
repression. Sorrel is also violated and traumatised by her biological mother
and half-sister, Dinah, and grandmother/ great-grandmother Shalome,
whose brief comment ‘…poor little Sorrel. I wanted to stop it. Is she still
alive?’ (2000, 48) tells the audience that whether upstairs or downstairs,
doors closed or open, the Raftery family members heard and understood
Red was attacking Sorrel but did not intervene during the act or come to
her aid post-attack. This abandonment of Sorrel by the Raftery family
members tells that they conceive of the rape as an inevitable initiation into
a cycle of abuse and violence that has become normalised through their
history (and social history), and is safeguarded as well as reproduced by
those it has violated.
How the Raftery family operates reveals dynamics that are present
socially and culturally, but usually downplayed as a result of shame, silence
and taboo. This triad of shame, silence and taboo is embedded culturally,
certainly since the Victorian era in Ireland if not before, though its vestiges
remain apparent in contemporary society. Specifically, these dynamics con-
cern learning to manage danger and dysfunction in certain contexts rather
than exiting these situations, which cannot occur without public knowl-
edge and/or scandal. Thus, public shame is conceived of as of greater
consequence than personal trauma by society’s structures. Arguably, the
social body learns to actively reproduce these dynamics also. Dinah knew
that one day Red may rape Sorrel ‘the only perfect thing in this house’
(2000, 45). She did not remove Sorrel from the Raftery house on the hill
to live in a more secure environment or home elsewhere. She did not warn
Sorrel about the realities of Red’s desires and attacks. If she was listening
to the attack behind the door, as Sorrel accuses her of, she did not inter-
vene. She did not remove Sorrel from the house post-rape or reassure
Sorrel that she had been grossly wronged and deserved care and restitu-
tion. Rather, Carr sets up a reaction that according to Herman’s research
is most common for female victims to experience post-rape. She isolates
her further, shames her, and blames her.
According to Herman, such abandonment furthers the traumatic
impact on the victim, and lessens their ability to recover their sense of self
and identity through the re-establishment of trust and safety. Throughout
Trauma and Recovery, Herman analyses ‘commonalities’ (1992, 3). This
refers to experiences of trauma that, while distinctive in their manifestation
and context, maintain many parallel dynamics of operation (i.e., the cap-
tivity of battered women and the captivity of political prisoners), as well as
post-traumatic symptoms. In particular, the PTSD of combat soldiers and
those who conduct military operations interconnects with those of female
experiences of sexual and domestic abuse. This has led to comparative
studies of the male space of public trauma (war) with the female space of
private trauma (domestic and sexual abuse). However, how such victims
are treated and judged by immediate peers and wider society drastically
alters. Herman’s research tells that generally, in the experience of returned
soldiers or victims of civilian disasters or ordinary crimes, ‘[…] the victim’s
immediate family and friends usually mobilize to provide refuge and safety’
(1992, 62). While Herman is quick to note that combat survivors often
describe that no one in the community or society really wants to know the
details of war, at the same time, public memorials are erected, public holi-
days are announced, and public speeches are made. In recent decades,
compensation demands for PTSD can be sought and won. These actions
imbue the experience of war with public respect, legitimising the experi-
ence of trauma as publicly, and nationally, significant, though the sacrifice
of any human life in war cannot ever be justified or compensated. However,
with female victims of sexual abuse, Herman’s research (largely based on
studies from the latter half of the twentieth century in the United States)
details that the people closest to the victim will not necessarily rally to her
aid. Indeed, many of the community may be more supportive to the
alleged rapist or abuser than to the female victim. To maintain a distance
from the attacker, the victim may need to retreat from some part or all of
her social network (1992, 62). Furthermore, had it not been for the legiti-
macy associated with veteran trauma, the parallels with female trauma
54 M. HAUGHTON
from abuse may not have been identified, and thus, somewhat reluctantly
validated by association. On this, Herman concludes:
Only after 1980, when the efforts of combat veterans had legitimated the
concept of post-traumatic stress disorder, did it become clear that the psy-
chological syndrome seen in survivors of rape, domestic battery, and incest
was essentially the same as the syndrome seen in survivors of war. The
implications of this insight are as horrifying in the present as they were a
century ago: the subordinate condition of women is maintained and
enforced by the hidden violence of men. There is war between the sexes.
Rape victims, battered women, and sexually abused children are in casual-
ties. Hysteria is the combat neurosis of the sex war. (1992, 32)
Herman’s overall claim is that for the study of psychological trauma to

occur, which would lead to a mass social engagement with trauma in vari-
ous forms, the concurrent political elite must first have a strategic vested
need to legitimate the traumatic experience. Until their need is identified
and studies advanced, public attitudes are not conditioned to support it.
Herman’s monograph begins with an interrogation of historical events in
the late nineteenth century in Europe and leads to late twentieth century
in the United States, charting how political movements come to find
themselves in a situation where they need to support the psychological
study of trauma and thereby public engagement with trauma. While major
developments have occurred on both fronts, Herman warns of the precar-
ity of this knowledge at all times:
But history teaches us that this knowledge could also disappear. Without the
context of a political movement, it has never been possible to advance the
study of psychological trauma. The fate of this field of knowledge depends
upon the fate of the same political movement that has inspired and sustained
it over the last century. In the late nineteenth century the goal of that move-
ment was the establishment of secular democracy. In the early twentieth
century its goal was the abolition of war. In the late twentieth century its
goal was the liberation of women. All of these goals remain. All are, in the
end, inseparably connected. (1992, 32)
While these major points in time in the study of psychological trauma are
clearly dialogical, Herman remains at pains to warn against the conflation
of their connection with their treatment by the body politic and commu-
nity. In particular, the trauma suffered by women and children such as
sexual and domestic violence often finds itself encouraged to keep its nar-
rative away from spaces of mass cultural and community dialogue, and as
subordinate to ‘universal’ [by which I assume the general Western under-
standing of the term ‘universal’ to be underpinned by the actuality of
patriarchal/capitalist-led) political debates centring on foreign policy, eco-
nomics, healthcare and so on.
The points of debate, politics and history I have drawn attention to,
deeply informed from Herman’s research and position, are taken primarily
from a US context, historicised by European philosophical and medical
practices. However, these contexts are immediately relevant to this play, set
in the Irish midlands in the late twentieth century. In many ways, On
Raftery’s Hill functions as a shockingly transparent microcosm of the
dynamics of gender, abuse, trauma and politics that interplay to inscribe
Herman’s argument, which I appropriate for this particular study. While
certain dynamics of On Raftery’s Hill will certainly speak to the specifics of
Irish theatre history, and Irish cultural history, the wider performance of
patriarchal power and privilege is parallel to that internationally. As the
Druid/ Royal Court co-production played to Irish, UK and US audiences,
these global histories of thought directly impact how global audiences
engage with it. In particular, the reactions of shock are particularly telling.
They point to the successful continuance of suppression regarding female
trauma, regardless of centuries of medical and philosophical research that
conclude that it is indeed pervasive. Yet, if something is pervasive, how can
it still be shocking? This dynamic, being ubiquitous and yet ‘not known’ in
some conscious aspect, is again central to how trauma operates and is rel-
evant to each case study included in this volume. It reinforces the conclu-
sion that some traumas are socially validated and thus ‘consciously’ known,
while others are ‘known’ in lesser extents, or perceived as ‘not known’.
These are the ‘bodies in shadow’. It is the traumata of these shadowed
bodies that this research is motivated by and dedicated to.
In my attempt to pierce through this shadowed knowledge, somehow
illuminating a trajectory and strategy, what follows is a brief history of
sexual abuse and the nation-state to foreground the roots of the present-
day debate.
2.4 Sexual Abuse and the Nation-State

Herman argues that brief studies of psychological trauma have occurred
mainly as a result of the vested interests of certain political elites.
Furthermore, she argues that, ‘The study of trauma in sexual and domestic
56 M. HAUGHTON
life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination

of women and children’ (1992, 9). Nineteenth-, twentieth- and indeed,
twenty-first-century Western politics, society, religion and culture pro-
mote and demand socialisation through philosophies which contribute to
the subordination of women and children. Rarely does a context emerge
which challenges their subordination, as the fundamental tenets of Western
civilisation—politics, economics, religions—are built upon patriarchal-
capitalist power structures, where female and child subordination is essen-
tial to their operation and thus, assumed. At times, rights for women and
children have been won, yet they are usually fundamentally flawed in their
design. These ‘rights’ specify better treatment of women and children
within these patriarchal constructs, but they do not demand an overthrow
of patriarchy and subsequent new design for gender relations, child auton-
omy and protection.
However, at a certain point in modern Western history another battle
for power was underway, that between science and religion, yet within the
patriarchal and capitalist structures. The main threat to church control,
and in particular, I refer to the control and power of the Roman Catholic
Church in France during the late nineteenth century, was scientific
advancement. For this brief time in history, as political, social, economic
and psychological battle lines were drawn up and strengthened, women
were endowed with increased visibility (though not control) as a pawn in
this battle for ideological supremacy, leading to greater social, political and
economic power. In summary, if hysteria could be proven through scien-
tific enquiry to have physiological determinants, then hysteria could no
longer be attributed to supernatural or religious determinants, and thus,
requiring religious management and intervention. So, as French statesman
Jules Ferry (1883–1885) declared in a speech he made in 1870, ‘Women
must belong to science, or they will belong to the church.’21
There probably is no need here to point out the obvious dynamic this
assumes: that women are objects, owned by patriarchal ideologies which
govern their minders, i.e., fathers, husbands, politicians, priests and doc-
tors. The battle was not about women necessarily; the battle concerned
which patriarchal structure is more adept at controlling, or owning, the
objects [women] of a nation, the scientific leaders, or, the religious lead-
ers. However, by confirming that hysteria is a physiological condition that
can be treated according to medical knowledge, perhaps these scientists
and scholars underestimated the consequences of this quest. Hysteria,
indeed, is a physiological condition. However, historically, hysteria was
believed to be a disease connected with the uterus, from whence the name
‘hysteria’ derived, emanating from the Greek translation. According to the
nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, hysteria was
a disease of heredity, typically, ‘poor’ heredity, such as children born out of
wedlock, or parents prone to excesses, not living in good faith, or from the
working classes. Further research from the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, particularly that advanced by Freud among others, suggested
that women’s hysteria was often a form of PTSD as a result of sexual,
physical and psychological abuse they had suffered, largely from the
domestic sphere, predominantly, at the hands of their fathers and hus-
bands. Suddenly, the political will for scientific and medical advance in the
study of hysteria became less robust; it retreated, step by step, to the shad-
ows of public discourse and power, wherein it remained until the women’s
liberation movement of the 1970s.
Herman locates the starting point for this dynamic in the late nine-
teenth century, particularly in France where the activities of the large
Parisian hospital, the Salpêtrière (currently one of Europe’s largest teach-
ing hospitals) attracted the attention of a host of young and ambitious
scientists, scholars and medical professionals who sought an advanced
breakthrough in the knowledge surrounding conditions of hysteria and
trauma. The Salpêtrière, run by Charcot, catered to clientele including
‘the most wretched of the Parisian proletariat: beggars, prostitutes, and
the insane’ (1992, 10). Transforming this asylum to a major facility for
medical study, as Charcot did, attracted physicians and scholars of psychia-
try and neurology such as Pierre Janet, William James and Sigmund Freud.
One of Charcot’s most notable and visible activities were his Tuesday lec-
tures, which were considered theatrical events, and were attended by doc-
tors, authors, leading actors as well as the wider public.22 Similar to the
remit of the theatrical stage, Herman details Charcot’s presentation:
In these lectures, Charcot illustrated his findings on hysteria by live demon-

strations. The patients he put on display were young women who had found
refuge in the Salpêtrière from lives of unremitting violence, exploitation,
and rape. The asylum provided them greater safety and protection than they
had ever known; for a selected group of women who became Charcot’s star
performers, the asylum also offered something close to fame. (1992, 10)
The purpose of these demonstrations, according to Herman, was to inform

the wider public that the symptoms of hysteria were psychological, since
58 M. HAUGHTON
they could be artificially induced and relieved through hypnosis. Similar to

arguments made by Foucault relating to power and Western society (also
with a keen focus on social systems in modern France), Charcot empha-
sised the need for careful observation, description and classification.
Freud, among his peers, was searching for a breakthrough in this field
of study. His breakthrough is acknowledged as the theories he presents in
The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896). In summary, it examines the sexual abuse
of children and its later adult ramifications in mental illness and distur-
bance. His approach was radical at the time, and remains pertinent to
contemporary discourse. Observing and categorising research findings
would not be sufficient from Freud’s perspective; one must talk with these
women. Herman maintains that such was the rivalry between Freud and
Janet to make the breakthrough discovery, that, ‘For a brief decade men
of science listened to women with a devotion and respect unparalleled
before or since. Daily meetings with hysterical patients, often lasting for
hours, were not uncommon’ (1992, 11–12). Both Freud and Janet
reached similar conclusions through talking to these women. Their con-
clusion of hysteria stated that it was ‘a condition caused by psychological
trauma. Unbearable emotional reactions to traumatic events produced an
altered state of consciousness, which in turn induced the hysterical symp-
toms. Janet called this alteration in consciousness “dissociation”. Breuer
and Freud called it “double consciousness”’ (1992, 12). The complex
behavioural symptoms sometimes referred to in recent decades and schol-
arship as ‘doublethink’, drawing from George Orwell, or ‘dissociation’, is
most commonly associated with the protean symptoms of hysteria, often
manifest through the wider condition of PTSD. Over a century previously,
Freud would identify these symptoms as ‘disguised communications about
sexual abuse in childhood’ (1992, 2).
Once the claim had been confirmed that hysterics suffer from memories
(albeit suppressed, distorted and fragmentary), the next phase of this
investigation concerned recovering the memories that appeared to these
women causing their psychological distress. By recovering them, and the
context surrounding them, they could be faced, talked through, analysed,
and hopefully, reduced. The political problem arose regarding the type of
memories being recovered. Repeatedly, Freud’s patients told him of sexual
abuse. Thus, his conclusions found that:
Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were
true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that
what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only
among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also
among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had estab-
lished his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credi-
bility. (1992, 13–14)
Thus, after years of research and investigation, and the dissemination of

The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud renounced his claims. Freud’s professional
hopes hinged on this first breakthrough work on hysteria, and that by its
dissemination, the research and arguments would be respected and
revered. His breakthrough was certainly internationally debated, but with
shock, criticism and disbelief. His main research finding, that sexual abuse,
particularly within the home, is prevalent among all classes in society, and
appears to be one of the root causes of much adult hysteria and mental
illness among women, was not welcomed nor applauded by many of his
peers.
Critics have attacked Freud for his cowardice, yet Janet, who remained
working within the field of psychological trauma, faced the same ostracism
throughout the remainder of his career. This point returns the study to the
opening point of this section regarding the fundamental political need or
will for these studies to gain currency, through validation by science, soci-
ety, politicians or priests. In Freud’s time in Vienna, Herman states that
such a context never existed, and the conditions which supported this
research in France were fast disappearing (1992, 18). Indeed, this context
has only recently emerged in contemporary Ireland, I would argue. Hence,
the production of a play such as On Raftery’s Hill, produced by large-scale
Tony award-winning companies and houses such as the Druid Theatre
and the Royal Court, and the touring of this narrative to contemporary
Anglophone audiences particularly interested in new Irish work, becomes
a radical act in itself. It also positions the political and social context for the
reception of such narratives on a timeline, or spectrum, of acceptability.
Perhaps there has not been a political will or strategic vested interest in
modern Ireland. Rather, the voices of brave survivors and pioneering
journalism converged at a time where claims of wrongdoing at the hands
of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and multiple domestic cases, could
emerge. That the patriarchal and domineering institutions of the family
home and the Catholic Church were being exposed simultaneously as
facilitating child abuse ensured that these institutions suffered the greatest
blow to their authority and credibility that they had ever suffered in Irish
60 M. HAUGHTON
history. As multiple state inquiries and personal child abuse cases testify,
the political and police response during the decades these crimes were
most prevalent was one of silence and denial. Furthermore, the social
response mirrored that of the authorities. Hence, any examination of the
sexual abuse of women and children in these contexts cannot be separated
from an examination of the complicity of state structures and institutions
(constructed to support patriarchal power and capitalism, both which rely
on ‘the family’ for their control), including the Church, and how they
inscribe the social body to support their particular breed of violence on
the vulnerable.
Freud moved away from his initial thesis. However, this change of
direction became equally criticised. His new theory fitted more comfort-
ably with the patriarchal frameworks underpinning Western science and
politics. Herman writes that although Freud continued to investigate the
sexual lives of his patients ‘he insisted that women imagined and longed
for the abusive sexual encounters of which they complained’ (1992, 19).
Sadly, this theory was popular and proliferated. In terms of positioning
himself as clearly separate from any feminist agenda, Freud also went on to
develop ‘a theory of human development in which the inferiority and
mendacity of women are fundamental points of doctrine. In an antifemi-
nist political climate, this theory prospered and thrived’ (1992, 19).
2.5 Scenography: Captivity and the Body

There are no physical or visible barriers on the windows or doors of the
Raftery household in Carr’s playtext or imposed in the scenography of the
Druid/ Royal Court co-production premiere. The psychological barriers
Carr has written, potently evident in performance, are deeply engraved,
and perhaps cannot be penetrated. On captivity, Herman details:
Political captivity is generally recognized, whereas the domestic captivity of

women and children is often unseen […] In domestic captivity, physical bar-
riers to escape are rare. In most homes, even the most oppressive, there are
no bars on the windows, no barbed wire fences. Women and children are
not ordinarily chained, though even this occurs more often than one might
think. The barriers to escape are generally invisible. They are nonetheless
extremely powerful. Children are rendered captive by their condition of
dependency. Women are rendered captive by economic, social, psychologi-
cal, and legal subordination, as well as by physical force. (1992, 74)
The sense of geographical barriers set by the isolating location of the Hill,
positioned on high and away from the community, is suffocating. The
political, cultural, social and religious barriers, supporting patriarchal cus-
toms and Red Raftery’s implicit authority as head of the household, stem
from centuries of power economies, as the previous section illuminated,
that have been iterated, reiterated, constituted and reconstituted through
discourses of nation, institution and ideology. Blocked by these barriers of
force, politics, terror and isolation, what chance of escape did the Raftery
children have? None.
Thus, the scenography of On Raftery’s Hill is led from this stifling
sense of captivity and the way in which it manifests through the specific
imprint of intersections from psychology, geography, politics, culture,
society and religion. By scenography, I refer to visual, visceral and cultural
design but also, experience. I consider scenography by reference to Joslin
McKinney’s and Philip Butterworth’s outline in the introduction to The
Cambridge Introduction to Scenography. In this, they consider scenogra-
phy as ‘the manipulation and orchestration of the performance environ-
ment’.23 This manipulation and orchestration of the performance
environment refers to the architectonic structures that one may expect,
such as light, projected images, sound, costume, and performance objects
or props (2009, 4). Central to the ‘performance environment,’ and inter-
linked with the analysis of the politics of reception, are the multiple inter-
national performance environments in which On Raftery’s Hill played.
Indeed, these environmental elements are also informed by their rela-
tionship with ‘the performing bodies, the text, the space in which the
performance takes place and the placement of the audience’ (4). This
study supports this concise arrangement of material and theoretical
approach, yet the main reason I am drawn to their approach is the follow-
ing position they take:
Scenography is not simply concerned with creating and presenting images

to an audience; it is concerned with audience reception and engagement. It
is a sensory as well as an intellectual experience; emotional as well as rational.
Operation of images opens up the range of possible responses from the audi-
ence; it extends the means and outcomes of theatrical experience through
communication to an audience. (4)
How does one design this action and create these images that may ‘open
up possible responses from the audience?’ The particular violence required
62 M. HAUGHTON
by the dramatic text, the rape, visible and live, pushed the boundaries of
dramatised action on stage. Rape is not unheard of in Western theatre.
Neither is incest, though it is perhaps less common. Yet, Carr does not
make her play tell of this action, she makes her play, and thus, all produc-
tions of the play, show it. This is the danger that exists within the play and
becomes pertinent to potential affective audience experiences and
responses. There is no escape. There is no way to not see it, and thus, to
not acknowledge it among peers in the audience. Immediately after the
rape scene, the interval is scheduled and house lights force such
acknowledgment.
The scenography of On Raftery’s Hill, including design, moving bod-
ies, and the audience, is led by the viscerality of captivity. A box set, detail-
ing a largely naturalistic domestic interior, like all those doll’s houses that
clutter twentieth-century Western theatre, keeps the moving bodies cap-
tive by its walls and claustrophobic milieu. In a wider context, the scenog-
raphy of On Raftery’s Hill is a commentary on the scenography of domestic
violence and its public and political compliance. The deepest and most
troubling scenographic element of captivity is the staging of the rape
scene, where the victim Sorrel literally and culturally, has nowhere to
escape to. She is forcefully spreadeagled across the kitchen table. She is
captive to Red Raftery’s demands, and her body essentially, is subject to
his will and whim. Once he symbolically penetrates her body (while he lies
on top of her on the table, he stabs the kitchen table with a knife to signal
penetration), her ties to the land and the Raftery family intergenerational
captivity are secure. When Dinah is making alterations to her wedding
dress, Sorrel refuses to hold it against herself and throws it aggressively
back at Dinah. Dinah then spreads the white dress, without a body in it,
across the kitchen table. The positioning of the dress is almost identical to
the position of Sorrel during the attack, and Hynes’s conflation of domes-
tic space with brutal violent attack, is powerfully evident.
Ultimately, notions of captivity are informed here by the role and sym-
bol of the family unit. Can the family function as a violent entity? Yes.
Does the family unit maintain a long history of violence in Western history
and theatre history? Yes. Why does this institution maintain such political,
civil, cultural, social and religious influence? A response or responses to
this are too many and complex for this study, but certain issues are evident
at the fore. The consideration of the family extends to its political contexts
from Ancient Greek society, where the family unit is the primary unit of
civilisation, to how said structure is enshrined in the Irish Constitution,
though fortunately, it is more frequently the subject of healthy debate

since the success of the Marriage Referendum (2015) and the ongoing
debate regarding a referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment of the
Constitution Act (1983).
Examining the family also extends to the bodies in the family, male and
female, siblings, parents and those bodies that defy familial roles, such as
the merging of sister with mother in the case of Dinah and Sorrel. The
correlation between the Raftery children and the baby hares that Red kills
is also an effective metonymy, as is the correlation between the Raftery
ancestors and the dead animal carcasses poisoning the farm, leaving a rot-
ten stench which isolates the family further and prevents renewal. The
threatening of defenceless animals to scare victims is a common trend
among perpetrators of violence. Herman’s research tells that, ‘Violence or
murder threats may also be directed against pets; many survivors describe
being forced to witness the sadistic abuse of animals’ (1992, 98). The
baby hares are not the Raftery family’s pets but they are Red’s warning
shots to his children regarding the extent of his violent instincts.
Critical theory has long recognised that there are some sentiments that
language cannot voice or express. By the same token, theatre has long
engaged in the notion that there are instances that dramatic action cannot
enact visibly, credibly and usefully. However, the fundamental nature of
performance, the live presence of performers and an audience in a shared
space and time, ensures that the suggestive power of performance facili-
tates the imaginative, interpretative and interactive potential of the audi-
ence. While it is physically possible to perform a rape scene, forcing an
audience to observe such violent and painful action does not necessarily
constitute the most effective method of deploying or representing the
action. Through Carr’s rooted rural midlands dialogue, the animalisation
of the characters and Walton’s bleak set complete with dead hares, these
issues are centralised by merging the diegetic space with the scenic space.
Though the Raftery farm was ‘outside’ and thus beyond the staging capac-
ity of the production, Carr’s language and Hynes’s production ensured
that a sense of this farm and rotting animals entered the house.
The farm’s living animals, innocent and dependent on Red, become
images of the Raftery children, while the rotting animal carcasses that
remain on the farmland act as images of the Raftery ancestry. Red’s treat-
ment of his farm animals and his farm (which amounts to his home and
the manifestation of his rule) also tells of his damaged relationship with his
children and his inability to respect life. Visually, we first encounter the six
64 M. HAUGHTON
foot plus Red Raftery onstage with a dead hare slung over his shoulder
while he holds a shotgun. Isaac Dun, a neighbour and friend of the family,
summarises the state of the farm, ‘That’s noh a cowdung smell, that’s the
stink a’ all a’ them dead sheep and cattle ya just lave maggotin the fields’
(2000, 14). The Raftery home, therefore, is suffering from the remnants
of rotting animal carcasses, which Red physically keeps on his person.
Though they are dead they remain on the Hill, their stench and degrada-
tion seeping through the fields and the house, poisoning the environment.
Evidently there is a symbolic connection between the dead animals poi-
soning the present and the actions of the Raftery ancestors, also perpetra-
tors of abuse, informing and poisoning the present. The living animals,
representing his children, continue to suffer abuse by Red, an abuse he
learned from his ancestors.
On the analysis of objects in performance, Gay McAuley states, ‘The
object has become an important means whereby theatre artists can go
beyond the visual, extend the auditory beyond the spoken word, and
engage the spectator in a bodily experience.’24 This experience for the
spectator is evoked through the symbolism of the animals and the diegetic
space of the farm, visually potent from Isaac Dunn’s criticism concerning
the stench of rotting animal carcasses. Carr’s use of hares and their young
leverets, Red’s kill from the farm, further strengthens the image and sense
of death and decay. Sense and perception embody and communicate the
milieu of danger and threat. The stage directions stipulate that Red ‘Flings
the hares at her [Sorrel]’ (2000, 14), and commands ‘And ya may gut
them, young wan’ (2000, 14). Sorrel tries to refuse this order ‘I will noh.
No wan ever tell ya ud’s bad luck to shooh a hare not to mind two?’ (2000,
14). In Hynes’s production, the sight of the towering Red in his dark suit,
flinging a dead and bloodied animal at young Sorrel in her lavender cardi-
gan and flowered dress, is an extremely powerful and telling exchange.
Isaac highlights the vicious nature of Red’s killing ‘And he went into
the lair after them and strangled the leverets. Seven little babbys huddled
in a ball. Ya don’t hunt fair, Red’ (2000, 15). Thus, Red looks for inno-
cence in the living and then crushes it. The fragility and youth of the hare
and her offspring, Red’s violation of their space as he enters their ‘lair,’ his
painful killing process and bringing the dead hares into the home, display
the viciousness and cruelty of Red Raftery and the threat his children face.
Throwing the hares to Sorrel marks his next victim; Sorrel’s refusal to gut
them signifies her acknowledgement of the wrongness and cruelty of the
act and her refusal to participate willingly.
The deployment of the hare in the plot manifests as an essential part of

staging the rape, which culminates in Red’s performance of ‘how to gut a
hare’ (2000, 34). This conveys Red’s pathological need to destroy inno-
cence, youth and any sense of purity associated with them. Red cannot live
with innocence; the only world he can exist in is the one he was born into,
a world of abuse. The hare aids the audience’s engagement with this dra-
matic portrayal of rape, incest and the human capacity for self-destruction
and destruction to others. The object/ hare has been transformed from a
farm animal to a representation of Sorrel—young, innocent and unharmed.
Indeed as the rape scene unfolds, it is Red’s description of the process of
gutting a hare combined with Carr’s stage directions and Hynes’s direc-
tion that deliver the action. The dramatic language is loaded and symbolic
while the stage directions command the enactment of a struggle but not
rape, though rape is clearly the action that is directed to take place, though
it is not physically taking place. However, through observing the drunken
Red blocking Sorrel’s ascent on the black stairwell with the remaining
family members not present, both violence and violation are signalled.
The stage directions read:
Red continues cutting the clothes off her. Sorrel gesticulates and struggles
pathetically. Her voice has betrayed her. We hear the odd animal moan or
shriek. Now Red has her down to her slip. He pauses, looks in satisfaction at his
work. (2000, 35)
The scene concludes:
RED: And you all the time prancing round like the Virgin Mary. (He pushes
her across the table, cuts the straps of her slip.) Now, this is how ya gut a hare.
(Stabs knife in table.)
Blackout. (2000, 35)
Therefore, Carr has used the object of the hare to deliver action that is not
directly performed; as McAuley has surmised, it allows Carr to ‘go beyond
the visual, extend the auditory beyond the spoken word, and engage the
spectator in a bodily experience’ (2000, 177). The physical act of violation
cannot be expressed through language and arguably cannot be fruitfully
enacted through performance. However, the meaning and consequences
of such a violent act, the destruction of innocence, pain and violation,
were powerfully conveyed through Red’s instructions on how ‘to gut a
66 M. HAUGHTON
hare’. Thus, the action was clearly deployed due to the many layers of
dimension and significance that objects can embody and produce in
performance.
McAuley outlines the layers of meaning and performativity that can be
inscribed on and enacted by the object in performance:
The striking feature of the theatre is that the mobility, transformability,

changeability […] of the object is always introduced through the actor, is
anchored in the actor’s skills and bodily presence […] the transformation
requires the imaginative participation of the spectator because the object
itself is unchanged. (2000, 184)
According to McAuley, it is the physical, the visual and the phenomeno-

logical effect of human engagement with an object that transforms its lit-
eral meaning or singular function into something that allows the object to
possess multiple allegorical or symbolic possibilities of meaning and func-
tion. Carr has skilfully crafted this transformative power of objects in per-
formance to signify meanings and events loaded with pain, controversy
and sociocultural resonance. Talk of farm animals and Red’s analogy of
how to gut a hare represented the youth and innocence of Red’s children
until the point of rape.
Following the ‘gutting’ of the ‘hare’, Dinah describes Sorrel’s state,
‘She’s noh wan bih alrigh … just cries and cries, won’t ate anything, just
keeps takin a bah’ (2000, 44). Post-rape, Carr moves to the portrayal of
the body as the object in performance, questioning the individual’s rela-
tionship with the body, particularly the influence on and penetration of
the body by external forces. Gone are Sorrel’s flowery V-necked dresses
exposing the shape of her chest and curve of her body. In their place are
oversized shapeless jumpers and trousers. Alongside Dinah and Shalome
in their nightdress-only attire, Sorrel has entered their tomb. The Raftery
family home is a space of night only, winter only, with half-living people
moving around the space and re-enacting moments of the originary
trauma. Sorrel’s withdrawal from her engagement to Dara Mood post-
rape is the final nail in her coffin, though she is being buried alive. Herman
speaks of the specifics of this post-traumatic condition:
Traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the
human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter,
a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the
most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community

and religion. When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong
more to the dead than to the living. (1992, 52)
Sorrel’s frequent baths suggest her desire to clean her body. However,
while she may be able to remove any remaining DNA from her father’s
contact, she will not be able to remove the memory of the event and her
body will always remind her of the act of torture she suffered. Her body
has become the physical evidence of her violation, even bearing the scars
of the act, as Dinah declares, ‘There’s marks on her as hasn’t haled in three
weeks!’ (2000, 45). Of Red’s body and desire to bathe, Dinah claims, ‘All
the Shannon wouldn’t wash you clane, Daddy’ (2000, 46). Sorrel must
learn to live with her rape by her father but she must also conflate this
event with her previous experience of her father, as a loving, if gruff, par-
ent. If she marries Dara Mood, the unhealed scars on her body would act
as physical evidence of her abuse. She could no longer defend her father,
defend her family, remain silent on the issue of abuse on the Hill and
remain silent to herself concerning the violation of her body. Silence, it
seems, is a more manageable option that public acknowledgment.
Therefore, she must silence her body by keeping it hidden, with no hus-
band to witness its history.
On the subject of the rape scene, the point in the play at which it is
staged must be reiterated. Sorrel’s rape constitutes the most directly visi-
ble threatening action in the play. As outlined above, Ireland’s relation-
ships with notions of womanhood, family, sexuality and the body have
been a tense journey to the present moment, informed by a long history
of patriarchal rule, Roman Catholic influence and a cultural climate of
shame, silence and oppression. Thus, staging the rape of a daughter by her
father has directly confronted a multitude of national taboos simultane-
ously; the female body, rape, incest, a dysfunctional family structure, and
a wider cultural and religious climate which demands the family remain as
the principal and protected unit of patriarchal society. Carr puts the rape
or ‘gutting of a hare’ directly before the interval and a blackout at the
presumed point of violation and penetration. The house lights go up and
the audience no longer embody the role of spectator hidden in the dark-
ness, but are a community of people in a shared visible place. The issues of
rape and incest are not contained on the stage but travel with the audience
to the theatre bar, the foyer and the designated smoking area, and as such
make cultural and sexual politics overwhelmingly personal. These issues
68 M. HAUGHTON
could not have been pushed to the back of a spectator’s mind for two
reasons. At this point of interval, the only action that could save the dig-
nity, or humanity, of this dramatised family and community would be a
restoration of order or the swift serving of justice in Act 2. However, not
only do these events not occur; they are not even considered as a possible
avenue of action.
Carr stages the soiled and trapped body toward the end of the play
through the grandmother Shalome dressed in Sorrel’s wedding dress, cov-
ered in muck. The white dress conveys a multitude of notions, from vir-
ginity and chastity to woman as object in transaction. However, Carr
challenges these ideals by soiling the dress. Shalome represents the future
for Dinah and Sorrel remaining on the Hill. No longer conceivable as a
sexual object, Shalome exists solely as a shameful burden and tragic evi-
dence of how their lives will unfold. No healing, renewal or hope has
altered Shalome’s life. Her only escape becomes living through the mad-
ness of her imagination and her imagined past, trapped in no-woman’s
land.
At the end of the play, Carr’s stage directions read, ‘Enter Red with
Shalome in muddied wedding dress’ (2000, 58). The depraved son enters
with his mother/half-sister in a soiled wedding dress, a visible rebuke to
the structures of the family that have been so privileged throughout time.
This desperate image speaks of the grim conclusion and finality to the
unbroken silence of abuse, the father, in this case the chief perpetrator of
the abuse, destroying the purity, innocence and future of his children.
Shalome summarises the unbreaking nature of the Raftery clan to Dara
Mood, the outsider who tries to penetrate the system of living on the Hill
by marrying Sorrel.
You’ll make someone very happy, Dara Mood, but it won’t be Sorrel because
you see we’re strange creatures up here on the Hill. And strange creatures,
aberrations like us, don’t make for lifetime companions. (2000, 50)
While fictional, this play questions the nation of Ireland through the rep-
resentation of its dramatic reality as culturally resonant, particularly female
experience within the family structure. Through its UK and US tour, On
Raftery’s Hill staged these questions before international audiences as well
as domestic ones. The circulation of power operating in the play draws on
cultural norms and traditions, such as the importance of the family and the
power of silence to conceal trauma in relation to rape, incest and domestic
abuse. Bridging the relationship between this play and Irish culture,
Margaret Maxwell explores the link between silence and violence. She
argues that this relationship has informed the socio-cultural and socio-
sexual ideologies concerning the family, sexuality and abuse in Ireland
which ultimately highlight a pervasive tension between Irish society and
the body:
Engaging with the themes of child abuse, domestic violence, and female
sexuality, the play resonates with the ‘resounding silence of the incest taboo’.
In so doing, it taps into an ongoing cultural debate in Irish society that
encompasses a broad socio-sexual framework. The moral crisis inherent in
this dialogue centres on the ongoing abortion debate and successive consti-
tutional amendments, and is reflected in a number of high-profile abor-
tional, parturient, and incestuous scandals.25
Maxwell ascertains that the recent revelations of child abuse and domestic
violence in conjunction with national tensions concerning notions of
female sexuality and incest in contemporary Ireland, question the Irish
sociocultural engagement with notions of sex and the body that have been
shaped and informed by history, politics and religion. It is worth noting
here that Maxwell writes this in 2007, fourteen years in the wake of the
Kilkenny Incest Case in 1993, and two years prior to the Roscommon
Incest Case in 2009. Moreover, she writes this three years after the estab-
lishment of Justice for Magdalenes26 (JFM) yet two years prior to the pub-
lication of the Murphy and Ryan reports and four years prior to the Cloyne
report. Therefore, by that time, various accounts of domestic abuse and
violence had entered the public sphere, although the major state investiga-
tions into child abuse in centres of pastoral care led by state and church
institutions had not yet been published. Also, the major drive for a state
inquiry into Magdalene history sought by Justice for Magdalenes and rec-
ommended by the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT)
(2011) had not been established.
Thus, the body, the female body predominantly, constitutes the battle
ground on which religious and juridical struggles are fought as the various
power regimes compete for dominance to manage and regulate the public
and private social spheres. Irish constitutional law and subsequent amend-
ments forbid the agency of the female body by denying abortion while
simultaneously upholding Roman Catholic teachings that privilege patri-
archal authority and strict regulation of the social body. Hence, both
70 M. HAUGHTON
church and state designate the boundaries of the female body, appropriat-
ing its dominion to their patriarchal hegemonic structures.
The lack of public discourses in relation to sexuality, the body and indi-
vidual agency in Ireland throughout the twentieth century has aided both
the strictly controlled management of the body and the culture of silence
concerning acts of abuse and incest. That research from the last twenty
years into abuse in Ireland27 concludes that the majority takes place within
the home or between intimate partners significantly contests the authority
of the family as a socially privileged site of nurture and safety. In On
Raftery’s Hill, the notion of the family and family respectability enforces
and hierarchises the characters’ loyalty to the public performance of their
family as a functioning unit of society over their individual personal
welfare.
By writing and staging On Raftery’s Hill, Marina Carr, with Druid and
the Royal Court, opened a proverbial can of worms questioning how Irish
authorities and Irish society have engaged with notions of family, incest,
sexuality and violence as well as public silence and complicit negation of
sexual abuse. While initial responses to On Raftery’s Hill, both in Ireland
and in America, proved unwelcoming, it has paved the way for Irish the-
atre to continue to acknowledge and express centuries of silence and
oppression in relation to sexual violence and the body. If the canon of
twentieth-century modern Irish drama explored and investigated Ireland’s
relationship with Britain and a postcolonial psychology, plays stemming
from a later, more globalised and postmodern climate are offering a dra-
maturgy of Ireland’s relationship with itself. Central to this self-examination
and imaginative exploration is an interrogation of sexuality, sexual oppres-
sion and violence. Seminal moments in Irish theatre, such as Marina Carr’s
On Raftery’s Hill, expose a history long denied and thus, renegotiate a
nation’s understanding of its past, allowing for other hidden or denied
narratives to come to the fore, and finally, be witnessed.
2.6 The Politics of Reception: Receiving Shame

In this book, the relationship between scenography, the body in perfor-
mance and the politics of reception are deeply interconnected. At times, it
may not be possible nor appropriate to study them separately. The staging
of trauma, as the case studies in this book attest to, is problematic artisti-
cally, materially, ethically and commercially. Artistic expression is met by
audience engagement and box office pressure, creating a dynamic that
feeds into how artistic expression is nurtured and supported at a develop-

mental stage. Thus, the way that a story becomes told through design and
movement is a major part of the creative decision-making, and sets the
scope for reception. By politics of reception throughout this book, I refer
to the expected areas of study such as target audience, marketing strategies
and critical reception. However, I also consider affect, spanning phenom-
enological and material contexts, as a central part of this remit. How the
production affects an audience, a spectator, and the theatre industry is a
challenge to quantify, if indeed it can be measured, as one is dealing with
many invisible or mutable territories. Nevertheless, efforts to examine it
rigorously should not be lessened as a result. Conclusions on affect will
always remain unresolved, and for that, this volume argues that they are of
greater value and scope. It serves as a reminder that human experience
cannot be every fully measured, limited and known. It is a reminder to
keep thinking and questioning. The moment one draws a circumference
on the totality of knowledge concerning human experience, simultane-
ously, one signals one’s own limitations, forging another pathway to paral-
ysis or oppression.
Sara Ahmed pithily concludes in ‘Happy Objects’, ‘After all, to receive
is to act. To receive an impression is to make an impression.’28 The
impression On Raftery’s Hill made in Ireland, the UK and America was
certainly a strong one. In an interview for this study which took place in
2015, approximately fifteen years following its premiere co-production
by the Druid and Royal Court, Marina Carr reflects on its controversial
reception.29 At the time, she was giving birth to her second child at the
Rotunda hospital beside the Gate Theatre in Dublin. She remembers
looking out the window to the Gate around the time the play was due to
end, seeing people scurry tensely and quickly to their cars and other des-
tinations. The common loose post-show congruence of audience mem-
bers to reflect and engage jovially did not occur on this evening. The
general tone and tenor of audience reaction throughout the tour was
‘How dare you [Carr]. Who do you think you are?’ (Interview, 2015).
Carr remembers the reception conditions being akin to a ‘witchhunt’,
and that, ‘Gary [Hynes] was fantastic’ (2015). Significantly, Carr is able
to move past these heated reactions, placing the level of passion in the
play, and as a result of the play, to Western theatrical ancestry which
depicts, and to an extent legitimates, that Western civilisation is built on
laws which practice violence against women. In that, there is shame.
When one is reminded of this ancestry, there is shame. Is it possible then,
72 M. HAUGHTON
that On Raftery’s Hill provoked such negative and tense audience reac-
tions, including anger and disgust, not solely because of the dramatisa-
tion of the Raftery family and Ireland, but also because of how it
functions as a reminder of this history, and contemporary complicity in
its reproduction? On the impact of viewing horror via photography,
Susan Sontag notes that ‘there is shame as well as shock in looking at the
close-up of real horror’.30 Shame as well as shock regarding the horrors
faced by the Raftery women, and indeed wider family, perhaps best sum-
marises the initial audience reaction to On Raftery’s Hill during its pre-
miere. Carr points to theatrical heritage here. She states, ‘Ibsen, he
captured something about the captivity of women. But it all goes back to
The Oresteia. It’s not alright to kill anyone, but it’s a little bit more
alright to kill a woman than a man. We’re still dealing with The Oresteia’
(2015). How does long-buried, deeply inscribed shame manifest in con-
temporary culture? How does one try to deal with it, to resolve it even?
Shame is submerged in shadows. It is something that becomes sup-
pressed, bubbling beneath the surface, provoking perceived overreac-
tions when stimulated.
This ancient shame is continuously reproduced in contemporary
Ireland. I argue that On Raftery’s Hill tapped into it. Both recent and
long-past histories of domestic violence against women, as well as the
treatment of rape in Ireland, protect the perpetrator where possible. Public
modes of discourse further this protection by silence and avoidance of
these issues altogether, and resisting them when they finally appear. As
Herman summarises:
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator
asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to
hear, see, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander
to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and
remembering. (1992, 7–8)
Ireland, as a nation, has taken the side of the perpetrator historically. Thus,
when this unpalatable truth (though fictionalised in On Raftery’s Hill) is
put before an audience, and to be specific, a Town Hall Galway/ Gate
Theatre Dublin audience, who are perhaps attending a play for proscenium-
arch related pleasures, the affect would likely traverse a spectrum imprinted
with shock, denial, disgust, guilt, shame and upset. As Herman has shown,
and indeed Leonard’s research regarding how rape law in Ireland works,
women are often considered by state and society to be culpable, and

potentially, to have provoked the act, and thus, be held somewhat
responsible.
These ideas, laws and traditions are slowly being challenged and pene-
trated. Nuggets of realisation have settled into the public sphere that
women in Ireland suffer a raw deal in the home and in the courts, and that
constitutional law and civic administrations are structured to achieve that
end. These nuggets are largely the result of hard-won feminisms interna-
tionally, and the influence of the EU and the UN on Irish law, as well as
the opening up of perspectives and tastes as a result of globalisation,
increased travel and access to digital media. However, I would argue that
society in contemporary Ireland largely does not want to acknowledge this
major inequality, predominantly due to shame, but also due to an ingrained
culture of established and socially acceptable misogynistic leanings. It is
less shameful to believe that because women in Ireland may vote and work
that gender equality has been achieved. Thus, it is difficult for contempo-
rary Irish audiences watching this endless nightmare on stage where the
women learn to accept this violence enacted upon them rather than upset
society and disrupt the family structure. It is difficult to consider the pos-
sibility that society also facilitates and protects perpetrators of this type of
violence. To accept this possibility means to receive shame.
Elspeth Probyn in ‘Writing Shame’ comments on this discourse, stating
‘Shame is subjective in the strong sense of bringing into being an entity or
an idea through the specific explosion of mind, body, place, and history.’31
Indeed, this affect often resides in the body, and potentially, remains with
the audience as they leave the auditorium. She continues ‘Yet shame and
other affects can seem to get into our bodies, altering our understanding
of our selves and our relation to the past’ (2010, 82). The relationship
between ‘our selves’ and ‘the past’ embeds the politics of reception lead-
ing to reactions of resistance, denial, anger and shame. Herman speaks of
denial on individual and collective levels:
The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public aware-

ness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation oper-
ate on a social as well as individual level. The study of psychological trauma
has an “underground” history. Like traumatized people, we need to under-
stand the past in order to reclaim the present and the future. Therefore, an
understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovering history.
(1992, 2)
74 M. HAUGHTON
Certain histories can be navigated by hegemonic agendas and provide

platforms for the development and strengthening of ‘nation’, economi-
cally and ideologically through profit-making and patriarchal privilege. If
the trauma being enacted is that of a war, nation against nation in the
name of honour and glory, it would be easier to digest, to stomach, to
think of, to accept on some psycho-somatic level. Centuries of patriarchal
politics and philosophy have sanitised social engagement with war, not its
horror, but its respectability; the noble sacrifice of young men for the
greater good of the nation. Audiences may accept this more easily than the
realities of men terrorising women in a state-sanctioned framework. This
reality, long suppressed and silenced, became one of the hallmarks of the
women’s liberation movement in the United States from the 1970s, cross-
pollinating feminist movements internationally. Herman reflects that:
Women did not have a name for the tyranny of private life. It was difficult to
recognize that a well-established democracy in the public sphere could coex-
ist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the
home. Thus, it was no accident that in the first manifesto of the resurgent
American feminist movement, Betty Friedan called the woman question the
‘problem without a name.’ It was also no accident that the initial method of
the movement was called ‘consciousness-raising.’ (1992, 28)
On Raftery’s Hill stages this trauma, the ‘tyranny of private life’. It will
never be a popular play, but it will always hold its own importance in the
legacy of the contemporary Irish canon.
Notes
1. Marina Carr, On Raftery’s Hill in Marina Carr: Plays 2 (London: Faber,
2000), 35. On Raftery’s Hill was first performed as a Druid Theatre
Company/ Royal Court Theatre co-production at the Town Hall Theatre,
Galway on 9 May 2000, and subsequently at the Royal Court Jerwood
Theatre Downstairs, London, on 29 June 2000.
Sorrel Raftery was played by Mary Murray, Ded Raftery by Michael
Tierney, Dinah Raftery by Cara Kelly, Shalome Raftery by Valerie Lilley,
Red Raftery by Tom Hickey, Isaac Dunn by Kieran Ahern and Dara Mood
by Keith McErlean. The production was directed by Garry Hynes, designed
by Tony Walton, lighting design by Richard Pilbrow, sound design by Rich
Walsh and music composed by Paddy Cuneen.
2. By ‘we’ I mean the audiences in Ireland, the UK and the United States. I
consider them a group by the performance location as Western, First
World, English-speaking, and thus largely resonant with the location of the
action in the play—Western, First World, English-speaking, though spe-
cific to rural Ireland.
Terror (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 57–58.
4. In Act 2, Sorrel accuses Dinah of listening to the attack from behind the
door and not intervening, stating ‘Some lookouh you are and ya listenin
behind the duur to the whole thing’ (2000, 57). Dinah neither admits nor
denies this accusation, but responds, ‘For eighteen years I watched you and
minded you and kept ya safe!…Ya know whah my mother done? She sent
me into the bed aside him’ (2000, 57).
5. Sorrel confronts Dinah in Act 2. She states, ‘You’re me mother aren’t ya…
Suppose I allas knew ud … buried in me though’ (2000, 38).
6. Marina Carr, ‘Marina Carr in Conversation with Melissa Sihra’, in Theatre
Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, eds. Lilian Chambers, Ger
FitzGibbon and Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001), 55.
7. Melissa Sihra, ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’, in
Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed.
Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 201.
8. For scholarship on rape and violence in modern and contemporary Irish
theatre, see: Lisa Fitzpatrick, ‘The Vulnerable Body on Stage: Reading
Interpersonal Violence in Rape as Metaphor’, in The Body in Pain in Irish
Literature and Culture, eds. Emilie Pine, Naomi McAreavey and Fionnuala
Dillane (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 183–198; ‘Performing Gender,
Performing Violence on the Northern Irish Stage: ‘Spittin’ Blood in a
Belfast Sink’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23:3 (2013), 302–313;
Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland, ed. Lisa Fitzpatrick (Dublin:
Carysfort Press, 2009).
9. Eamonn Jordan traces the points of similarity and distinction between On
Raftery’s Hill and the Greek myth of Zeus and Hera relating to their fam-
ily, divinity and the animal world in Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary
Irish Theatre (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 165–167. He states ‘In
On Raftery’s Hill Red Raftery is a serial abuser like Zeus, and he is also a
victim of abuse […] Here Carr links up a degraded infantilism or regres-
sion to a juvenile consciousness with the play’s Greek precedents, through
the evocation of an ancient time “before rules was made”’.
10. Rhona Trench, Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina
Carr (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 8–9.
11. Clare Wallace, ‘Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s The Mai,
Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats…’, Irish University Review, 2:31
(2001), 435.
12. Melissa Sihra writes of the US reception to Carr productions in ‘Reflections
Across Water: New Stages of Performing Carr’, in The Theatre of Marina
76 M. HAUGHTON
Carr ‘Before Rules Was Made’, eds. Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan
(Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), 92–113. In conversation with Andrew
Paul, Artistic Director of the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre
Company, she notes his reflections on the US receptions of On Raftery’s
Hill produced by Druid and the Royal Court in Washington, DC and his
own production of Portia Coughlan, ‘Her vision of Ireland is certainly not
one the Irish Americans want to see and embrace. We seem to prefer Frank
McCourt’, 97.
13. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), 34.
14. Bunreacht Na hÉireann 1937/The Irish Constitution 1937, Article 41.1
‘The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental
unit group of Society…’, and ‘In particular, the State recognises that by
her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without
which the common good cannot be achieved.’ This article on the Family
produces a fundamentalism to women’s roles within the home, and refers
to ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ as interchangeable. As a result of The Marriage
Bar (1932–1937), Irish law further embedded women’s confinement to
the domestic space, without opportunity for financial independence or a
role in public space. The legacies of this Constitution and these laws remain
present in the ongoing negotiation of gender equality in Ireland.
‘The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not
be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of
their duties in the home.’
15. For analysis of major plays by women, and their problematic treatment, in
twentieth-century Ireland, see Cathy Leeney’s Irish Women Playwrights
1900–1939: Gender and Violence On Stage (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). For
analysis of major performance and live art practice by women in twentieth-
century Ireland, and their troubling reception, see Performance Art in
Ireland: A History, ed. Áine Phillips (Bristol: Intellect, 2015).
16. Instances include (but are not limited to):
(1) The State Report into the Kilkenny Incest Case presented to Mr
Brendan Howlin TD, Minister for Health by the South Eastern Health
Board in May 1993 can be downloaded from the Lenus Irish Health
Repository online. Chapter 1 ‘Circumstances Leading to the Investigation’
states ‘On March 1 1993 at The Central Criminal Court, a forty-eight year
old Country Kilkenny father of two was given a seven year jail sentence,
having pleaded guilty to an earlier court hearing to six charges of rape,
incest and assault from a total of fifty-six charges covering the period
1976–1991. The sentence attracted considerable media coverage as details
became public of a history of physical and sexual abuse which had been
ongoing for a fifteen year period’. http://www.lenus.ie/hse/bit-
stream/10147/46278/4/zkilkennyincestinvestigation.pdf Accessed 13
July 2012.
(2) The State Report into the Roscommon Child Care Case presented to
the Health Service Executive on 27 October 2010 can be downloaded from
the One in Four website. The Introduction outlines ‘On 22 January 2009,
Mrs A, a mother of six children, was sentenced in Roscommon Circuit Court
to seven years in prison following her conviction for incest, neglect and ill
treatment. The presiding Judge, Judge Miriam Reynolds (RIP), said that the
children were failed by everyone around them and that she was concerned
that, while the former Western Health Board has been involved since 1996,
the children had not been taken into care until 2004’. http://oneinfour.ie/
content/resources/RoscommonChildCareCase.pdf Accessed 13 July 2012.
(3) Commission of Investigation: Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of
Dublin July 2009 (The Murphy Report). ‘Report by Commission of
Investigation into the handling by Church and State authorities of allegations
and suspicions of child abuse against clerics of the Catholic Archdiocese of
Dublin’. http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/PB09000504 Accessed
7 June 2011.
(4) The Commission to Enquire into Child Abuse: Publication of ‘Ryan
Report’ May 2009. <http://www.childabusecommission.ie/ Accessed 7
June 2011.
(5) Report by Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of
Cloyne (The Cloyne Report). ‘Report by Commission of Investigation into
the handling by Church and State authorities of allegations and suspicions of
child sexual abuse against clerics of the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne’. http://
www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/Cloyne_Rpt Accessed 9 August 2011.
17. Madeleine Leonard, ‘Rape: Myths and Reality’, in The Irish Women’s
Studies Reader, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin: Attic Press, 1993), 107.
18. NUI Galway holds the Druid Archive, including a recording of the Druid/
Royal Court premiere production. Any performance analysis of On Raftery’s
Hill in this chapter is derived from examination of that recording.
19. ‘Madness’ in this context is considered as part of the general popular cul-
tural trope of performing madness for popular entertainment and comic
relief, which is inaccurate and exploitative as outlined in the ‘Introduction’
to Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts, eds. Anna Harpin
and Juliet Foster (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 1–16.
20. Melissa Sihra, ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’, in
Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 212.
21. Cited in Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric
Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2001), 374.
22. Sally Charnow’s research charts the wider theatricality prevalent in Parisian
culture at this time, not only at the Salpêtrière, but in the visual spectacle
78 M. HAUGHTON
displays at the city morgue. See Sally Charnow, Theatre, Politics and Markets
in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); and ‘Commercial
Culture and Modernist Theatre in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: André Antoine and
the Théatre Libre’, Radical History Review, 77 (Spring 2000), 60–90.
23. Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth, The Cambridge Introduction to
Scenography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 40.
24. Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann
Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2000), 177.
25. Margaret Maxwell, “The Stahe A The Country’ Female Silence and
Father–Daughter Incest in Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill’, The Irish
Studies Review, 15:4 (2007), 465; Elizabeth Ward, Father–Daughter Rape
(London: Women’s Press, 1984), Notorious examples include: the ‘X’
case; the Ann Lovett tragedy; the Kerry Babies Case (Joanne Hayes); the
Kilkenny Incest Case; the West of Ireland Farmer Case.
26. Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), ‘In 1993, upon the discovery of the 133
graves at High Park Convent, a small group of women formed the Magdalen
Memorial Committee (MMC). In 2002, the Residential Institutions Redress
Act was passed, which addressed abuse and neglect suffered by thousands of
Irish children in industrial schools and other state-licensed residential institu-
tions. Unfortunately, Magdalene survivors were omitted from this group
and to date have been unable to achieve justice for the horrors they endured.
Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) was established in 2004’. http://www.mag-
dalenelaundries.com/ Accessed 28 June 2011.
27. The National Office for the Prevention of Domestic, Sexual and Gender-
Based Violence http://www.cosc.ie/ Accessed 26 August 2016.
28. Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa
Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 36–37.
29. Marina Carr, Unpublished Interview with Miriam Haughton. Galway, 14
July 2015.
31. Elspeth Probyn, ‘Writing Shame’, in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa
2010), 81.
Bibliography
Print Sources
Carr, Marina. 2000. On Raftery’s Hill in Marina Carr: Plays 2. London: Faber.
———. 2001. Marina Carr in Conversation with Melissa Sihra. In Theatre Talk:
Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, ed. Lilian Chambers, Ger FitzGibbon, and
Eamonn Jordan, 55–63. Dublin: Carysfort Press.
———. 2015. Unpublished Interview with Miriam Haughton. Galway, July 14.
McAuley, Gay. 2000. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Ann
Arbor: Michigan University Press.
Probyn, Elspeth. 2010. Writing Shame. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa
Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 71–90. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sihra, Melissa. 2007. The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr. In
Melissa Sihra, 201–218. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Trench, Rhona. 2010. Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina
Carr. Bern: Peter Lang.
Wallace, Clare. 2001. Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s The Mai,
Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats…. Irish University Review 2 (31):
431–449.
CHAPTER 3
Loss: Colder Than Here (2005) by Laura

Wade
Premiered by the Soho Theatre London, Directed
by Abigail Morris, Developed as Part of the Royal
Court New Writer’s Programme 2003
3.1 Introduction: Threshold People

In contemporary English playwright Laura Wade’s subtly chilling play,
Colder Than Here,1 the white English middle-class nuclear family is staged
as ‘threshold people’. Anthropologist Victor Turner outlines the charac-
teristics of ‘threshold people’ theorising that, ‘The attributes of liminality
or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous […]
Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between
the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and cere-
monial.’2 The Bradleys are bodies of time and space in flux and in crisis,
provoked by a forthcoming traumatic encounter, death, which is know-
able yet unknowable, a central paradigm of trauma. Their positions and
customs are in transition, as are the laws, customs, conventions and cere-
monials surrounding them while they inhabit this liminal ‘no one’s land’
between life and anticipated death in the near future. For this uncomfort-
able and tense moment, all encounters and relationships are subject to
renewed scrutiny and potential change, forging and reforging interrela-
tional and intergenerational dynamics. The anticipation of wife and mother
Myra’s forthcoming physical end shatters the Bradley’s traditional n arrative

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1_3
82 M. HAUGHTON
of ‘family’, and thus, their routines and selves that are embroiled in that
structured cultural linearity. This relationship, between trauma and family,
is played out with the suggestion that the family in its current context is
inherently traumatic, yet by the play’s end there is also the suggestion of
renewal, and indeed survival, though only by addressing the dysfunction
that exists. The Bradleys thus interact anxiously on unstable personal, psy-
chological, and physiological spaces as they wait for this trauma to con-
clude, both wishing it away and willing it to be done. A more explicit yet
dialogical dynamic is suggested in relation to the play’s wider environmen-
tal and ecological backdrop. They also interact anxiously on unstable eco-
logical spaces, spatialities that Wade foregrounds in the dramatic space,
both mimetic and diegetic. Consequently, flux, fluidity and fear dominate
the play’s core, evident through plot and narrative, as well as suggested
scenographic scope.
Daughter Harriet sets out the family’s specific moment and manner of
liminality when she criticises her father Alec, ‘Mum’s dying and you’re sit-
ting there reading the paper’, to which he concisely and pragmatically
responds ‘Watched pot never boils, love’ (2012, 35–36). The Bradley
family represents two distinct divisions of ‘threshold people’. Myra, the
maternal figure recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, constitutes the
most potent liminal entity, alive yet near death. Her husband, Alec, and
two young adult daughters, Jenna and Harriet, are joined together in the
second threshold division. They are alive and do not face immediate death
themselves, but must experience it in a different yet related context. They
must deal with the apparent insurmountable tasks of independent exis-
tence and familial co-existence without their mother. If Myra functions as
the ‘centre of the bike wheel, with spokes attaching her to other family
members, but not necessarily them to each other’,3 what happens when
the centre point is removed? The remaining pieces must reassemble if
social order and personal balance can continue or be restored in some way.
This is the process Turner identifies as aggregation following phase one
‘separation’ (Myra’s diagnosis) and phase two ‘margin’ or ‘limen’, which
is the dramatic present of the play. This change in structure, which neces-
sarily changes the functions of all the interconnected parts, results in a
traumatic experience for those who must learn to restructure and reas-
semble, without the reassurance of the former centre point.
Turner outlines that what liminality or liminal figures can reveal to us
though such traditions or rites, which are moments both in and out of
secular social structure, is ‘some recognition (in symbol if not always in
LOSS: COLDER THAN HERE (2005) BY LAURA WADE… 83
language) of a generalised social bond that has ceased to be and has simul-
taneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties’ (2007,
90). The social bond in Colder Than Here is that of the family in a modern
sense and structure. To attempt a more culturally, spatially and temporally
nuanced suggestion, the social bond is an English family, constitutive of
the traditional compulsory heterosexual unit represented by husband and
wife, Alec and Myra, who reproduce capitalist norms with their two
daughters, Harriet and Jenna. They are contained by the structure of their
houses and all its objects, and absolutely plagued by poor familial and
social interpersonal skills. Turner details that when states of liminality
reveal such social bonds, they illuminate ‘the ties organized in terms either
of caste, class, or rank hierarchies or of segmentary oppositions in the
stateless societies’ (2007, 90). The liminal state of dying that Myra embod-
ies which further embeds the dramatic space, reveals the hierarchies and to
a certain extent, class, that the Bradley’s social bond maintain as a middle-
class family in contemporary England.
Turner draws from fellow anthropologist Arthur Van Gennep’s theori-
sation of rites de passage which argues that all rites of passage or transitions
are ‘marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying
“threshold” in Latin), and aggregation’ (2007, 89). The characters are
‘betwixt and between’ their conventional and established states of ‘every-
day performance’, as Erving Goffman’s theorisation asserts. As Turner’s
evocation suggests, the state of being ‘neither here nor there’, or ‘betwixt
and between’ is indicative of the spaces of theatre and performance. The
performance event offers the sensory paradox of anxiety and liberation
through its fundamental fluidity in time and space. Aside from Turner’s
proclaimed affinity for theatre and performance, particularly in how its
customs illuminate the traditions of anthropological ritual and cultural
performance and indeed, vice versa, one of the most often employed inter-
pretations of these threshold people and liminal states, is, death.
On trauma and death, seminal trauma theorist Cathy Caruth asks if
trauma is ‘the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having
survived it?’4 Fellow performance and trauma theorist Patrick Duggan
specifies that, ‘Trauma is a disruption of the self, or self-composure; it is a
perpetual disruption of personal time which questions understandings of
self because it recurs without anticipation continually to call into question
our comprehension of the world and our movements through it.’5 The
Bradleys’ selves are disrupted because of the encounter with dying and
death. Myra is in the process of encountering death through her cancer
84 M. HAUGHTON
diagnosis, and yet, while still alive, she cannot survive it, as her diagnosis
is terminal. Linear time is something of the past, and the present of the
theatrical moment is a threshold space and experience.
This anticipated ‘loss’ is the primary traumatic encounter for the char-
acters in the play. Yet, the direct reference to a specific type of terminal
bone cancer, the frequent and alarming nods to ecological disaster, and the
normalisation of the breakdown of interpersonal relationships between
loved ones and lovers, are suggestive of a wider traumatic experience, what
Roger Luckhurst coins ‘contemporary trauma culture’.6 By this, he refers
to how the established usage of ‘trauma’ from its Greek etymology mean-
ing ‘wound’ now traverses ‘the physical and the psychical’ (2008, 3) and
significantly, ‘grief is now one of the best means for thinking about social
collectives’ (2008, 2). Contemporary trauma culture cannot be ‘owned’ by
any discipline, as Dominick LaCapra argues in Writing History, Writing
Trauma, as it is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Reading from Bruno
Latour, Luckhurst summarises it as knowledges and practices forming
complicated networks, according to ‘things that seem to emerge some-
where between the natural and the man-made [my emphasis] and that tan-
gle up questions of science, law, technology, capitalism, politics, medicine
and risk’.7 This space ‘between the natural and the man-made’ is a signifi-
cant insight for this analysis, traversing the examination of the dramatic
text, its scope for production, and its potential for meaning and affect.
Colder Than Here exemplifies this trajectory of trauma, whereby the
forthcoming cancerous death of Myra starkly illuminates this network
bridging ‘the natural and the man-made’. Wade foregrounds the nexus
between cancer and capitalism, opening up multiple ideologies of eco-
nomics, health and humanity in a contemporary globalised technological
age. Furthermore, the interweaving of the death of a loved one, the isola-
tion of the individual in society, and the destruction of habitats at the
hands of mankind are presented as everyday traumatic, dramatic, and
mimetic circumstances. For audiences, particularly contemporary
Westernised ones situated in, or rather, engulfed by, capitalist culture from
every nook and crevice of their lives, the above-identified traumatic conse-
quences are not strategic devices of heightened theatrical melodrama, but
rather, an immediately identifiable and ongoing material context. Indeed,
these instances are normalised to the extent that the distinctions between
natural and man-made traumas begin to blur.
I do not argue that Colder Than Here attempts to traumatise its audi-
ence. I do argue, though, that the play dramatises and complicates notions
of trauma extending to the personal, social and theatrical. It quite clearly

makes assertions regarding contemporary Westernised cultural experience,
suggesting that ‘we’ are all sitting reading the paper (or watching a play),
not watching ‘the pot’, and not only will it boil, but potentially explode.
At the same time, its potent visual imagery of growth, renewal and youth,
ironically mainly embedded in descriptions of graveyards, offers a sliver of
hope that the proposed Armageddon may be postponed till a later age,
should forms of harmony or healing address current wounds. For exam-
ple, the opening stage directions describe the first scenic mimetic location,
a graveyard, as:
The site is young, the trees just a few years old and still spindly. There are no
headstones—graves are marked by shrubs or trees with the occasional wooden
plaque. (2012, 21)
This inverts some established notions regarding graveyard design and

atmosphere, juxtaposing perception with possibility. Firstly, Wade
describes the site as ‘young’ when the typical association of graveyards
may be of old age primarily, as a result of the main demographic of their
residents, as well as a possible historical time of construction. The fact that
the trees are still growing strengthens this image of vivacity and freshness.
There is growth here, not stagnant nothingness. The ‘no headstones’ also
denies the grey final words of death and age range, concluding an identity,
which seem to weigh down with heavy finality, and ensure being is consti-
tuted by a linear framework with a fixed beginning and a fixed end. The
graves in this opening scene remain marked, but in a way that lessens the
distinction between overground and underground, life and death, as dis-
tinct binaries of knowability and unknowability. Instead, nature grows
organically, wilfully, and the disruption of such growth by the man-made
laying of cement or concrete typically making markings fixed and immov-
able, is denied. Finally, the tone of interactions and general milieu of
Colder Than Here is subtle, bittersweet (though careful to avoid nostalgia)
and intellectual, perhaps not quite the comparative tone of trauma as
applicable to the other case studies in this study. Later on in this critique,
I will consider this in greater detail, referring to it as a paradigm of ‘gentle
trauma’, provoked by reflections from playwright Laura Wade in terms of
programming considerations.
This chapter examines the staging of Myra’s forthcoming death as a
fluid process, passing from this life, on. It applies analytical frames of
86 M. HAUGHTON
theatre and performance studies, death studies, and trauma studies. It

considers how ‘loss’ through death is an inescapable traumatic paradigm.
Furthermore, it argues that a terminal disease, cancer in this case, resulting
in anticipated death, acts as a wider narrative inextricably linked to the
trauma of capitalist societies and ecologies in contemporary Western neo-
liberal cultures. I do not assume that cancer and capitalism exist only in
these societies, but rather that there are major links across their material
cultural contexts, which unveil wider narratives regarding patterns of con-
sumption and social consequence. The forthcoming sections will examine
the liminal and ritualistic structures framing dying, death and funerary
processes in the play and the surrounding cultural context informing the
premiere production.
Finally, the structure and history of the family as a dramatic device and
function is significant, and extensive, and so, too, will be examined. The
particular focus is led by the tension between the lineage of ‘the family’ as
traumatic, as acutely and repeatedly dramatised or invoked in the arts,
across theatre, film and television. Wade is both playwright and screen-
writer, and so reference to both live and broadcast mediums is necessary,
while taking into account the major differences that exist across their
modes of production, dissemination and consumption. The dramaturgy of
Laura Wade and the space and time of contemporary British theatre will
be considered, placing Colder Than Here in the playwright’s oeuvre to
date. In the final section focusing on the politics of reception, the play will
also be considered in the context of its premiere production in January
2005 in London, approximately six months prior to the ‘7/7’ London
bombings, and the subsequent major shift in the representational politics
and policing of contemporary British communities. Here, Benedict
Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ are called upon, as is Susan Bennett’s
concept of audience frameworks, to navigate the politics of reception of
such a complex play, and compromised cultural-political space of recep-
tion that both engulfs and succeeds it.
3.2 Laura Wade, Colder Than Here, and Writing

for Theatre and Film
Colder Than Here, Wade confirms, owes its development to the 2003
Royal Court New Writers’ Programme (Interview, 2015). Its premiere
production, however, took place at the Soho Theatre in London, directed
by Abigail Morris to popular and critical acclaim. Wade ponders if its final
iteration was perhaps ‘too gentle’ (2015) for a Royal Court premiere in
the early 2000s, as the ‘in-yer-face’8 energy of contemporary British the-
atre was grabbing headlines as well as audiences. Regardless, with Wade’s
next play, also centring on death, Breathing Corpses, they jointly received
the Critic’s Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (2005)
and an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an
Affiliate Theatre (2006). Other awards include the Pearson Playwright
Best Play Award (2005) and joint winner of the George Devine Award
(2006). Citing inspiration from Caryl Churchill and Martin McDonagh,
her early work has made sufficient impact and garnered attention from
both popular and critical audiences. Colder Than Here subsequently
received productions in the off-Broadway MCC Theater in New York in
2005, in Darmstadt, Germany in 2006 and in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006
and 2007 (2015). Wade reflects that while the irony that seeps through
her writing was received well among European audiences, it failed to
translate fully during its US production (2015). Following the interna-
tional success of Colder Than Here, her playography extends to Breathing
Corpses (2005), Other Hands (2006), Catch (2006), Alice (2010), Posh
(2010), and multiple radio plays. Early work includes Limbo (1996), 16
Winters (2000), and Young Emma (2003). In 2015, she adapted Sarah
Water’s bestselling novel for the stage at the Lyric Hammersmith, Tipping
the Velvet (2015).
Her awards and critical acclaim may span from the playography men-
tioned above, but the media frenzy Wade later became swept up in was
largely provoked by Posh. Following a Royal Court premiere in 2010, it
made its West End transfer in 2012, and the screen adaptation by Wade
resulted in the film The Riot Club released in 2014. The narrative of an
elite Oxbridge-like all-male dining society protecting the corridors of
power from the advent of fair democracy and the rise of the middle classes,
struck a chord with contemporary British society. Splashed across The
Daily Mail and The Mirror due to its resonances with what is known of the
infamous ‘Bullingdon Club’ associated with Oxford University (entirely
fictitious, and any perceived links coincidental, Wade asserts in the open-
ing of the playtext). Former members, some using pseudonyms, made
public statements about the club’s activities and pranks, fuelling the fire.
By the time the (then) British Prime Minister David Cameron’s personal
affiliation with the Bullingdon Club came to light, Posh and The Riot Club
became part of a nationwide dialogue on privilege and power in Britain.
88 M. HAUGHTON
The former British Prime Minister David Cameron and former London
Mayor Boris Johnson (both Conservatives) were shown to have been
members of the infamous Bullingdon Club, following the printing of ‘that
photograph’.9 John Steven’s summarises the Club’s historical footprint
and activities for the Mail Online in 2013:
Oxford University’s notorious male-only dining society—whose alumni

include David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson—usually pose
for their annual photo on the steps of Christ Church, the Oxford college
[…] The club is famously discreet about its membership and gatherings […]
It is banned from meeting within 15 miles of Oxford since a dinner in 1927
when its members smashed every window in a college quad. Former mem-
bers ran riot around the town for decades, paying thousands of pounds in
cash to buy the silence of dining establishments they damaged during their
disorderly evenings. (Stevens, Mail Online)
Since the Royal Court and West End productions of Posh followed by the
release of The Riot Club, the ‘Bullingdon Club’ has attracted heightened
attention from the media, as an emblem of privilege, elitism and aristoc-
racy that has not dissipated with the rise of the middle class and democ-
racy, but rather, tightened its ranks even further. Stevens writes that ‘David
Cameron and George Osborne have seemed embarrassed by the emer-
gence of photographs of them dressed in their Buller “uniform”. Other
former members include Edward VII, Earl Spencer and broadcaster David
Dimbleby’ (Mail Online). Cameron’s alleged club initiations in the head-
lines in 201510 kept the play and the myths alive. Yet, while Posh may
depict the few and appeal to the many, Wade’s earlier work is a much more
subtle and potentially more deeply affective dramatisation of socio-cultural
experience.
Wade has been writing for the theatre since she was seventeen. Though
Colder Than Here became her ‘breakthrough play’ into professional the-
atre in one sense, evidenced by its ability to attract audiences and win criti-
cal acclaim, she was by no means a novice playwright at the time of its
production. Where did this rise through the Royal Court and Soho
Theatre take her? One can assume it took her to a place of confidence and
risk, the natural habitat for many theatre-makers and artists in general, if
precarity does not swallow them first. Her next play, Posh, has a large cast
(for new writing) and attacks neoliberal elitist England. It highlights the
hypocrisies of claims of democracy and welfare, showcasing the danger
underlying established British networks of power. In production at a time
when Clement Atlee’s ‘from cradle to grave’ welfare system is under

threat, the major evils he sought to eradicate, ‘want, disease, ignorance,
squalor and idleness’ are arguably increasing in this rich and privileged
society. What Posh does make clear, however, is that while there could
credibly remain a small group of elite individuals controlling the wealth of
the British populace, how that wealth is managed, and by whom, poten-
tially can change as a result of the neoliberal culture in operation. In A
Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey maintains that ‘While neolib-
eralization may have been about the restoration of class power, it has not
necessarily meant the restoration of economic power to the same peo-
ple.’11 If one accepts this as possible, it explains the anger of its characters
in discussing the need for initiating estate tours to pay for the broken roof,
another not so subtle metaphor on the state of these class structures.
To return to Colder Than Here, Wade tells of its origins, that it was ‘sit-
ting in a shoebox at the back of my mind for years’ (Interview, 2015). The
Royal Court gave her the confidence and toolbox to write. In the
‘Introduction’ to Laura Wade: Plays One, Aleks Sierz introduces her early
career and success with Young Emma at the Finborough, her work at the
Crucible, Playbox Theatre at Warwick, for Bristol University where she
studied drama, and the Bristol Old Vic (2012, 7). The appearance of death
as a theme across some of her early works led Sierz to hail the new play-
wright ‘as a contemporary chronicler of our attitudes to death’ (7).
However, the diversity of her dramaturgy that follows ensures that any
fixed associations cannot stick too long. Perhaps, it is not that ‘attitudes to
death’ constitutes her calling card, but a wider engagement with the issues
provoked by death, i.e., how we live independently and how we live
together. Across her dramaturgy, there is an isolation and coolness to her
characters that suggests a loosening of the interpersonal, if not outright
loss of the communal. This can be felt not only in the physical room tem-
perature of her plays, but viscerally seeps through the narratives and char-
acter interactions.
Thus, while Colder Than Here sets dying and death as its context, the
subject matter it examines pertains to the contemporary dysfunctional
Anglophone treatment and display of emotions, the traditional family unit
in crisis, the lonesome individual, and the violation of both the earth-body
and the human-body at the hands of Western systems, largely from the
destructive elements of neoliberal capitalism. A newspaper article Wade
read about natural burial sites struck a chord, leading her to question the
cultural context of funerary traditions in England. ‘A wake has tea, you
90 M. HAUGHTON
rarely see a dead body’, Wade muses (Interview, 2015). The Natural
Death Handbook12 aided Wade’s research. Exploring contemporary
English society’s relationship with and attitudes to death, dying and the
body suggests the dominant condition may be disconnection. Indeed, it is
this disconnection that also seems to have become normalised for ‘the
family’ as a unit. Furthermore, Wade details, in the Bradley family, an
emotional laziness has become established, where the members are, to an
extent, resistant to and at times even repulsed by emotion. Reliance on
Myra for familial interactions and operations is total. Colder Than Here
suggests that there is something about the core of the body, the core of
death, and the core of family that can appear emotionally and physically
sidestepped in industrialised consciousness, as the daily patterns of labour,
movement and consumption soak up the best of time and energy.
In Colder Than Here this chilliness is quite pervasive, not least as
claimed by the play’s title. Sierz surmises that ‘The coolness of their rela-
tionships is emphasised by the fact that the boiler in the household has
broken down, and that daily life is lived in a damp chilliness, which feels
like a symbolic preparation for the grave’ (2012, 8). Yet, while Wade might
set a cold context to begin as is typically associated with the context of
death, the play’s narrative arc journeys to warmer moods. This is perhaps
the play’s greatest achievement (alongside adult children talking about sex
with their parents); contextualising death and dying as open topics for
conversation and as naturally and inherently part of community life. This
can be difficult to achieve in times when the increasing privatisation of
health care ensures palliative care is controlled by the market rather than
personal wishes or familial intimacy. Indeed, it is this change in tempera-
ture that Sierz draws from in considering Colder Than Here as speaking to
the modern British dramatic tradition. He concludes that ‘Dying is a
tough subject. In Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s Jimmy called it a
“sordid process”, and it’s kept offstage. By contrast, Colder Than Here is
more honest and humane in unflinchingly showing the way that people
face the inevitable, with humour, with silence, sometimes clumsily, some-
times stoically, and ultimately with love’ (9).
3.3 Staging Trauma: The Big C

The staging of death through ritualistic traditions offers some kind of plan
and digestive process for the Bradleys, though not necessarily the comfort
nor comprehension they yearn for. As threshold people, they are wavering
unsteadily in their liminal space(s), as notions of death, and, ‘a good

death’13 are theoretically, emotionally and practically negotiated.
Simultaneously, the realisation dawns that ‘a good death’ is not possible
when the ‘death’ is not expected, but instead functions as a robbery, ran-
dom and unfair. Beginning with an interrogation of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) as a strategy for comprehending the complexities of trau-
matic experience and impact, this section will also analyse the performativ-
ity of mortality and funerary processes.
Fundamental to the study of trauma is the study of the past event(s)
which overwhelms the senses and the mind, understood to trigger trau-
matic symptoms which continually manifest without a clear endpoint,
known as PTSD. However, Duggan challenges this conventional engage-
ment with PTSD. He queries the idea of ‘post’ particularly, inherent in the
PTSD diagnosis, outlining that:
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a false definition of trauma symp-

toms because they are anything but ‘past’. The perpetual present of trau-
matic experience, I argue, creates a schism in one’s understanding of self;
thus, trauma-symptoms are modeled as an ever-present doubling of the
traumatic wound. (2012, 7)
Indeed, the academic interdisciplinary field of trauma studies has reached

a point where the established definition of PTSD remains in constant
debate. Multiple definitions and interpretations coexist as postmodern
philosophy traverses academic disciplines as well as professional and cul-
tural contexts, and indeed, as trauma seems increasingly relevant to all
aspects of modern and contemporary social experience. Among this fer-
vour of academic enquiry, the tensions do not necessarily arise due to the
fluidity of the term and scope of the condition. Rather, it seems linked to
the contemporary ‘structure of feeling’ as Duggan claims reading from
Raymond Williams, which suggests that we exist in ‘traumaculture’, as
coined by Luckhurst (2008, 28) specifically referring to British society.
Argued by Christina Wald, the suggestion is that contemporary, Western,
postmodern, digital, neoliberal society is so saturated by trauma, that
‘The employment of trauma as a cultural trope has on the one hand risked
its generalisation to the point of meaninglessness.’14 Yet, paradoxically, at
this potential plateau of meaningless, its position as an urgent field within
academic discourse strengthens. One of the most immediately striking
aspects regarding the role and affect of trauma in Colder Than Here is that
92 M. HAUGHTON
it does not perform according to almost universally anticipated signifiers.

By that, I mean Wade does not reproduce this contemporary attraction to
staging violence and psychological and social breakdowns in her play.
Thus, any forms of PTSD such as nightmares or hallucinations one might
anticipate do not occur. Rather, the PTSD is that of the everyday, the
anxious, and the ‘slow violence’ that destabilises the ecologies of living
that this study examines in light of Rob Nixon’s work in this field.
Specifically, this study of Wade’s work draws from Nixon’s argument that
to confront slow violence ‘[…] we attempt to give symbolic shape and
plot to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across
space and time’.15 In Colder Than Here, the environment dramatised is
not one with an obvious climactic point of crisis or highly theatricalised
traumatic encounter. The trauma is the day-to-day destruction of the
family, landscape, and legacy.
Returning to Duggan’s claim, I can agree that while the symptoms
present in Colder Than Here and indeed all the case studies in this study
are anything but past, one understands, or assumes, that they were pro-
voked (in varying degrees) by a past traumatic event or encounter, con-
sidered originary by established academic enquiry. To analyse the staging
of trauma in relation to Myra’s forthcoming death in Colder Than Here,
I must invert traditional structures concerning PTSD. Traditionally,
PTSD suggests that resulting from a post-traumatic event/encounter,
the experience of linear time collapses for the individual and, conse-
quently (and perhaps paradoxically as Duggan rightfully argues), the
trauma does not remain in the past but repeats itself in distorted and
fragmentary forms in the present. However, this analysis is more con-
cerned with how these stages of trauma can be troubled as a result of
multiple temporal experiences of trauma. By this I mean firstly the histori-
cal traumatic event of learning about Myra’s terminal cancer, secondly,
the present moment of living consciously with that acknowledgment, and
finally, the anticipation of the trauma of Myra’s death in the future,
resulting in the destruction of their established narrative of ‘family’ and
‘self’. In this play, the traumatic event and encounter is the present
knowledge of Myra’s forthcoming death, as well as forthcoming actual
death. As Myra’s daughter Harriet tells, ‘And I just thought God, I can’t
cope with this I can’t do this. I was looking at her and I missed her’
(2012, 88). Thus, the trauma is, problematically and paradoxically, in the
past, the present, and the future. To be specific regarding Myra’s future,
‘Six months or so. Up to about nine’ (2012, 26). While such a reading of
the traumatic encounter indeed complicates the established interpreta-

tion and employment of PTSD, it also reinforces the central idea of
trauma as a disruption to linear time, and thus, linear narratives (of self
and society). Linear time can no longer function as expected (or uncon-
sciously assumed) for the Bradleys, and thus attempting to negotiate this
traumatic event is too complex, as well as emotionally destructive, as they
grieve for the person standing in front of them, breathing and alive. Thus,
they exist as threshold people until the point of Myra’s death, neither
here nor there, but betwixt and between realities, psychological spaces
and social customs. Terminal illness, indeed, inverts traditional under-
standings of PTSD, yet produces similar symptoms.
The characters must negotiate their anticipation of the trauma through
their time and space, which is entirely disrupted out of its perceived
structure, as are their identities. They are forbidden to attempt to settle
into a new structure that may exist when Myra has passed on. Yet they
attempt to conceive of it, step by step, before they are reminded of why
these new patterns are being timidly forged, which then returns them to
the psychological jolt of facing the forthcoming traumatic event.
Regardless of the trauma as past, present and future event, major symp-
toms of PTSD occur. These include LaCapra’s theory of ‘acting out’ of
the event of dying and death to ‘work through’ it, and the repetition of
funerary processes, such as visiting graveyards and attempts at forging
new familial relationships that can function with the loss of the matriarch.
However, linear narrative time begins to disintegrate as the family’s expe-
rience of routine daily life has been altered in every respect. This cannot
be ‘worked through’ until the actual traumatic encounter of Myra’s death
takes place. Even then, it cannot be ‘worked through’ to resemble life
before the trauma of Myra’s dying and death, but must result in the
establishment of new performed routines.
In addition, the process of dying and the staging of death as perfor-
mances prevalent in contemporary England significantly inform the play’s
meanings and impact. The seminal performance theories of ritual and lim-
inality as espoused by Van Gennep, Turner, and indeed, the good com-
pany they keep in the interdisciplinary spaces of performance studies and
anthropology, illuminate the structure, functions and shifting power
dynamics that the stages of liminality can reveal. By examining these social
rituals as performative in structure, one can assess the major and minor
alterations that have occurred throughout previous centuries, questioning
how such a performance may be read. Funerary traditions and processes
94 M. HAUGHTON
evoke politics and prejudices surrounding religious belief, community and

class dynamics, environmental concerns, as well as social and cultural
trends. In late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century England, the pop-
ularity of cremation alongside burial, both of which Colder Than Here is
concerned with, is suggestive of a diversity of religious faith as well as the
impact of local authority regulations and policies on burial space and envi-
ronmental impact.
For ritual and performance, I take my cue from performance theorist
Henry Bial, as he summarises that:
Rituals provide us with a sense of control over an uncertain existence. Rituals

are based on repetition, and though most rituals change somewhat over
time, we look to them as fixed points from which we measure the rest of our
experience. Generally speaking, rituals exemplify and reinforce the values
and beliefs of the group that performs them. Conversely, communities are
defined by the rituals they share. [my emphasis] (2007, 87)
What Colder Than Here shows its audiences, in short, is that the rituals
they share, as a community/ies, have changed. The events of dying and
death are one of the most choreographed embodied performances in
British culture (and indeed, most cultures). Practices and beliefs constitut-
ing a ritual which produces ‘a good death’ have drastically altered as the
performance of dying is produced under a set of significantly altered mate-
rial and ideological conditions. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Britain, death statistics will speak of poverty and its related diseases, the
impact of two world wars, and the emergence of HIV and AIDS. From
records and artistic depictions since medieval times as mapped in Peter
C. Jupp and Claire Gitting’s Death in England (1999), ideas of ‘a good
death’ have always been concerned with wealth and process, ‘Worms and
cadavers notwithstanding, memorials and tomb sculpture offered an
optimistic reading of death, whilst manuals of dying offered the prospect
of a good death for many.’16
If we consider the contemporary context of dying as of a time when
globalisation is in full swing, the role cancer plays in dying and death has
moved from a supporting character to a key protagonist’s role. Accordingly,
‘New models of “the good death” were developed by the hospice move-
ment’ (1999, 7), a movement which emerged in Britain in 1967 to re-
vision society’s approach to death and dying.17 However, while many
aspects of secularisation informing dying and death were praised, mainly as

a result of the reduction of religious control, other aspects brought their
own challenges. In particular, a decline in the belief in Hell occurred in the
UK, much more so than in other Anglophone countries, such as Ireland
and the United States. Yet, somehow, the focus and role notions of human-
ity once played, perhaps colloquially referred to as ‘the human touch,’ also
became somewhat reduced in more recent processes of dying. In contem-
porary times, dying and death have become increasingly managed by pro-
fessionals rather than family members or loved ones. Jupp and Gittings
summarise that, ‘The gradual passing of authority for death from the dying
and their kin to professional specialists such as undertakers and doctors is
a development increasingly criticised in the later twentieth century’ (1999,
8). Due to the major advances of science and technology, fully available
through the NHS, ‘Hospitals and doctors were now orientated to cure,
not to death and dying’ (271), and so ‘the good death’ did not receive
equal attention as in previous generations of healthcare. Jupp and Walter
detail that, ‘People were taking longer to die, but doctors oriented to cure
did not know what to do with them. By around 1960, helping people die
well was off nearly everyone’s agenda’ (271–272). In summary:
Dying people are today far more likely to want the doctor than the priest,
cremation and burial are organised according to the precepts of public
health rather than of safe transport to the next world; and counseling is
concerned with the psychological health of the bereaved, not the spiritual
health of the departed. (276)
Until the arrival of the hospice movement, it seemed dying had become
largely isolated and institutionalised. By the 1990s, Cancer diagnoses sup-
planted AIDS diagnoses in numbers. Once more, this process was largely
devised and managed by professionals, and ‘the cure for cancer’ consti-
tutes a profit-led competitive market for pharmaceuticals and research.
Discourses regarding ‘the good death’ became further removed from
ideas of reunion between notions of the human-body and the earth-body,
or of reunion between notions of souls and spiritual otherworlds.
Indeed, with the major reduction in deaths from airborne (bronchitis,
diphtheria, influenza etc.), water-, insect- or food-borne diseases (cholera,
diarrhoea, typhoid etc.), survival rates, particularly of the young, surged
post-1950. Thus, ‘infectious diseases as the primary cause of death were
96 M. HAUGHTON
being replaced by non-communicable, degenerative conditions, like heart

disease and cancer’, resulting in the term ‘diseases of affluence’ (260).
Historian David Cannadine glibly summarises that, ‘The reason why so
many people seem to die today of heart attacks, strokes and cancer is that
there is, literally, nothing else to die of’ (261). Regardless of the percep-
tions of cancer’s pervasive spread, it still held the fear as being ‘“The Big
C”…the unmentionable disease’ (272). Ultimately, ‘the good death’ of
late modernity, whether hospice-managed or no, concerns:
Adding ‘life to years, not years to life’ is the effective motto of palliative care.
Meanwhile, dying people can conclude ‘unfinished business’ with friends
and family, and come to terms with the ambitions they must abandon. This
is a time less for making peace with one’s maker as in traditional Christian
dying than making peace with oneself and one’s family. (272)
Judd and Walter detail that ‘the hospice movement’s “good death” is bet-
ter geared to the physical reality of deferred death’ (272). In Colder Than
Here, Myra is dying at home rather than a hospice or hospital, which per-
haps suggests a shift in contemporary attitudes away from the ubiquitous
authority hospitals and institutions exert over processes of dying and
funerary practices.
As the authors assert, during this facilitated and professionally managed
dying time, or liminality, the person is able to conclude ‘unfinished busi-
ness’ (272), such as making peace with those left behind, or indeed, one-
self. In the context of Colder Than Here, the peace Myra seeks to make is
not with a proposed maker, but with her immediate family and their trou-
bled relationships. The lack of attention the play directs to notions of
afterlife, relationships with a God, and indeed, regrets or guilts, is a telling
marker of its spatio-temporal context. The ideas foregrounded instead
relate not to the ubiquitous power of institutional ideology but interper-
sonal relationships, which are specific and local. These are the worries
Myra holds, as ‘the family’ is a shaky construct where love is not easily
expressed, rooms are not easily co-occupied, and feelings and thoughts
not easily shared. Fundamentally and significantly, bodily harm and ten-
sion, such as eating disorders and discomfort in outside spaces, suggest the
breakdown of connection between the individual and the earth.
Interestingly, it is in this cultural context that Colder Than Here fore-
grounds the search for a woodlands burial, accompanied by an eco-friendly
coffin, situated centre stage in the dramatic and scenic space of the living
room, where the family is encouraged not only to see the coffin, but to
touch it, and draw on it, and essentially, normalise it and reduce their
unspeakable fear in relation to it. Myra, sitting in it while she watches the
television, displays an irreverent joy in the challenge to liturgical authori-
ties over the space of the dead body and funerary practices. It quite liter-
ally returns the process of dying and death to the individual dying, their
family, and the space of their family home. Harriet describes Myra’s reap-
propriation of this dynamic in Scene 7, ‘Walked in and she’s sat in the
coffin. Middle of the living room floor and she’s—She’s watching ‘Have I
Got News For You’ and she’s laughing. Sitting in it, laughing. And I just
thought God, I can’t cope with this I can’t do this’ (2012, 88).
The funeral, a major personal and public event occurring with cere-
mony, and embedded with meaning, but without liturgical ceremonial
frameworks and power structures, is how this dramatised family are mak-
ing meaning and finding value in the tragedy that has befallen them. The
specifics of their ritual, such as visiting graveyards, discussing how Myra’s
cancer is spreading, and Myra making her funeral wishes and demands
clear through open dialogue, is not completely alien to contemporary
communities when this play was first produced. However, the PowerPoint
scene, when Myra delivers a PowerPoint presentation to her family to
summarise her wishes for her funeral, is something we must attribute to
Wade’s deftly ironic tone.
With the significant increase in cancer throughout late twentieth-
century England, the rise of palliative care concurrently developed along-
side renegotiations of meanings of ‘the good death’. Section 3.4, ‘Riddled
With It’, will consider the violence of terminal diseases so pervasive in
contemporary times, the bodies they inhabit, and the wider scenography
of sick societies and contaminated bodies.
3.4 Riddled With It: Contaminated Bodies

Firstly, let us return to the spaces of liminality and the threshold people
who reside there, simultaneously returning our focus to the dynamic of
‘in-between’. These spaces teeter on anticipated major change resulting
from a seismic shift in the stable centre point in their lives, the forthcom-
ing death and thus absence of Myra, mother and wife. Myra functions as
the family’s centre point, their nexus. Her body that once bore children to
complete the traditional family unit has been violated by a terminal dis-
ease, cancer. As she details the forthcoming inevitability, ‘Anyway, a couple
98 M. HAUGHTON
more places and we’ll be able to say I’m riddled with it’ (2012, 35) leading
to a short future of ‘More radio [radiotherapy]. Painkillers. Warm Baths.
Funeral planning.’ (2012, 35). Thus, the characters presented to the audi-
ence are ‘threshold people’, betwixt and between their traditional and
long-established rituals and routines of everyday performance, and, the
forthcoming unimaginable change of overwhelming grief and unknown
futures. However, the stable centre point of the dramatic ecologies and
landscapes that Colder Than Here intently visualises are also in imminent
threat. In this sense, the contaminated body of Myra is calling to the con-
taminated earth-body.
While Wade confirms Myra’s imminent death from her cancer-riddled
body from the outset, she suggests, but does not set a similarly specific
trajectory for the future death of the violated body of the surrounding
landscape. Scorched with disease and deteriorating day by day, ‘riddled
with it’ indeed, Myra’s death is the suggested prelude for wider disasters
of the future should the dignity of nature not be restored in some major
attempt at redress, if this is even possible. In this context contemporary
audiences are threshold people too. ‘We’ are betwixt and between stable
habitats and ecological disaster. How organisms and existence may be
structured or restructured in the wake of the looming natural crises, if at
all, is impossible to foretell.
On Wade’s contaminated bodies and ideas of affect, scenography,
the body in performance (which includes audience bodies), and the
politics of reception—all the key performance questions driving this
study, one must ask, who in the audience might be riddled with it? The
performance of theatre as an act—the performance of the performance
event—is also brimming over with ‘threshold people’, who may or may
not be ‘riddled with it’ similar to Myra, but know of someone who is,
as cancer statistics confirm.18 Those playing and those observing the
playing are not in time and yet they are. They are betwixt and between
realities, spaces and psychologies, as the contradictory spaces of perfor-
mance allow. Both the action onstage and the encounter of perfor-
mance are clearly framed rituals as much the result of ancient
anthropological development as contemporary social design. There is a
potency and even perhaps a threat seeping under the ironic tone of
Colder Than Here. Wade dramatises the rituals of dying and death in an
immediately identifiable English middle-class context to its audiences
(and indeed international audiences, as this play as toured to Germany,
Sweden and the United States, as noted earlier). The juxtapositions and
cruel ironies are abundant. One is surrounded by comforts, yet dying

of cancer. England is a First World country, but riddled with it. The
British Empire is the great coloniser of most of the earth’s surface, but
being violated from within. No amount of concern over British bor-
ders, immigration and EU negotiations can prevent the disease from
within, which grows and intensifies daily. Did the very construction and
accumulation of such wealth and luxuries among First World populaces
simultaneously cause or contribute to the development and spread of
new diseases? Is the village eating itself? Cancer and capitalism are
inherently connected, one feeding the other, and inevitably reproduc-
ing its own parasitic cycle.
In Death in England the historical trajectory resulting in this relation-
ship between modern societies and death is traced and accounted for, and
as also found in Colder Than Here, both capitalism and environmental
damage feature heavily in this analysis of the most physical and personal of
experiences. Major shifts in funerary traditions occurred after World War
II in England, examined by Jupp and Tony Walter in ‘The Healthy Society:
1918–98’. The context dramatised in Wade’s play is one where strict
Christian edicts of death and dying are no longer resolutely followed by
the majority, though they have not wholly disappeared. The rise of spiritu-
alist and theosophical ideas from the mid to late twentieth century brought
about a mixture of diversity of religious belief from England’s relatively
recent multiracial society, as well as medical advances, and increased access
to global knowledge, attitudes and behaviours. Yet, Colder Than Here
does not produce a Church vs Science master narrative debate regarding
notions of a ‘good death’ and the afterlife. Colder Than Here is situated in
a postmodern cultural moment where both religion and science may hold
merit and flaw simultaneously. It rarely if at all alludes to an afterlife or
ghosts. Would such omission or dismissal be unthinkable in a play about
dying and death even fifty years ago? The unverifiable and unknown expe-
rience of Death is accepted as fact at this time. Rather, the focus remains
on the living and making peace with the bodies left in anticipation of
Myra’s future absence.
For the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly with the medi-
cal advances spurred on by World War II, death was ‘increasingly deferred
to old age’ (1999, 8). In this way, the trauma of death was something
sidestepped during everyday consciousness as it became relegated to an
inherently assumed, or hoped-for, ‘far-way’ event. The rise of hospitals
and hospices physically removed the visible encounter with dying and
100 M. HAUGHTON
death, so that geographically, it could also be treated as a ‘far-way’ event.

Death is a land over the hill, one we know is there and yet cannot see on
the immediate horizon, allowing us to push it to the furthest recesses of
consciousness, away from daily activity. Indeed, part of the trauma for
Myra and family is inherent in the knowledge that not only is the trauma
ahead of them but that Myra has not reached old age. She is not an elderly
woman. She is being taken before her time, from her time. Is this injustice
brought on by the health consequences of living in the post-industrial age?
Or, is the increasing longevity of human life part of the capitalist, contem-
porary, globalised destruction of previous cycles of living, and thus, is
Myra’s cancer a call to return? Cancers, its causes and cures, reflect scien-
tific, religious, economic and political debates over centuries regarding
medical advancement, interference, the cost of life and death to an indi-
vidual and a civic authority, and indeed, the agency of the individual over
the trajectory of their dying and death.
However, Myra’s too-early demise suggests other crises are taking
place. Being ‘riddled with it’ and at times, feeling too ‘cancerous’ for small
movements, one must assume a ‘good death’ is not ahead of her. However,
dying and death can be understood radically differently, depending on
culture, religion, era, politics and social norms. Perhaps a ‘good death’ can
be inscribed with new meanings. Perhaps one can face terminal cancer and
find a ‘good death’ through their psychological navigation of the time left?
In this chapter, and in relation to Wade’s play, I interpret the rituals of
dying and interpretations of death as cultural performances, which, like
the performance event itself is inherently fluid, unstable and suggestive of
movement to a new phase of being, or energy, or, something, perhaps.
Death is often discussed as ‘passing away’ provoking notions of ‘passing
over’ or ‘passing through’ a ‘threshold’ from the known to the unknown.
The space(s) between can be inherently traumatic or liberating. The con-
ditions framing the ‘passing’ designate this context. Death remains a ritual
and rite all must face. Hence, society’s learned and attributed social status
cannot intervene or join beyond the threshold. It is the most democratic
and natural state of being, and thus in that context, utopian. In its wake,
it leaves previous structures undone, immersed by uncontrollable tides of
emotion and grief. It is a reminder that the greatest force on earth is that
of nature, not economics. In contemporary theatre and the arts in general
everyday economics has reached such stifling heights on personal and pro-
fessional contexts that the rules and forces of ecologies have been over-
looked in most daily practices of globalised Western societies. There is a
specific type of trauma that stems from facing the unknown resulting from
this violation of organisms (individual and habitat), and experiencing sta-
ble structures becoming destabilised, such as the body and the earth. In
this specific case study, the trauma is drawn directly from the merging of
the ‘natural and manmade’ disease of bone cancer, violating the institution
of the body and its lifespan. This disease is partly inherited from econom-
ics and so the traumas dramatised are partly the spawn of capitalism (and
ironically, somewhat hereditary as Charcot once argued of trauma), par-
ticularly contemporary neoliberal capitalism and how it exercises its power
through multiple apparatuses.
3.5 Slow Violence: Bodies in Shadow

American literary scholar Rob Nixon asks ‘How, in an age that venerates
the instant and the spectacular, can one turn attritional calamities starring
nobody into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment?’
(2006–2007, 14) Nixon poses this question in relation to what he coins
‘slow violence’, that is, the gradual yet consistent erosion and destruction
of the earth’s habitats and resources. This destruction is daily, and thus,
routine. Routines and habits are perhaps the most violent and powerful
structures humankind invests in and reproduces, consciously and uncon-
sciously. They have the power to act as invisible, though they are material.
They have the power to act as organic, inherent, and ontological at times.
Thus, they are not always acknowledged or held accountable for the dam-
age that they create and conceive.
Against the shock factor of ‘falling bodies, burning towers, exploding
heads’ (14) that media sources can disseminate through the 24-hour news
cycle, what chance does the slow violence really have to intervene in, jolt
or affect public and private space? Nixon maintains that:
Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, or desertification may be

cataclysmic in which casualties are deferred, often for generations. In the
gap between slow acts of violence and their delayed effects both memory
and causation readily fade from view and the casualties thus incurred pass
untallied. (2006–2007, 14)
In terms of the very present-day impact and stakes surrounding slow vio-
lence, the lack of visceral affect it produces lays the groundwork for politi-
cal ignorance, complicity and the conditions for reproduction and
102 M. HAUGHTON
intensification of such violence. Nixon queries, ‘How can leaders be goaded

to avert catastrophe when the political rewards of their actions will be
reaped on someone else’s watch, decades, even centuries from now?’ (14)
Employing the US context to argue the point further, he pays particular
attention to how potential catastrophes have been somewhat regulated
since 9/11. Citing Bush’s ‘war on terror’ which colonised media outlets
for the following decade, an increase in representational bias towards slow
violence became yet another victim of the mass destruction of his adminis-
tration’s policies. Nixon argues that ‘Condoleezza Rice’s strategic fantasy
of a mushroom cloud suspended over America if the United States failed
to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein gave further visual definition to
the idea of cataclysmic violence as something explosive and instantaneous,
a recognisably cinematic, pyrotechnic event’ (15).
These types of traumas, or dramas, rely on spectacle for their performa-
tivity and social affect. Spectacle has been a central device of theatre as well
as political power since the Athenian amphitheatres both instructed and
entertained their citizens to varying degrees. Indeed, spectacle was the
method for confirming sovereign power through the public display of tor-
ture and the tortured body of the criminal until very recently, as Foucault
so convincingly charts in Discipline and Punish. Interestingly, as the spec-
tacle and perfomativity of everyday life drastically increases, particularly
since the 1960s, and often referred to as ‘the performative turn’, the
spectacle of the stage has witnessed a comparative reluctance. Reasons for
this are varied but remain inextricably linked to artists and audiences seek-
ing experiences from performance encounters which suggest authenticity
and ideas or ideals of truth, as the public sphere of politics and news is
submerged in postmodern cynicism. The remaining social milieu is domi-
nated by a pervasive sense of incredulity and mistrust.
In terms of performance and its relationship to spectacle, how does one
stage ‘catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-
term effects’ (15)? For a play like Colder Than Here, there is no revelling
in spectacle; there is no major denouement or catharsis, as there is no
Aristotelian build to crisis. And yet, the first two stages of Turner’s social
drama, ‘breach’ and ‘crisis’, can be identified in the play’s narrative,
through knowledge of Myra’s cancer (breach), and the approach to her
death (crisis). ‘Redressive action’ is insinuated by the end of the play as the
remaining family members tentatively attempt new modes of interaction
which will potentially lead to ‘reintegration,’ though without Myra. This
redressive action and reintegration may be achieved by the family but the
lingering question regarding the environment, and the increase in cancer

rates among young and old, cannot find such closure at the close of the
play. These are the stakes the play presents to the audience. The slow vio-
lence of Western capitalism has seeped through generations as a form of
epigenetic trauma from ingested toxins and chemicals seeping through air,
food, water and habitat.
In reflecting on the multiple international productions of Colder Than
Here, Wade notes some distinctions among the unique staging choices
made by each production. In particular, she found the scenography of a
later production19 staged at The Theatre by the Lake, Keswick in the Lake
District, appealing, as rather than attempting any type of fixed or natural-
istic representation, bits of grass and earth sprouted up from the stage,
invading the Bradley’s living room, offering a fluid tone to the produc-
tion. In this way, there is a subtle yet stark image. The burial sites and
living room ‘co-exist’ visually on stage, with the living room centre stage
and the burial sites signalled through a ‘platform of grass high off ground’,
with ‘bits of tussock popping up’ (Interview, 2015) in the living room.
Nixon declares that to ‘intervene representationally’ one requires a merg-
ing of ‘iconic symbols to embody amorphous calamities’ with ‘the narra-
tive forms to infuse them with dramatic urgency’. Colder Than Here
possesses such potential though does not make demands of its produc-
tions. Perhaps this has contributed to a sense of the play as ‘gentle’, how-
ever, in examining its impact in relation to public and private traumas, one
may argue it has radical potential.
Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ aesthetic pervades the dramaturgy of Colder
Than Here. Indeed the title of the play foregrounds the notion of multiple
spaces, the experience of the body, and a sense of chilly decay. The ‘Than
Here’ could refer to contemporary neoliberal flailing England or the strug-
gling family home, both institutions in crisis. It probably refers to all those
spaces and energies. Death is long spoken of in terms of the winter and
sensory coldness, whether a literal corresponding temperature exists or
not. It raises the question of an afterlife, whether that space and time, or
non-space and non-time, is also colder than this space and time. This rela-
tionship between the body and interpersonal space is revealing about the
play’s overall narrative motives and intentions. The body, of both person
and earth, is arguably facing man-made death. The interpersonal spaces—
of the family, of society, of politics—need more humanity, more heat. The
current temperature forbids the regeneration and regrowth so desperately
required.
104 M. HAUGHTON
The dead body decomposes in ‘about six weeks or so’ (2012, 57)
according to Jenna’s information from one of the graveyard administrative
staff. It sheds skin, fluids, muscles and all its padding, till the human form
is transformed to a skeleton, in short, a collection of bones which can
eventually disintegrate into the land, returning to the soil. Soil, damp or
dry, parched or rich, is also both stable and unstable. It lies everywhere at
the foundation of things, leading to growth, renewal, flowers and weeds.
And yet, it can be kicked and dispersed at the quickest and lightest of
touch. Walking on soil, for most of one’s life, is a habit so ingrained it
barely demands pause for thought. And yet, many will return to the soil,
and the fruits of the soil will engulf the body, and take it for its own.
The ‘arse-bag’ (2005, 57) Jenna packs for the latest graveyard tour,
albeit with the surprise accompaniment of her sister Harrier rather than
their mother Myra, conjures up the chills one feels living in North Atlantic
blustery climates such as England’s, where the rotation of seasons cannot
be assumed. In winter especially, during a rainy day out, one will always
feel ‘a shiver’. The shiver or chill unforgivingly whips through the body by
the force of temperature and movement of wind, a reminder of the control
of the earth’s external forces on humankind’s internal network. The ‘arse-
bag’ is also an effective reminder of the space modern societies have
wedged between the physicality of the human body, and the physicality of
the earth body.
Living and dying are bound by temperatures, residing within the
human organism and in transference with others. Alec’s perennial strug-
gle with the boiler may be an oversimplified metaphor for the passing of
Myra’s living, through and over the threshold of death, and the change
in body temperature that is required to facilitate this journey, but it
remains a potent one. In Westernised cultures, dying and death have
become medicalised and isolated from daily encounters. The conserva-
tism of middle-class etiquette stifles all bodily experiences, and one is not
likely to discuss or debate death lightly, if at all. The boiler and the cold
house are part of the thresholdness that the characters embody. Thus,
both established Christian and modern ideas of death are refuted by
Myra’s cancerous body. From the Church-ing of death to the medicalis-
ing of death, from private grief to public display, we still face the unknown,
each of us, at an unknown (or, known) future point. The family, the
body, the institutional beliefs and routines, come undone by death, and
thus are traumatic.
Ironically, this machinery of ‘slow violence’ which can violate the body
before it has reached what one might argue is ‘its time’, is also part of the
culture which creates further machinery resulting in the lengthening of
the body’s life-span. Contemporary culture faces a stark paradox. An
increase in cancer is matched by an increase in the lifespan of its popula-
tion. Inevitably, one is linked to the other, and set against the backdrop of
the ‘First-World’ problems, where poor dietary choices (not always as a
result of poverty, though this often remains the case, but also as a result of
‘convenience’ foods, stress-related encounters resulting from work pat-
terns, industrialisation and globalisation) account for diseases of cancer
and those linked to cancer, as the main diseases stemming from the poor
social conditions of the twentieth century retreat. Cancer Research UK’s
figures state that cancer diagnoses increased by approximately 50,000
per annum over the last decade (The Guardian, 2014). ‘Cancer numbers
have gone up primarily because people are living longer although alcohol
and obesity are also playing a part in the rise of the numbers’ (The
Guardian, 2014). The social cost to health is as big a concern for medical
and state authorities as are the personal ones. ‘Macmillan Cancer Support
warned that the numbers of people living longer with cancer or its after-
effects is set to grow from 2 million to 4 million by 2030, adding further
expense to the NHS’ (The Guardian, 2014). Indeed, this trajectory sets
out a new paradigm for trauma culture, the prolonged diseases attacking
the elderly of the West’s ‘ageing society’. How does one psychologically
and physically navigate ‘The Big C’, when it has entered the realm of the
everyday and the expected?
In the UK in particular, according to a 2010 government report,
‘10 million people in the UK are over 65 years old. The latest projections
are for 5.5 million more elderly people in 20 years time and the number
will have nearly doubled to around 19 million by 2050.’20 The report
outlines the stakes for public spending from the Department of Work and
Pensions, where ‘65% of [its] expenditure goes to those over working age
[… ] Continuing to provide state benefits and pensions at today’s aver-
age would mean additional spending of £10 billion a year for every addi-
tional one million people over working age’ (‘The Ageing Population’,
2010).
Thus, the ‘slow violence’ that I argue is associative of the dramatised
culture at play in Colder Than Here, points to, in varying degrees of imme-
diacy and discretion, a type of plateau where multiple social crises are
106 M. HAUGHTON
interlocking. ‘Diseases of affluence’ (1999, 260–261) as coined in Death

in England have infected the health and lifespan of organisms and habi-
tats. The elderly are too old and the young may be snatched too young.
Vast increases, if not epidemics, of ill-health relating to obesity, mental
health illness, substance abuse, stress and pollution are inextricably linked
to the building blocks of contemporary trauma culture, managed by the
apparatuses of Western capitalism, which continue to gather pace without
pause or interruption. Love, trust and interpersonal relationships are suf-
focating, lacking the intimacy and space required to foster and sustain.
These are the conditions for violence, lurking in the shadows, there but
unseen except with a brief backward glance as one hurriedly moves to the
next appointment. Only when taken to the door of death and forced to
face the process of dying do these shadows loom large, suddenly ubiqui-
tous. Perhaps the pervasive trauma of contemporary culture is the part of
life we allow to linger in the shadows; perhaps it is the politics of visibility
and feeling which determines the trauma wound. When the invisible
becomes visible, when the suppressed becomes affective, it is too late. Loss
of opportunity to change and implement redress, as well as loss of a loved
one, as so eloquently staged by Colder Than Here, forces these shadows
centre stage.
3.6 The Politics of Reception: Performing Lineage

This section requires a review of many of the ideas already examined
by this point but through a distinct analytical lens focused on audience
and reception, primarily directed at the Soho premiere in London. This is
intended to illuminate the play’s construction of meanings from multiple
material and ideological perspectives. It will begin by analysing the fami-
ly’s role in society, historically, politically and socially, considering further
the relationship between the family and trauma. Beginning with consider-
ation of the ‘Horizon of Expectations’ framework outlined by Susan
Bennett derived from the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, the
analysis will be followed by reference to Benedict Anderson’s analysis of
‘imagined communities’. In the odd way that one notes the shift of para-
digms from one era to the next, the community in question is not so much
connected via ideas of nationhood as much as those of terminal or chronic
illness, an increasingly prevalent and inescapable urgency in Western neo-
liberal ‘ageing societies’, though ideas of sickness and death spread to all
age brackets.
In Susan Bennett’s seminal Theatre Audiences, she makes the funda-

mental point regarding the politics of reception; that each event and expe-
rience is specific. Bennett outlines:
Neither theories of reading nor theatre semiotics, however, goes far beyond
the issues facing an apparently individual subjectivity. Neither takes much
notice of reception as a politically implicated act. Indeed, the relationship
between production and reception, positioned within and against cultural
values, remains largely uninvestigated. Yet all art forms rely on those cultural
values for their existence and, among them, theatre is an obviously social
phenomenon. It is an event which relies on the physical presence of an audi-
ence to confirm its cultural status.21
Thus, the relationship between production and reception for the Soho
premiere will be considered ‘within and against’ the cultural values of the
time. As Bennett rightly observes, it is the nexus of these where the specta-
tor and audience exists, and exists politically. To achieve this, the analysis
will firstly consider what Bennett coins as the outer frame, which is con-
cerned with ‘theatre as cultural construct through the idea of the theatrical
event, the selection of material for production, and the audience’s defini-
tions and expectations of a performance’ (2003, 1–2). The inner frame
then, looks to the spectator’s ‘experience of a fictional stage world’ (2)
during the event itself. This frame extends to ‘production strategies, ideo-
logical overcoding, and the material conditions of performance’ (2).
In extrapolating these frames, Bennett foregrounds the role of ‘cultural
values’ in her approach. ‘Cultural values’ is an intriguing point of refer-
ence, which can be inferred to an extent through analysis of relevant phe-
nomena, yet must remain partly individual and subjective too. For this
play’s premiere, the analysis must query what cultural values or ideas
regarding cultural values were in circulation for a 2005 Soho audience in
London? Did the advertisement of a new play from an emerging English
playwright, female, young, on completion of the highly competitive Royal
Court New Writer’s programme workshops and mentoring, impact the
audience? If so, what expectations were set up? It is not long since the ‘in-
yer-
face’ moment of contemporary British theatre where Sarah Kane,
Mark Ravenhill and Martin McDonagh, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s disorientated
children,’22 among others, foreground physical and visceral violence cen-
tre stage in their plays. Their strategies of shock and dehumanisation pro-
voked heated debate on Thatcher’s generational legacies, as well as the
108 M. HAUGHTON
political crises in the Middle East, further compounded by the social crises
in the UK and Ireland. Indeed, largely from the 1960s in Western cul-
tures, the impact of feminisms on theatre and performance demands radi-
cal critical renegotiations of normalised constructions of gender and sexual
identities, and how they relate to class, race and ethnic constructions.
Race, ethnicity and intersectional identity politics in the UK are in peren-
nial debate, and much contemporary British dramaturgy focuses on these
politics of community, class and culture directly.
Thus, what community demographics are prevalent for this 2005 pre-
miere and what paradigms of representation are they accustomed to? On
the origins of nationalism, Benedict Anderson considers the major factors
creating the conditions for ‘imagined communities’ in his landmark
Imagined Communities. He notes that as the decline in the belief in the
scripts of antiquity offering ontological truths took place, accompanied by
the faltering of dynastic realms which direct societies around a centre, a
third major social shift was occurring. This third shift considered time, and
the relationship between time and humankind. Anderson explains that:
[… ] a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were

indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical.
Combined, these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of
things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above
all death, loss, and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption
from them.23
Mortality is that which regulates temporality in human consciousness. It

ties people to the same fate and suggests there is some shared ‘nature of
things’, separate from all the questions of nation, identity, and belief that
bind and divide. Live performance is one of the most potent, political,
personal, public and private experiences of ‘imagined communities’. It is
important to stress the significance of ‘liveness’ to any study of audiences
or reception. In short, liveness makes a demand on the individual greater
than the written or digital can. People must ‘show up’ for liveness to
occur. This study accepts that people must also show up to read or use
digital media, but there remains a distinction in terms of the mode of
interactivity and the physical sharing of space. The performance questions
in this study relate to liveness as an immediate physical embodied experi-
ence. For example, Sara Ahmed considers how ‘we may walk into the
room and “feel the atmosphere,” but what we may feel depends on the
angle of our arrival. Or we might say that the atmosphere is already angled;
it is always felt from a specific point.’24 Thus, to ‘show up’ involves feeling
the atmosphere, which is angled prior to one’s arrival. In the case of per-
formance, ‘feeling the atmosphere’ is the result of planned, specific direc-
torial and design choices, as well as whatever spontaneous factors may
occur in the moment.
Consider the most important events and rituals performed to mark the
temporality of human existence; christenings, birthdays, graduations,
weddings, and funerals. Families and friends ‘show up’ for these.
Communities ‘show up’ to the most politically infused events; protests
and demonstrations, parades and commemorations. They ‘show up’ to
live events of spectacular entertainment and commercial value; sports
occasions and concerts. And indeed, they ‘show up’ to the theatre, whether
the performance occurs in a small black box or fringe venue on a dreary
night in January or a family outing to the pantomime at Christmas.
Theatre is a live event that bridges the personal, the political, the public
and yet can still exist as a private encounter. Emotions can circulate and
stick, and these emotions are inscribed by the politics of the public sphere.
Anderson argues that the ritual of reading the newspaper constitutes an
‘extraordinary mass ceremony’ (1993, 35) embedded with the performa-
tive functions and international scope of religion. Building on this I argue
that to ‘show up’ lays the groundwork for another type of ‘extraordinary
mass ceremony’. Like the newspaper, the content changes according to
the performance one attends. Like the newspaper, it tends to be under-
taken at specific times, in this case, primarily an evening event, with options
for matinee performances. Like the newspaper, it is telling of the events
and ideas circulating in the consciousness of the temporal moment. Unlike
the newspaper, however, there is a much greater demand pre- and post-
engagement. ‘Showing up’ to a new play about the terminal cancer of a
middle-class English lady, married with children, in a middle-class English
society, thus, the dramatised place and time they exist in, indeed, embeds
reception as a political act, as Bennett argues. Furthermore, it frames the
audience as an imagined community though sharing this experience, as
Anderson outlines. He maintains that the news items in the newspaper (or
for contemporary purposes, broadcast and digital platforms, though there
are radical renegotiations of ‘imagined community’ as a result of these)
bind communities into nations from approximately the eighteenth-century
onwards, following the demise in predominant dynastic and religious
structures of power. He notes, ‘The date at the top of the newspaper, the
110 M. HAUGHTON
single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection—

the steady onward clocking of homogenous, empty time.’ (1991, 33).
Merging Anderson’s thoughts with my own, what were the newspapers
(and TV news, online forums etc.) reporting during the situated temporal
moment of calendrical time of Colder Than Here’s premiere production in
2005? In 2005 in England, what were the cultural values and ideas in
circulation? A quick scour over a decade later immediately jumps to the
attacks on London, 7 July. In 2015, the BBC reports that, ‘[…] four sui-
cide bombers with rucksacks full of explosives attacked central London,
killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more. It was the worst single ter-
rorist atrocity on British soil’.25 Ten years on, they reproduce government
narrative that ‘The official government position, for headline purposes, is
that there is a “severe” threat from international terrorism, which means
security chiefs have concluded that an attack is highly likely’.26
While bombs were detonating throughout London, the England–
Australia cricket test series, The Ashes, was in full swing across the globe.
As one group of militants who believed they were avenging generations of
colonial violence unleashed mass carnage, simultaneously, the sporting
icon of said colonial empire became employed as a reminder of British
pride. Andy Bull writes for The Guardian, ‘On the eve of the Oval Test,
Brendan Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, urged
employers to “make arrangements” to allow employees to watch the
cricket. People, Barber explained, had to be allowed “to follow their
heroes”.’27 On the heroes’ return to England in the months following the
bombings, approximately 50,000 people ‘showed up’ to cheer them
home. This ostensible act of celebration can also be read as an act of
community- assurance, imagining their sovereignty and survival in the
wake of recent threats. The Birmingham riots also took place, allegedly
provoked (never settled) by the gang rape of a teenage Afro-Caribbean
girl by a group of South Asian men. Weeks of racial tension ensued. In
2015, a BBC report reflected the riots from a decade previous, ‘When the
story was broadcast—and presented as fact—on two pirate radio stations,
it was the spark needed to ignite simmering racial tensions. The evening of
22 October 2005 saw petrol bombs thrown, windows smashed, and an
innocent bystander stabbed through the heart and killed.’28
These major events of 2005 do not speak to the world or sensibility of
Colder Than Here, and that is my point. Wade’s premiere production,
randomly and yet fundamentally, remains connected to these events and
their social ideologically navigation through Anderson’s extrapolation of
‘calendrical time’ (1991, 33). Colder Than Here opened in the Soho on 3
February 2015, unknowingly, the final spring before a decade of terrorist
alerts, threats, attacks and heightened Islamaphobia. Colder Than Here
constitutes the last spring before the renewed energy of contemporary
right-wing and conservative politics led to the rise of the British National
Front party, two Conservative governments in power consecutively, and
Brexit. If the politics of reception can include the now, how would Colder
Than Here play if revived for a British audience more than a decade on? It
is a recent play according to calendrical time, but it arguably belongs to a
past cultural time for British audiences, pre-dating the 7/7 attacks, the
most recent Middle Eastern tensions, migration crises, increased racism,
ongoing terrorist threats and Brexit.
Colder Than Here, one may argue, eschews direct and immediate fore-
grounding of political issues with a big P. Its subject matter is not that of
individual identity politics or a noted minority group. Its subject matter is
the traumas of the collective that are situated in the contemporary
moment, one where the ageing society, environmental calamities, and the
breakdown of interpersonal relationships and intimacies continually esca-
late, without clear interventions or strong leadership. However, as previ-
ously argued, these take the form of slow violence and thus become
shadowed in public consciousness. In Colder Than Here, Wade fore-
grounds the fragmented family, cancer, and capitalism. Myra may not be
cast in the ‘ageing society’ bracket yet her aggressive terminal cancer at
this stage in her life further makes uncomfortable signals regarding the
untimely deaths of many. Perhaps the politics of this play is ahead of its
time as it raises questions (whether it intended to or not) such as what is
an age-appropriate lifespan? How may the environment respond to the
ageing society and population explosion? Such questions could in turn
lead to further dialogue on the legal status of euthanasia, the developmen-
tal practices of pharmaceutical companies, and policies of health insurance
and life insurance. Indeed, the politics of such practices eerily resonate
with the rise of trauma theory as they fundamentally related to modernity.
Luckhurst claims that the railway was ‘the icon of British modernity’
(2008, 21), but ‘With the 1871 Railways Regulation Act, records of fatal
accidents were properly reported […] never less than 200 passenger deaths
a year’ (21). Inevitably, questions regarding compensation and insurance
arose, as ‘medical speculations that travelling at speed might have concus-
sive effect on the nervous system’ (21) among other injuries, often referred
to as ‘railway spine’ (21). The stakes surrounding ‘railway spine’ were
112 M. HAUGHTON
urgently high and became a symbol of ‘the industrial accident [as] the
juncture around which a new kind of state emerges, since it brings together
‘attorneys, judges, lawmakers, government officials, health and safety offi-
cials and company assessors […]’ (25) to determine and contest ‘the trau-
matic costs of industrialization’ (25). Thus, the horizon of expectations,
with a little digging, can point to streams of historical and contemporary
political, economic and humanitarian issues.
Yet while Colder Than Here concludes with an acknowledgment of the
Bradley family’s flaws, by acknowledging the state of dysfunction, it simul-
taneously suggests potential for action. In the final scene, Jenna tells Myra
of the task that lies ahead of them, the task that is, of connecting:
I used to notice, going to the loo in the middle of the night, I’d be walking
down a corridor of closed doors. Like a hotel. Four separate people…. So I
don’t know if—If we never had that even with you here, I don’t know if
we’ll do it without you. (2012, 103)
To conclude, I turn to Ahmed’s thinking where she persuasively examines

how emotions ‘work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individuals and collective
bodies.’29 Ahmed’s analysis proceeds by ‘reading texts that circulate in the
public domain, which work by aligning subjects with collectives by attrib-
uting ‘others’ as the ‘source’ of my feelings’ (2004, 1). While Ahmed’s
focus largely lies in the domain of the politics of immigration, institution-
alisation and marginalisation of certain ethnic or racial groups, her overall
hypothesis remains useful here. By treating Colder Than Here as a ‘text’
(performance text as well as playtext) that circulates in the public domain,
one can find a lens from which to analyse the encounter with ‘The Big C’,
terminal illness, environmental crisis, and familial dysfunction that are the
central traumas staged in Wade’s play. Audiences are cultural bodies and
emotive bodies. A study cannot identify, isolate and categorise the precise
nature of cultural engagement that they seek or why, or specify their emo-
tional production. One can however, theorise the circulation and ‘sticki-
ness’ as Ahmed terms it, of the emotions in the public domain in relation
to prevailing ideas and events.
The central trauma of this play is coming to terms with inescapable
death and participating in the processes of dying. Duggan queries if ‘live
performance can put the spectator into an experience of trauma’s central
paradox’ (2012, 9), arguing that ‘performance can hold the spectator in a
state of flux between a sense of the ‘reality’ of a performance and an under-
standing/recognition of mimesis’ (9). The liminal status of Wade’s char-

acters in Colder Than Here produces profound shifts in the meaning and
unfolding of their daily lives that are radical and anxiety-ridden. This pro-
vokes a psychological reawakening with the body and ecology. This
reawakening could be argued paradoxically as inherently liberating and
traumatising. In one sense, Wade’s dramatisation of the unfolding of their
daily lives submerged in traumata is one of its greatest strengths; it stays
true to the ‘slow violence’ of the illness, yet still acknowledges the devasta-
tion, just without the spectacle the contemporary subject has learned to
associate with ideas of trauma.
However, it is important to note that while the dramatic space of the
play is a liminal zone of structure, experience, feeling and consciousness
for the characters, the event of theatre itself also constitutes a liminal expe-
rience for the audience. Audiences may experience liminality through the
break from the ‘outside world’ while they attend a performance. In terms
of negotiating the wider politics and implications of Colder Than Here, the
issues of how contemporary society engage with the nuclear family as a
viable capitalist social unit, the violation of organic ecologies and habitats
for financial gain, and how Myra’s terminal cancer and dying body acts as
a microcosm of the violated earth body, may also form and inform this
theatrical event. Thus, Colder Than Here’s major political position is stag-
ing these concerns, and doing so at the height of English neoliberal eco-
nomic success in 2005 (prior to global banking crises), in the middle of
the West End, one of the most visible centres of globalisation and height-
ened mass consumption.
Colder Than Here is built upon both personal and political traumas, as
it negotiates maternal death, family instability and ecological destruction.
The politics of its reception lies in the encounter it offers to its audience,
connecting the world on stage to the world outside the stage, directly so
through its elements of mimesis. The fact that it does so through a tone of
humour, and even perhaps gentleness, points to Wade’s dramaturgy at this
moment. This may be part of Wade’s strategies for reception for this play,
yet the content and form of its narrative are no less challenging or affective
as a result. The trauma in this play is dying and anticipating death, person-
ally and ecologically. It situates the living being as a part of the living
environment, and connects their diseases and potential annihilation. It
questions if society can restructure habits and modes of living following
the levels of violation it enacted.
114 M. HAUGHTON
If ‘grief is one of the best means for thinking about social collective’ as
Luckhurst argues (2008, 2), then Colder Than Here is a play about com-
munity as much as family. So rare is it to think on, and feel for, the collec-
tive in the neoliberal-crafted society, that at times it is only such major
moments as death that bring individuals into some kind of interactivity,
psychologically, emotionally and physically. The realisation can become
heightened that time is not infinite and that relationships require nurture.
Tragedy occurs when time runs out. Trauma is what remains. Colder Than
Here concludes with a thaw in the ice and the suggestion of healing.
Notes
1. Laura Wade, Colder Than Here, in Laura Wade Plays One (London:
Oberon, 2012).
2. Victor Turner, ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in The Performance Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Bial, Second Edition (Didcot: Routledge, 2007), 89.
3. Laura Wade, Unpublished Interview with Miriam Haughton (London: 24
June 2015).
4. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, Identity
5. Patrick Duggan, Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 27.
7. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001), 14–15.
8. For further research on this paradigm, Aleks Sierz’s, In-Yer-Face Theatre:
British Drama Today (London: Faber, 2001) provides a comprehensive
analysis.
9. ‘That’ photograph refers to a photograph from 1987 allegedly depicting
the infamous Bullingdon Club on the eve of their annual dinner, accessible
on Mail Online, in John Steven’s article from 30 August 2013, ‘Private jet,
morning suits and champagne for desert grouse shoot…Move over Boris,
it’s… Bullingdon Club 2013’. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-
mail/20130831/281784216757764 Accessed 19 January 2016.
10. Rowena Mason, ‘David Cameron Publicly Denies Lord Ashcroft Pig
Allegation for First Time’, The Guardian, 27 September 2015. http://
www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/27/david-cameron-denies-
lord-ashcroft-allegations-call-me-dave-dead-pig Accessed 20 January 2016.
11. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 31.
12. Josefine Speyer and Stephanie Wienrich, Eds. The Natural Death Handbook
(London: Rider, 2003).
13. Further context on notions of a ‘good death’ as put forth in Irish play-
wright Marina Carr’s play Woman and Scarecrow, see: Miriam Haughton,
‘Woman’s Final Confession: Too Much Hoovering and Not Enough Sex
in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow’, Mortality, 18:1 (2013), 72–93.
14. Christina Wald, Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies
in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 3.
15. Rob Nixon, ‘Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the
Poor’, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 13.2–14.1
(2006–2007), 14–37, 14.
16. Peter C. Jupp and Claire Gittings, Eds. Death in England: An Illustrated
History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 6.
17. See ‘Hospice UK’. https://www.hospiceuk.org Accessed 6 June 2017.
18. Sarah Boseley, ‘UK’s Annual Cancer Diagnosis Numbers Rise by 50,000 in
a Decade’, The Guardian, 14 January 2014. http://www.theguardian.
com/society/2014/jan/14/people-diagnoses-cancer-rises-50000-de-
cade Accessed 10 February 2016.
19. Colder Than Here was produced at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick from 8
June to 9 November 2012. Directed by Abigail Anderson, cast includes
Philip Rham, Augustina Seymour, Maggie Tagney, Joannah Tincey.
Reviewed for The Stage, 11 June 2012 https://www.thestage.co.uk/
reviews/2012/colder-than-here-review-at-theatre-by-the-lake-keswick/
and The Guardian, 2 August 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/
stage/2012/aug/02/colder-than-here-review Accessed 7 June 2017.
20. ‘The Ageing Population: Key Issues for the 2010 Parliament’. http://
www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/key-issues-for-the-
new-parliament/value-for-money-in-public-services/the-ageing-popula-
tion/ Accessed 10 February 2016.
21. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception
(London: Routledge, 2003), 86.
22. Benedict Nightingale in Amelia Kritzer’s, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher
Britain: New Writing 1995–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 28.
23. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1993), 36.
24. Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’ in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg
and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 37.
25. ‘7 July London Bombings: What Happened That Day?’ BBC News, 3 July
2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33253598 Accessed 8 December
2015.
26. Dominic Casciani, Home Affairs Correspondent, ‘7/7 Attacks: Ten Years
on, How Safe Is the UK’, 30 June 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/
uk-33328716 Accessed 8 December 2015.
116 M. HAUGHTON
27. Andy Bull, ‘2005 And All That: An Alternative History of the Greatest
Ashes’, The Guardian, 6 July 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/
sport/2015/jul/06/2005-alternative-history-greatest-ashes Accessed 18
February 2016.
28. Alex Homer and Bethan Bell, ‘Lozells Riots: The Night Birmingham Was
Rocked by Rioting’, BBC News, 30 October 2015. http://www.bbc.com/
news/uk-england-birmingham-34639442 Accessed 2 December 2015.
29. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2004), 1.
Bibliography
Print Sources
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1993. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Bennett, Susan. 2003. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception.
London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated
by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.
Jupp, Peter C., and Claire Gittings, eds. 1999. Death in England: An Illustrated
History. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Nixon, Rob. 2006–2007. ‘Slow Violence, Gender and the Environmentalism of
the Poor.’ Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 13.2–14.1:
14–37.
Turner, Victor. 2007. Liminality and Communitas. In The Performance Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Bial, 2nd ed., 89–97. Oxon: Routledge.
Wade, Laura. 2012. Colder Than Here in Laura Wade Plays One. London: Oberon.
———. 2015. Unpublished Interview with Miriam Haughton. London, June 24.
CHAPTER 4
Containment: Laundry (2011), Directed

by Louise Lowe
Produced by ANU Productions
4.1 Introducing Laundry1: Bodies of the Past,

Bodies of the Present
In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth asks ‘What do the dying and bodies of
the past […] have to do with the living bodies of the present? And what is
the role of our seeing in establishing a relation between these two sets of
bodies?’2 To respond to Caruth’s question, this study of ANU Production’s
Laundry demonstrates that the dying and bodies of the past are implicit in
the social and political fabric of the present. Indeed, they are also impli-
cated in the fabric for potential futures. Yet the potential of their present-
day impact is dependent on dominant prevailing and historical value-systems
and power economies. These structures largely determine one’s agency to
communicate and construct narratives, personal and public, and access
channels of official and cultural discourse. That is not to suggest that hid-
den bodies bear no impact on present-day life and the potential for change,
or, that very visible bodies necessarily hold a position of power. Indeed, as
this chapter will reveal, the invisibility and silence of centuries of deceased
Magdalenes and the remaining survivors potently illuminate the complex
tapestry of power economies and hierarchies both in Ireland and the
Christian countries throughout Europe, America, and Australia which
established and maintained the laundries and related institutions. Only by
claiming witness to their shadows, and how their illegal and inhumane

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1_4
118 M. HAUGHTON
incarceration became normalised, can one begin to comprehend the privi-

leges and discriminations fundamental to processes of seeing and not-
seeing, speaking and being silenced.
ANU’s Laundry visibly and viscerally merged the bodies of the past
with the bodies of the present in performance. This merger provoked con-
flicting memories and histories, urgent queries regarding the implementa-
tion of constitutional law, and renewed scrutiny of wider social value
systems. Tense questions regarding the role and responsibilities of indi-
vidual citizens as well as collective communities in relation to marginalised
institutional histories re-emerged and circulated nationally and interna-
tionally. Laundry staged some of the bodies the Irish body politic worked
hard to hide. Many of the women the production referenced lie in
unmarked graves, their lives and deaths rarely witnessed or documented.
With that in mind, I open this chapter with a request for remembrance,
mirroring an encounter which took place during the performance of
Laundry. Please remember these names: Margaret Blanney, Gertrude
Craigh, Mary Fagan, Christina Green.3 These are four names I selected at
random from the 1911 Irish Census. The women to whom these names
belonged resided, according to the census, at the Magdalene Laundry run
by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge on Seán MacDermott
Street (formerly Gloucester Street) in Dublin’s north city centre. This
laundry remained in operation until 1996. It was at this address that these
names and hundreds of others were finally given voice during ANU’s
Laundry in 2011, a century after that census was held. Gloucester Street
was located in the ‘Monto’ (abbreviation for Montgomery Street, now
Foley Street) region of Dublin, part of a north inner-city slum and
Europe’s largest red-light district of the early twentieth century. This act
of remembrance reflects one of the scenes or ‘moments of communion’4
in ANU’s site-specific, postdramatic, immersive performance located in
the convent building attached to the former laundry. In this encounter,
the names of these enslaved women were read aloud and each audience
participant was given four names in particular to repeat and remember.
The issues of naming, identity, presence, absence, freedom, remembrance,
criminality and complicity were at the heart of this performance as they are
at the heart of Magdalene history and the intersectional legacies of Irish
society, culture, politics and religion.
Laundry staged and performed historical and modern trauma in
Ireland. It traversed the spaces of the individual and the communal, the
private and the public. Cloaked in dim light, soft movement and silent
CONTAINMENT: LAUNDRY (2011), DIRECTED BY LOUISE LOWE… 119
penitents, it conveyed how the strategy of containment, deployed largely

via silence and fear, controlled Magdalene lives, their bodies, the laundries,
these histories and their public presence, particularly as a result of emigra-
tion as well as adoption patterns and policies. This strategy of containment
also serves the interests of social, religious, economic and political capital,
providing profit-led services to the church-state balance sheet, while
simultaneously providing ideological profit to the church–state balance
sheet. ANU staged this containment, pushing the women’s silenced incar-
ceration into the public domain of discourse. By doing so, they simultane-
ously pushed their audience to question the role and power of successive
Irish governments and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, general
social complicity for these histories, and the locale of the north inner city
where certain activities are staged. Furthermore, they highlight the pres-
ent potential for restitution, accountability and a questioning of dominant
ideologies which are perceived to be ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ rather than
‘historical’ and ‘vested’. Furthermore, the laundries’ similarities in struc-
ture raise tense questions in relation to contemporary Ireland’s Direct
Provision system5 for asylum seekers and their children. In summary, the
production of Laundry centralised the reality that Ireland’s population is
the most institutionalised of the twentieth century6 specifically in relation
to mental and psychiatric asylums (which the laundries were substituted
for ad hoc) and that such a history bears intergenerational legacies of
trauma, unacknowledged histories, and unresolved tensions.
Laundry signalled the stakes at play for the Irish state, its citizens and
its ‘official’ history. On 5 February 2013, the ‘Report of the Inter-
Departmental Committee to establish the facts of state involvement with
the Magdalen Laundries’ chaired by former Senator Martin McAleese
(hereafter referred to as the ‘McAleese Report’) was published, eighteen
months after it began its inquiry. Senator McAleese announced his retire-
ment on 1 February, four days before the report was published. This
inquiry into state involvement commenced following an urgent recom-
mendation from the United Nations Committee Against Torture
(UNCAT) in 20117 though the Irish state had previously argued that
women entered these institutions voluntarily and were managed by the
religious orders without state involvement. This report acknowledges sig-
nificant state involvement from 1922 (when the Irish Free State was estab-
lished as a dominion of the British Empire under the Anglo-Irish Treaty),
with 26.5 per cent of referrals made by state authorities.8 Yet, An Taoiseach
(the Prime Minister) of the time, Enda Kenny, failed to apologise in full on
120 M. HAUGHTON
behalf of the Irish state to the remaining survivors and the families of its
victims9 on its publication. Instead, the apology came weeks later as intense
international public pressure mounted. Following the McAleese report,
two nuns, remaining anonymous, gave a radio interview broadcast on
Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), the national broadcaster. They defended the
Church’s role in Magdalene history, refusing to apologise10 and reminding
listeners that it was the families who put them there, and during those
times, Ireland was a ‘no welfare state’. Since then, the four Orders who ran
the laundries in the Republic of Ireland have refused to contribute to the
Redress Scheme set up by the Irish government in the wake of the Report
(this scheme was confirmed after much delay and initial hesitancy to do
so).11 Nigel Rodley, Chairman of the UN Human Rights Committee,
commented on the Irish State’s human rights records, highlighting the
ritualised strategy of official response to these scandals and silenced histo-
ries, especially when they do not further any aspect of the state’s dominant
neoliberal agenda. Rodley declared:
That it is time the Irish State stopped its automatic response to every scandal
being first to deny, then delay, then lie, cover up and eventually, if forced,
throw some money at it and hope it will go away. In all this, it takes the sides
of the elites, those who wield more power than is healthy, whose concerns
are for protecting their members, including the medical profession.12
This study supports Rodley’s criticism of the Irish state’s responses to insti-
tutional histories and related human rights abuses. Laundry, in this con-
text, operates as a case study of how performance can disrupt and challenge
official narratives and histories promoted by leading forces of authority,
offering side lined and suppressed narratives a space in the public domain,
limiting as that space may be. This study does not argue that victims, artists
or individuals seek to use the arts directly as a method of drawing public
attention to wrongdoing, but acknowledges that in modern and contem-
porary Ireland, the arts often directly and significantly contribute to the
creation of cultural, phenomenological, and psychological spaces which
encounter narratives not yet officially welcomed in the public sphere.
4.2 Staging Trauma: Knowing and Not Knowing

Laundry signalled not only the trauma suffered by the women who
became victims of the incestuous policy arrangements traversing Church–
State control, but the trauma of Irish society during their existence and
indeed, on their closure. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault

asserts that ‘On the subject of sex, silence was the rule.’13
However, the act of silence often requires greater staging that the act of
conversation. On a conscious level, Irish society knew that these places
existed. There were large buildings, and both residential homes and busi-
nesses were reliant on the laundry work of these institutions. Yet their
existence and the harm that could occur to ‘penitents’ within them man-
aged to be silenced and suppressed as the banner of religious assistance
and care became their official representative reference point and justifica-
tion. Largely, poverty and fear prevented any serious challenge to these
institutions, accounting for the totalitarian ideological and commercial
control of both life and laundry within Ireland throughout the bulk of the
twentieth century. Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell detail in Coercive
Confinement in Ireland that this ‘infrastructure of social control existed
outside the formal criminal justice system’14 and thus one had to look
‘beneath the surface’ (2012, x) to see it. Their research confirms that:
This was used extensively as a mechanism to contain and discipline poor

children and ‘fallen’ or ‘hysterical’ women. The emigrant boat offered an
option to those who had the desire, and wherewithal, to get away. While
there may have been few prisons, troublesome and troubling citizens were
present in large numbers in industrial and reformatory schools, Magdalen
Homes, Mother and Baby Homes and district mental hospitals. While some
of the inmates may have been there ‘voluntarily’, and in other cases the legal
basis for their detention was doubtful, all are captured by the label that we
choose to apply to the practice of holding people in such establishments,
namely ‘coercive confinement’. (2012, x–xi)
In summary, this operation of coercive confinement was orchestrated to

function without immediate or direct ‘knowing’ by the communities sur-
rounding them and indeed, using them.
Freud turns to literature to investigate this complex relationship
between ‘knowing and not knowing’, a key dialectic of trauma studies
throughout its interdisciplinarity. In The Trauma Question Luckhurst
affirms it seems to ‘foreground the slippages inherent in the act of repre-
sentation’.15 In this case study, this tension of ‘knowing and not knowing’
demands analysis of the overlapping acts of presence, visibility, embodi-
ment and interaction. Throughout Laundry the performance aesthetics,
installations and encounters staged at the site of performance presented
‘knowing’ side by side with the crimes against humanity a state declared
122 M. HAUGHTON
that ‘it did not know’. Caruth’s reading of the genealogy of trauma studies
foregrounds the phenomena of ‘latency, the period in which the effects of
the experiences are not apparent’ (1996, 17), also commonly referred to
as ‘nachträglich’ further detailed by Luckhurst (2008, 81). I argue that in
this case, the effects of Magdalene history have always been apparent, vis-
ible and affective in Irish laws and cultural traditions which govern public
and private behaviours, particularly in relation to hegemonic control of
the body, sexuality and sex. Latency however, is a useful term for consider-
ing the effects of the experience in relation to general social acknowledge-
ment of wrongdoing and the execution of processes of accountability. In
a postcolonial society such as Ireland, the established twentieth-century
tradition of navigating accountability for historical trauma is pointing the
finger (often with cause) at the British Empire. There is not yet an equal
tradition in the contemporary moment within Ireland for accepting
accountability of state-led wrongdoing and social complicity, or any top-
down desire to create a dialogue regarding acknowledgement and account-
ability of state-led crimes.
Luckhurst, like Caruth and other seminal trauma theorists, draw from
Freudian analysis to query latency, exploring ‘the strange temporality of
traumatic memory: an event can only be understood as traumatic after the
fact, through the symptoms and flashbacks and the delayed attempts at
understanding that these signs of disturbance produce’ (2008, 4–5).
While steps have been made to recover these histories and consider official
modes of restitution, a full and widespread acknowledgment of the depth
of wrongdoing and inhumane treatment of vulnerable women in Ireland
remains hesitant. It is interconnected with the inhumane treatment of the
female body as a result of constitutional articles which remain in effect
throughout the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann. This ensures
a legal framework and public validation for the control of women, inevita-
bly creating the conditions for the violence enacted against them, as well
as normalised everyday patterns of misogyny. Accountability is something
the Irish state struggles to process and address, and thus equality is more
clearly demonstrated in theory than in practice, halting, perhaps, the
potential maturing of the nation to a new era of independent governance
and leadership.
Significantly, as the live performance encounter so strongly evidences,
materiality forbids the ‘not knowing’ to achieve a totalising circumference
in public life and discourse. Why? Bodies and buildings remain. Indeed,
this site-specific performance environment imbued the event with a politi-
cal and social potency perhaps not accessible if staged at a conventional

theatre building. Joanne Tompkins queries in Performing Site-Specific
Theatre:
How might the ambiguity, contingency, and unsettlement that we perceive

to be characterizing site-specific performance be explored productively?
[…] how might cultural politics—whether expressed through urban regen-
eration, the economics of culture, or even an ethics of performance (among
other possibilities)—be enhanced through the generation and performance
of site-specific work?16
Laundry addresses these questions very specifically. The critique of this

performance in a national debate actively contributes to ‘the articulation
of cultural activity as crucial to social well-being’ (2012, 4). It does not do
so in a simple way as this cultural activity demanded the release and cen-
tring of suppressed histories that are complex and painful. Yet, it continues
to direct attention to this very large building, lying in disrepair in the
middle of the capital’s city centre. It asks, where are the bodies and com-
munities connected to this building? It reminds society that this history is
known by some and should be known by all. Bodies and buildings; these
sites of trauma, abandoned and forlorn, become places of performance for
daring artists, willing to dig up the lives once lived, or, contained, there.
The bodies most hidden and most silenced, those in unmarked graves
whose identities were wilfully lost by the Sisters at High Park Convent,
became the ones most prominently known, visible and vocal.17 The latency
of these traumatic histories broke through the present-day national con-
sciousness assisted by the efforts of the late investigative journalist Mary
Raftery. So overlooked were their deaths, as with their lives, that the reli-
gious order who buried them allegedly forgot their existence while selling
the land for redevelopment during Ireland’s economic boom the in 1990s,
as they tried to recover their financial losses from the stock market.
Before a direct analysis of the performance ensues, Magdalene history
in Ireland must be briefly examined to situate the trauma paradigm of
‘knowing and not knowing’ specifically to the context informing this pro-
duction. As Foucault pithily stated regarding Victorian society and the
overt discourse of silence in relation to sexual activity, the Irish social pop-
ulace could be sexually active outside of wedlock, but it must be a silent
and secretive encounter. Thus, Magdalene history results from eigh-
teenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish history when ‘outcast’
124 M. HAUGHTON
women were sent to convent-run, state-supported laundries for ‘penance’

and ‘protection’, largely due to the governing of sexual activity of the Irish
populace. In her ground-breaking book on the laundries, Do Penance or
Perish, Frances Finnegan’s research declares that these outcast women
included prostitutes, unmarried mothers, orphans transferred from indus-
trial schools, women prosecuted by the courts (using the laundries instead
of a prison), women with intellectual and physical disabilities, and women
considered ‘objects of temptation’. Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), a
survivor advocacy group seeking justice and redress for these victims, are
loath to attach themselves to a figure, but the estimate that approximately
30,000 women were sent into the laundries in Ireland is frequently called
upon, though an exact figure cannot be confirmed.18 The recent problem-
atic19 state report finds approximately 10,000 women entered the laun-
dries between 1922 and 1996, though the first laundry opened in 1767
(Finnegan 2001, 8). Many who entered these places never left them, but
died in forced slavery and incarceration, unaware they had the legal right
to leave. Some were buried on convent grounds in mass graves without
public ceremony.20 Their identities were removed on arrival, as was their
freedom and if pregnant, eventually, their babies.
This chapter considers how the performance staged the containment of
Magdalenes as well as the containment of social intervention through
strategies of silence and fear. The performance directly disrupts ‘The Rule
of Silence’21 (2001, 23–24); an official policy implemented in Irish
convents throughout the twentieth century to control and subjugate

Magdalene ‘penitents’. This blanket ‘Rule of Silence’ was as essential to
the public sphere as it was within the convents. Through its operation, it
ensured that the trauma of Magdalene containment (as well as the wider
traumatic institutionalisation of the population, but this chapter focuses
on the laundries specifically), remains contained within dominant narra-
tives of history which continue to circulate within official discourse and
state education.
Institutional histories on the island of Ireland, particularly throughout
the twentieth century, exist on a liminal tightrope of ‘knowing and not
knowing’. As memory scholar Emilie Pine tells, ‘From 1980 to 2010 Irish
culture has undergone a major shift in terms of the representation of the
past’,22 resulting in Irish society ‘obsessed’ with the past and ‘haunted’ by
trauma. Significantly however, Pine draws attention to the marked differ-
ence in tone that distinguishes recent remembrance culture from early
twentieth-century dynamics, maintaining ‘In contrast to the heroic past of
early-twentieth-century nationalism, the most recent thirty-year phase of

Irish remembrance culture looks back instead to a degraded past, stimulat-
ing the present by provoking the desire to escape that past’ (7).
Within this context, I employ the trauma paradigm as a framework
which includes both psychic and physical wounds. In The Trauma Question,
Luckhurst notes that from the late nineteenth century ‘the drift of trauma
from the physical to the mental realm […] would start taking place’ (2008,
2–3), with the result that ‘The predominant popular connotations of
trauma now circle around metaphors of psychic scars and mental wounds’
(3). Yet this critique observes that in Laundry, ANU conveyed the wounds
of the ‘penitents’ in terms of their physical and psychic contexts, and thus,
they must be analysed in conjunction. In the context of Magdalene history,
many of the women were incarcerated due to corporeal experiences of
prostitution, pregnancy, sexual abuse, physical disability, and poverty. Thus,
physical wounds are as central to this performance and history as mental
scars. Though this study does not assume that pregnancy is necessarily con-
sidered a wound, however in some Magdalene pregnancies, sexual assault
could be the starting point for the pregnancy. While Luckhurst notes the
dominant connotations of trauma refer to metaphors of ‘psychic scars’, he
also maintains that, ‘Indeed, it is useful to retain a sense that meanings of
trauma have stalled somewhere between the physical and the psychical’ (3).
In summary, the paradigms of trauma theory cannot be concluded or fixed
as they reflect and negotiate the magnitude of lived suffering and intergen-
erational legacy. Luckhurst identifies ‘where the lines feeding notions of
cultural trauma converge: the problem of aesthetics “after Auschwitz”; the
aporia of representation in poststructuralism; the diverse models of trauma
developed by, and in the wake of, Freud’ (2008, 13). In terms of secondary
trauma, one might speak more of the mental trauma that impacts families,
friends, those working in the laundries or associated with their mainte-
nance, and the wider community. As Luckhurst details:
Collectives, whether they are political activists, survivor groups, or ethnic,

regional or national formations unite around the re-experiencing of their
woundedness. Histories of gender, sexual or racial violence have indubitable
reasons for finding explanatory power in ideas of trauma, yet traumatic iden-
tity is now also commonly argued to be at the root of many national collec-
tive memories […]To Andreas Huyssen, it seemed as if the entire twentieth
century was marked under the sign of ‘historical trauma’ (Huyssen 2003: 8).
(2008, 1–2)
126 M. HAUGHTON
Analysis of this landmark Irish performance conveys how these staple rules
of silence and invisibility, fundamental to the daily operation of these
crimes and their post-traumatic experience, ultimately ensured religious,
political and social complicity in the discrimination, slave labour and force-
ful imprisonment of these vulnerable women. Entering Magdalene history
through the academic critique of performance and research from the lim-
ited documents relating to it not only begins to reveal the individualised
traumas of the women incarcerated and their orphaned children, it
addresses various traumas entangled with cultural and religious traditions
which permeate the everyday customs, rituals and social etiquette in mod-
ern Ireland, and to an extent, contemporary Ireland. Indeed, while this
chapter analyses the performance of Laundry in this north Dublin city
centre location, one must remember this history is related to the histories
of laundries in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia. Through
radical staging strategies which resituated the bodies of the audience to
engage directly with the bodies of the performers, Laundry addressed,
what Caruth maintains, ‘that history, like trauma, is never simply one’s
own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s
traumas’ (1996, 24). Furthermore, through staging the performance in
the site those very histories were located:
a new mode of seeing and of listening—a seeing and a listening from the site
of trauma—is opened up to us as spectators […][the performance is] offered
as the very possibility, in a catastrophic era, of a link between cultures. What
we see and what we hear […] resonates beyond what we can know and
understand; but it is in the event of this incomprehension and in our depar-
ture from sense and understanding that our own witnessing may indeed
begin to take place. (1996, 56)
Laundry provoked questions for its audiences, such as, what are the differ-
ences between the women incarcerated and the attending audience? Are
they of class, fortune and generation, or acts of deviance and God’s retri-
bution? It positioned the audience to consider, why her, and why not me?
It revealed how high walls can facilitate centuries of torture in communi-
ties which prided themselves on obeying Christian edicts of love thy
neighbour, compassion and forgiveness. Ultimately, it signalled how
hypocrisy, despair and abuse can be known yet function as if it were
unknown. Indeed, sometimes a jolt to an individual and a society is
required to disrupt naturalised patterns of viewing and the continual reas-
sertion of dominant value-systems, which become normalised as part of

wider strategies. Sometimes it can take a jolt to ‘know’, following a long
period of ‘not knowing’ that one has acted as a witness to torture, slavery,
incarceration, abuse, kidnapping and human trafficking. Many individuals
tried to ‘jolt’ the authorities and wider society to these events, but their
claims routinely fell on deaf ears. Silence in Ireland is both power and
poison, and deeply ingrained in policies of education, cultural politics, and
religion. In Brian Singleton’s extensive research on ANU’s Monto Cycle,
he theorises this jolt for its audiences as awakening ‘a heightened sense of
consciousness’.23 The potential affect of this is so great, Singleton pro-
poses that ‘Through these dramaturgical strategies of intimacy and direct
engagement, spectators come away from the performances often with vis-
ceral phenomenological responses, having had direct experience of not
necessarily witnessing a performance but of experiencing it from within’
(2016, 4–5).
The jolts informing Irish society are indeed, equally extensive. For
example, in 2002, the Redress Board was set up under the Residential
Institutions Redress Act (2002), following the broadcast of a three-part
documentary series States of Fear (1999) on RTÉ. The goal of the Redress
Board was ‘to make fair and reasonable awards to persons who, as chil-
dren, were abused while resident in industrial schools, reformatories and
other institutions subject to state regulation or inspection’.24 The
Magdalene laundries were not included, as the state claimed they were run
solely by religious organisations without state involvement. Yet in 2011,
repeated calls (or jolts) came from United Nations Committee Against
Torture (UNCAT) urging the Irish State to launch an official inquiry into
state involvement in Magdalene institutions. The state inquiry and conse-
quent McAleese Report25 was not tasked with making recommendations
or findings, and refers to the survivors’ testimonies as ‘stories’, which it
does not include as evidence. It highlights in the introduction that none
of the women interviewed made allegations of sexual abuse against the
Sisters (Introduction, ‘Conditions in the Laundries’) though it chooses
not to highlight the extent of verbal and psychological abuse they did
testify to in the full report,26 or that many of them were sent to the laun-
dries following an experience of sexual assault.
In the north of Ireland, the ‘Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse
Bill’27 was passed by the Assembly in December 2012. Public hearings
began in 2014. Similar to the Redress Board in the Republic of Ireland in
2002, this inquiry does not include Magdalene laundries. Similar to calls
128 M. HAUGHTON
by Amnesty and UNCAT regarding Magdalene history in the Republic, a

recent Northern Irish Amnesty Report28 outlines reasons arguing for their
inclusion, resulting from women’s experiences in the twelve laundries and
similar institutions which were operational in the north of Ireland, with
the alleged involvement of the then-RUC police.
This silencing of ‘outcast’ women and related silencing of the public to
discuss the silencing of outcast women, strengthens the representation of
pure Irish womanhood that is critically bound up with the representation
of the Irish state. Through attempting to interrogate and analyse Laundry,
one of the few events in Irish history which explores Magdalene experi-
ence, one must address Magdalene history as part of a national narrative
built upon multiple traumas, which include the scars from centuries of
poverty, destitution, colonial rule, religious rule, emigration and hardship.
Institutionalisation, including Magdalene asylums, Mother and Baby
homes, orphanages, industrial schools, and psychiatric hospitals, reflects a
traumatic response to a traumatic history, the remnants of which continue
to penetrate the ideologies, laws, traditions and habits of contemporary
Irish society, consciously and unconsciously. They have been excluded
from popular historical narratives as society sought the ‘freedom of forget-
ting’ (Caruth 1996, 32), but unmarked graves, such as those at the centre
of the High Park Convent controversy and the Tuam Babies scandal,29
prove that they cannot be forgotten. The silenced voices of history’s vic-
tims emerge from their graves.
4.3 Performing Silence and Invisibility: Artistic,

Political and Critical Contexts
Irish Magdalene history has been a subject of immense power for the few
plays, books and films in the latter half of the twentieth century which
examined it. Notable artistic responses to Magdalene history include
Máiréad Ni Ghráda’s An Triail (1964), written in the Irish language,
which centres around a young woman who becomes pregnant by the local
primary school teacher, a married man, and the tough consequences she
suffers thereafter. Playwright, poet and artist, Patricia Burke-Brogan,
wrote Eclipsed (1992) in the wake of her experience as a novice in a West
of Ireland convent, where she was sent to work in a nearby Magdalene
laundry for a short period.30 To date, Eclipsed has received 103 produc-
tions in Ireland and internationally (Interview, 2013). The feature film
The Magdalene Sisters (2002), written and directed by Peter Mullan, offers
an account of the dehumanising conditions of life in the laundries, draw-
ing from the documentary States of Fear. In 2010, the Abbey Theatre
staged the documentary play No Escape directed by Mary Raftery based on
the publication of the Ryan Report in 2009, as part of their ‘The Darkest
Corner’ Series. Philomena (2013), a feature film written by Steve Coogan
and Jeff Pope, and directed by Stephen Frears, is adapted from the novel
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2011) by Martin Sixsmith. Both novel
and film map the biographical history of an Irish Magdalene survivor
Philomena Lee, now living in England, whose three-year-old son was
adopted by an American couple while she was incarcerated. Following 50
years of silence regarding her child born out of wedlock, Lee’s adult
daughter from her later marriage instigates the search for him with the
assistance of journalist Martin Sixsmith, only to discover the convent
which managed the adoption process actively prevented both mother and
son from contact, though they had both requested contact through the
convent. The film also alleges that Magdalene infants were sold to wealthy
families internationally.
However, with each of these significant works, there remains a sense of
distance between the production and the audience. These works are stim-
ulated by history for performance on stage or screen, but there remains a
physical separation between the performers and the audience in their seats
in the theatre or observing a film. Part of Laundry’s potency lies in the
staging of testimonies and recovered histories in the very building those
experiences were contained in. This renegotiates the ‘suspension of disbe-
lief’ often assumed to underlie the theatrical event; the re-presentations
were drawn from historical record, and the setting was a functioning laun-
dry. This also renegotiates the rules governing Magdalene experience in
Irish society. Thus, rather than the women’s silence, the performers spoke
directly to audience participants. Instead of the women’s absence and
invisibility, they were seen, acknowledged and they offered physical con-
tact. Significantly, rather than a concrete barrier separating the women
from public life such as the high walls which typically surround these laun-
dries, members of the public crossed this threshold and entered them,
contesting the boundary between public citizens and hidden citizens. For
a brief time, audience participants were positioned to consider consciously,
and feel, a lifetime of stripped constitutional freedoms, silence, slavery and
isolation. As an Irish audience member, I entered the convent building as
a consumer who bought a theatre ticket as part of The Ulster Bank Dublin
130 M. HAUGHTON
Theatre Festival 2011, and exited it as a citizen, confused and horrified by

my shared history with a regime characterised by such unjust despair to
the weak and struggling members of Irish society.
Both spiritual and secular rule in Ireland have injected the role of wom-
anhood in Irish society with mythological and symbolic functions, further
established (and often contested) by Irish theatre history to the detriment
of material womanhood in Ireland. Cultural, political and religious shap-
ing of gender roles have resulted in a normalisation of the subjugation of
women in Irish public life throughout the twentieth-century. As Irish the-
atre theorist Melissa Sihra details:
The social and cultural position of women has historically been one of sym-
bolic centrality and subjective disavowal as both colonial ideology and
nationalist movements promoted feminized concepts of the nation, while
subordinating women in everyday life.31
The questions regarding further investigation into the generations of

Magdalene infants adopted and exported, and the inclusion of Magdalene
history in dominant and visible narratives of Irish history remain unan-
swered. To date, Magdalene history is most marked by its absence in offi-
cial discourses.
Magdalene history will continue to haunt Irish and international mem-
ories (as questions regarding Magdalene laundries in the UK, the United
States, and Australia continue to emerge at this time of writing), through
both its presence and absence. Indeed, the recent confirmation by state
authorities of an investigation into widespread illegal adoptions in Ireland
as recently as the 1970s (though no prosecutions have occurred due to
lack of evidence32) ensures this complex history is scratching its way to the
surface of Irish politics, demanding action. Various forces vie for dominion
of the female body and its fruit once more, to regulate its territory and
write its history.
This study maintains that a culture of silence and sexual oppression in
Ireland was facilitated and intensified by the power of ideology, instituted
not only by major hegemonic institutions, but reproduced through daily
life and habit by communities, families and individual men and women.
Power operates in a complex manner, as Foucault details:
Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it

comes from everywhere […] power is not an institution, and not a structure;
neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one
attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. (1998, 93)
Society becomes divided into useful and non-useful citizens. Indeed, non-
useful citizens in twentieth-century Ireland included those who did not
embody or produce narratives complimentary to the hegemonic discourses
of church and state. Useful citizens are productive and docile, and the
‘others’ can be located in prisons, mental asylums or variations of these,
away from town centres, also detailed in Foucault’s Madness and
Civilization. Indeed, historians detail that it was mostly women’s female
relatives who deposited them at the laundries,33 and through the high
walls of convents, the majority of Irish society actively did not look past
them. The conditioning of Irish society to perform according to the strict
rules of Catholicism and social conservatism ensured the swift and often
permanent removal of female bodies which acted as evidence that the Irish
populace were sexually active outside of wedlock, or that they were too
much of a burden on a family’s finances or respectability to remain as part
of the unit proper.
Magdalene history is international history, not least as many of the Irish
Magdalene penitents’ children were adopted by families outside of Ireland,
as James M. Smith has detailed in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the
Nation’s Architecture of Containment. Smith provides global context, not-
ing ‘The first asylum for fallen women in the United States, the Magdalen
Society in Philadelphia, was founded in 1800 and closed its doors in
1916.’34 In Ireland, those doors closed in 1996, except for the remaining
women (approximately 100) who currently remain in residence in con-
vents with the Sisters (JFM). Consequently, this visual, visceral and
embodied experience of Laundry is of elevated social importance as well
as of major artistic merit. The continual post-performance efficacy experi-
enced by Laundry’s audience ensures that while the actual performance
may be ephemeral, the memory and consequence of this performance lives
on. My experience cannot be universal nor my performance analysis wholly
objective, but I will detail my subjective experience of this production as
critically as I can. Regardless, the experience is not entirely exclusive to me
either: reviews, commentary and continued debate regarding the impact
of the production provide this assurance.
Laundry focused on conveying the histories of the Magdalene peni-
tents in a manner that produced a visceral, embodied and affective experi-
132 M. HAUGHTON
ence for the audience. Indeed, one cannot deny a history of trauma
enacted in front of one’s eyes. One cannot forget the poisonous smell of
carbolic soap (distributed to the penitents) that infiltrates the senses the
moment the front double doors are shut and bolted. One cannot rebuff
the unexpected grief that bubbles up from an overpowering experience of
silence and isolation in performance. One cannot help but shudder while
gasping for fresh air in a building locked tight which forbids open win-
dows and bright light, observing the shadowy and ghostly movements
behind sturdy doors. Most significantly, one cannot release the emotional
connection that is forged between audience participant, performer and
history. As audience participants help one ‘penitent’ bathe and another
escape, dance with a young woman whose light of rebellion had not yet
been defeated in her burning eyes, and listen to the story of an elderly
penitent who sought refuge in the convent in her final years, one may
realise their history is not only a narrative of national history or interna-
tional history, but a history which ties victim and perpetrator, performer
and spectator, together in time and space. In this way, as Pamela Howard
observes, ‘Plays transcend geographic boundaries, and belong not to
nations but to audiences.’35
Thus, the unacknowledged crimes of the Irish authorities, spiritual and
secular, transfer to the negligence and complicity of Irish society. While
the laundries did close throughout the late twentieth century, the domi-
nant reason is attributed to the commonplace arrival of washing machines
in the domestic sphere, not a public outcry of injustice (Finnegan 1996,
2). Magdalene history began on the island of Ireland in 1767. It has crept
in and out of official narratives since, though in sombre and hushed dia-
logues, as the shame of ‘fallen’ and ‘outcast’ women became more suitable
to public silence then discourse. In 2011, ANU’s Laundry created a space
for audience participants to witness, acknowledge, engage with, and feel,
this section of Irish history and the oppressive central to it, which resulted
in slavery, incarceration, premature death and lost children in an unknown,
and unquantifiable, magnitude.
4.4 ANU, Laundry, and Irish Theatre

Louise Lowe, director of Laundry, is the fourth generation of her family
born and raised in Dublin’s struggling north city centre. Laundry is part
two of the devised and collaborative Monto Cycle by ANU Productions,
the company Lowe established with visual artist and fellow artistic director
Owen Boss in 2009. The Monto Cycle constitutes a quartet of perfor-

mances, with each segment mapping the histories and community testimo-
nies of the area throughout four major regenerations schemes spanning
1925–2014. Singleton navigates the tensions and complexities of
middle-class audiences visiting The Monto for performance encounters,
referring to concepts such as ‘dark tourism’ which involves ‘bringing spec-
tators to sites of death or trauma, and the dilemmas associated with curat-
ing the engagement of tourists in the commodification and consumption
of past traumatic events’ (2016, 5), as well as referring to Lyn Gardner’s
queries on ‘poverty porn’ in contemporary British theatre. However, ANU
is extremely aware of these issues and tensions, and speaks to them directly.
ANU is dedicated to creating ‘ethical encounters’ (Lowe Interview, 2012)
where the audience will experience ‘moments of communion’ (Interview,
2012). They do not fictionalise their work; rather they re-present testimo-
nies to dramatise the relationship between people and place. Heavily influ-
enced by visual art, dance theatre, and the stories of place, they seek to
develop ‘Cubist dramaturgy—exposing all sides simultaneously’ (Interview,
2012) as well as creating a company ethic where performers become ‘dra-
maturgs of their own work’ (Interview, 2012). The Monto Cycle presents
remnants of postcolonial experience in postdramatic36 and immersive form,
and thus, dramatic histories of Ireland become subject to scrutiny in new
light.37 As Singleton summarises, ‘the strategies of empathy, implication
and agency used in the performances, ensured spectators experienced The
Monto as both direct and prosthetic reality, and far removed from the
spectral voyeurism of ‘dark tourism’ (2016, 5).
By continually placing the spectator at the centre of their work, and
encouraging each spectator to engage with the performance, this form
works to create an experience specific to each individual. Each audience
participant has the opportunity to participate in the writing of the perfor-
mance. The event relies on the fundamental and embodied act of presence
as audience participants experience each performance independently. On
the one hand I must depend on the term ‘spectator’ for this analysis as
each person who participated in the performance did so without the com-
pany of a group; there was no audience as such. Yet, much more was
required from each participant than the act of spectatorship as the event
constituted a major personal experience between each performer and per-
son in attendance; is there such vocabulary to even describe or present the
role of the participant in this instance? It was certainly not that of a con-
ventional theatrical production. As Lehmann declares, ‘The new theatre,
134 M. HAUGHTON
one hears and reads, is not this and not that and not the other, but there
is a lack of categories and words to define or even describe what it is in any
positive terms’ (2006, 19). Thus, I must refer to any individual who expe-
rienced the event as a participant though this term may not be wholly
suitable either. While the performance offered participants the chance to
participate in the performance to varying degrees, it did not enforce
participation.
Part one of the Cycle, World End’s Lane (2010), re-presented ‘the
Monto’ where it was purported to house approximately 1600 prostitutes
in one square mile at its peak, working from four main brothels, ruled by
four Madams. On 14 April 1925, this red-light district was shut down by
Frank Duff ’s Legion of Mary38 and the police, bearing torches and fire
in a manner described as ‘a witchhunt’ (Interview, 2012). Nailing cruci-
fixes to doorways, Duff decried Monto ‘a nest of Satan’ where souls
needed to be saved. However, their souls were therein entrusted to the
Roman Catholic convents. Fourteen beds had been allocated in a hostel
on Leeson Street in Dublin’s south city centre, while an unknown num-
ber were directly transferred into the lucrative laundries (Lowe Interview,
2012). Thus, from sex workers to God workers, or, from commercial
and sexual possession of the female body to religious control, a life sen-
tence was imposed upon these women. When death came it was not
acknowledged nor their burial places marked. This denial of their deaths
and their lives, ironically, is what gave voice to them, as Celtic Tiger
property developers discovered human remains while digging up land
they bought from High Park Convent in Dublin, following the Sisters’
misfortune on the stock exchange (Raftery, Guardian). Of the 155 bod-
ies found (and many believe more exist), 22 cannot be identified, includ-
ing three children discovered in plaster casts. One skeleton lacks a skull
(JFM). Yet, the discovery of unidentified human remains in a public
space was never treated as a crime scene. These women and children
were speaking from the grave, affirming their presence in a world that
had only noted their absence.
Hence, part one of the Cycle—the closing down of Europe’s red-light
capital alongside the departure of the British administration in Ireland (as
authorities at the time declared that there would not be custom for such
evil business in the wake of their exit), stimulated part two of the Cycle,
Laundry. Part three, The Boys of Foley Street premiered in the Dublin
Theatre Festival 2012, and scenes from part four, Vardo, were presented
as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival 2014. A comprehensive and engag-
ing critique of each production independently and in conjunction can be

accessed in Brian Singleton’s ANU Productions: The Monto Cycle.
4.5 Laundry: Shadows of Lives, Shadows of Space

Through the staging of the Monto Cycle, ANU set in motion a train of
critically artistic explorative impulses, designed initially to reveal the stories
of this place, which are not well documented in official histories and rarely
included in contemporary cultural discourse, except when focus is turned
to urban disadvantage or crime. Howard declares that ‘In many cases, it is
destruction through war or time that reveals the potential of a space. It is
as though when the skin of a city is broken, its veins are revealed, and
theatre makers, always opportunists, leap in to fill the gap’ (2009, 7). As
ever, performance produces more and beyond that what their auteurs
intended for or prepared. In What is Scenography? Howard argues:
Architecture and the performing space are always set in a context. To under-
stand this, it is important to research and understand the history of the
space. What secrets do these walls tell? For stones speak, and space holds
memories. In this way the dramaturgy of the space is created. (2009, 21)
Indeed, the stones of the Gloucester Street laundry spoke, as did the stale
air within the building that was dense with dust, the lingering DNA of its
past inhabitants, and the architectural archive of a history of forced incar-
ceration. When ANU opened the doors of the building, they opened the
doors of Magdalene history, Irish politics, Roman Catholic rule, and some
kind of suppressed yearning for these histories to be accounted for,
acknowledged and released; to be known. This performance also tells of
the longest-running laundry in Ireland and through its specific locale,
highlights how many of these women became incarcerated as much
because of their vulnerable background as their present ‘trouble’ of pros-
titution or pregnancy.
Laundry staged Howard’s contention that ‘A space is a living personal-
ity with a past, present and future’ (2009, 2), and by re-presenting the past
in the present, and thus, questioning the future of Magdalene narratives in
official discourse and documentation, the performance showed how ‘a
designated theatre space allows an anonymous congregation to become a
community’ (2009, 8). In this case, participants experienced each scene
individually and thus any sense of community that was fostered existed not
136 M. HAUGHTON
only between the other participants one saw in passing, but with the per-
formers, the memories of Magdalene experience they staged and evoked,
and the wider community who live beside this abandoned building. The
performance demonstrated how ‘the on and offstage world, [are] co-
existing, dependent on each other yet invisible to the public’ (2009, xxiii).
In short, the performance of the civic environment of the performance,
the venue and its architecture, and the energies designed and trapped
within the space, were not only central scenographic elements to the per-
formance as a whole, but remain actively political. The place and spaces of
the laundry building in the Monto region constitute much of the perfor-
mance; they are history, memory, and record; the very archives allegedly
absent from canonical narratives.
Laundry re-presented the daily routine of the lives of the women who
lived and worked in that particular laundry. The action was not overtly
theatrical in any traditional sense but the performance remained dramati-
cally powerful due to where it was taking place. ANU researched historical
accounts of these women and developed each performance according to
personal testimonies detailed in the JFM archives they were given access
to, oral histories retrieved from the local community where Lowe was
raised, and histories documented by a local historian, Terry Fagan of the
North Inner City Folklore Project. The production focused on ‘witness-
ing’ the female body in a closed punitive space in a quiet and constrained
manner, reinforcing the sense of tragedy inherent in this situation. It rein-
stated the reality that the women’s lives were quiet hidden lives with no
access to political power or opportunities to communicate. The last
women were admitted to the Gloucester Street Laundry in 1995 and the
building was closed in 1996.39
Lowe argues vehemently, ‘It should matter that you are there.’40 Noting
that the role and experience of the participant is central to the artistic and
personal experience of the performance resonates with Peggy Phelan’s
claim in Unmarked that ‘Performance implicates the real through the
presence of living bodies.’41 However, ANU not only considers the living
bodies which perform but the living bodies traditionally seated en masse
covered by darkness, away from all but visual contact with the stage. By
renegotiating the relationship between performer and participant through
including the participant in the performance, and staging the performance
not in a commercial theatre venue but in a haunting historical landmark,
the company urged each participant to realise the importance attached to
their presence at this event. If Magdalene history could not enter the pub-
lic sphere due to the lifetimes of silence which locked it up, then the public
will have to enter Magdalene history.
From my experience and memory, a total of 15 micro-performances
took place from when I arrived at the site of performance to when I left.
Performance One: I consider arriving at the venue and waiting to enter
the building the first part of the performance. I waited on a seat outside
and observed other audience members exit the building approximately
every five minutes, carrying linen in the company of a ‘Maggie’ (pejorative
colloquial abbreviation for a Magdalene) and being pushed into a waiting
taxi as she attempted escape. At the same time, local residents watched the
waiting participants as we watched them. In this way, the social history of
the area was as performative as the performance taking place inside the
convent building. Foucault argues that by analysing how space has been
organised, categorised, managed and encoded, one could ‘write the whole
history of a country, of a culture, of a society’.42 Observing the history of
this space indeed details the history of hidden and hushed-up Irish cul-
ture. Tattered buildings, litter and graffiti surrounded the laundry, not
ocean views, Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) clubs or shopping chains;
and as such situated the laundry and the penitents’ lives in a neglected and
forgotten place, outside the main focus of national activity and
representation.
Observing such direct close contact with the performers and realising I
would be pushed into a car travelling to an unknown venue certainly
heightened my critical interest but also signalled this was not a perfor-
mance I could necessarily control my participation in. There were no fixed
seats, dimmed lights and camaraderie with other patrons. In this instance,
the number of performers would be greater than the number of audience
members and not due to a ‘poor house’ but to ensure this was a uniquely
personal experience for each person. Consequently, it arguably would
become a performance never forgotten by the few who saw it, which is
precisely the political issue at stake by representing the Magdalenes, hid-
den for decades. Irish authorities and society tried to deny and forget their
incarceration. Forgetting these people, for some, may be easily done; as
the women entered the laundries they were re-named.
Performance Two: Daylight disappeared as the heavy bolted doors
opened and the two other participants and I were ushered into the dark
reception hall with an extremely distinctive and overbearing smell (later to
be identified as the carbolic soap distributed to the women in the laun-
dries). They were immediately directed to small rooms right and left of
138 M. HAUGHTON
the first entrance hall while I waited for approximately ten minutes in
silence with a young man tending to the front door. Cold tiles, the smell
of carbolic soap, a high ceiling, whispered sounds and shadowy move-
ments taking place behind the faded glass double doors leading to the rest
of the building created an overwhelming sense of darkness and dread. For
the many Irish citizens who have been educated in Catholic institutions,
entering such a building could be simultaneously familiar and alien. The
design and atmosphere, incorporating subtle sound and scent injections,
immediately evokes the memory of my own convent education and yet it
is a system many can no longer connect with in the wake of such major
failures in pastoral care, religious guidance, gender discrimination and
totalitarian rule. Standing still in that front foyer while waiting to enter
the other rooms facilitated an encounter with walls, locked doors, and
silence. Ten minutes of ‘real’ time became distorted and heavy. It brought
the realisation that as a participant in this production, I was acting as wit-
ness to a history of human torture and despair. Before he reopened the
doors to the rooms he spoke, ‘People said they didn’t know what was
going on. Would you have done anything?’ Hence, I was no longer a
spectator in a theatrical imagined performance but a complicit member of
Irish society, asked to consider the limits of my own social responsibility
and intervention.
Performances Three and Four: These performances took place in the
small side rooms connected to the front reception hall. These rooms
housed the relatives and friends who had sent their female folk into the
laundries, or came searching for them. Small window-hatches opened
onto the main street, allowing fresh air to travel in and mingle with the
dense smell of used soap but also juxtaposed the incarceration and tower-
ing silence of that inner space with the daily rhythms and conversations of
passers-by. The room on the right housed who initially may have been
assumed as a distraught boyfriend, but it transpired this character was
based on a brother, Noel Walsh, searching for his sister Alice. Their father
had delivered her to the laundry while Noel was working in England.43
Noel never found her though ‘Alice’ forms part of a later scene.
A man, approximately forty-five to fifty years old, was present in the
room on the left.44 His performance began quietly; he stood with his back
to the wall looking tense and clutching a pink scarf. I sat on a chair in very
close proximity to him; there was no conversation though I felt I could
have spoken to him had I wished to. After a few minutes of tense silence
passed, he began to hold his head in his hands and then lean his head, fac-
ing inwards, towards the wall in evident anguish. As the door opened for
me to leave, he caught me by the arm, looked me in the eye, and said
‘What was I supposed to do?’
Performance Five: I was directed to the second reception hall where a
young penitent listed the names of 225 Magdalenes listed as resident in
this laundry in the 1911 Irish Census and instructed me on four particular
names I had to remember. Each participant was given four different names
of Magdalene women to remember and repeat out loud, incorporating the
act of remembrance into the act of witnessing. Indeed, one participant
heard the name of her birth mother being read out during this scene
(Interview, 2012). Once the names were listed and repeated, I was directed
to an old filing cabinet which contained extra bars of soap and clips of
human hair; I was instructed to look through it and invited to leave some
of my own. Sifting through the human hair, in remembrance of those who
had lived their lives in a place of punishment, neglect and slave labour,
ensured my personal connection and thus personal responsibility for their
memory was tightening.
Naming is an essential component in strategies of control. Naming has
been an integral part of the numerous regenerations projects related to
Monto, as it has been an integral part of Irish history and politics. From a
colony of the British Empire to a dominion of the Commonwealth as The
Irish Free State to the present day 26-county Ireland, naming has cost the
Irish nation terror, trauma and human life. Magdalene penitents were
called promiscuous, sinful, whores, shameful and more. Their children
were referred to as illegitimate, orphans, bastards and in the end, children
for export to the UK, America, Australia and many other places. Laundry
exposes another conflict of naming and identity; Gloucester Street became
Séan McDermott Street and World End’s Lane became Liberty Corner.
Yet each regeneration attempt of this area has failed and, as Lowe describes
her home-place, ‘It’s a pocketplace, insular, shut off from the hub’
(Interview, 2012). If the experience of humanity can inform a place, and
possibly leave a trace through objects, memory and DNA, then perhaps
the history and trauma of this area is too inscribed in its bricks, mortar and
energy. Moreover, perhaps this locale still suffers from discrimination in
official discourse and social investment to enter any phase of transforma-
tive renewal, while the ghosts and histories resident there remain con-
tained within its urban coordinates, and not fully accounted for in the
established discourses of national history, as the liminal tightrope of
‘knowing and not knowing’ prevails.
140 M. HAUGHTON
Performance Six: As I was instructed to enter the room right of the

second reception hall, another audience participant exited it crying. In this
room another young Magdalene was performing her daily ritual; bathing.
It was a bath of cold water mixed with what appeared as breast milk,
expressed by her leaking breasts. From ANU’s research, the team learned
that hundreds of women had died from mastitis, an infection that often
occurs in the breasts following breastfeeding, which can be treated with
antibiotics. I was instructed by her, not through dialogue but her hand
gestures, to unwrap the cloth that covered her chest and help her into the
bath where she shivered and quietly wept. I then helped her to get out of
the bath and re-wrap her chest. Being faced with a shivering naked vulner-
able body and instructed to wrap and cover her breasts symbolises the
fragility of these women in this repressive place and the policy to deny
evidence of their motherhood. Silently but steadfastly observing this inter-
action was a stage manager, dressed similarly to a nun, sitting on a stool
while reading a book and eating an apple. Upon reflection, there is a tragi-
cally ironic connection in this encounter between the British Empire’s
colonisation and oppression of the island of Ireland, re-naming the land-
scape and controlling social movement and the Irish authorities colonising
these women, denying their identities, controlling the landscape of their
bodies and removing them from free society.
Performance Seven: Performance seven took place in the room oppo-
site, where seven women sat on chairs and repeated sections from the
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.45 A dim light
offered the participant observation as there were no windows. Here, ANU
attempted to voice the rights denied to these penitents, rights many had
not been aware they were entitled to. Though they were voicing their
rights, their eyes were dead, staring blankly at the wall, the floor, or into
space; waiting, waiting, waiting for the seconds to become minutes, the
minutes to become hours, the hours to become days, months, years and
decades. The remaining survivors, and indeed some of their families, are
still waiting.
Performances Eight and Nine: These performances foregrounded the
complexities and politics of visibility. Both performances required the
spectator to participate from another foyer area. Performance eight, ‘Alice
Through the Looking-Glass’ as Lowe calls it, was devised from the memo-
ries of Lowe’s friend and neighbour Sandra Walsh. Sandra’s aunt Alice
Walsh lived with her family directly across the road from the Gloucester
Street laundry in the 1960s and tried to hide her pregnancy from her fam-
ily. At approximately six months pregnant her father discovered her secret
and forced her to enter the laundry. Local testimony declares that Alice
had fought him every step of the way, kicking and screaming through the
streets and into the convent (Interview, 2012). Years later, her brother
Noel Walsh returned from work on a building site in Birmingham and
learned of his sister’s fate. He tried to retrieve her from the laundry, but
was informed by the nuns there was no record of her entry or any child.
Alice had disappeared. In Finnegan’s research, she discusses convent lit-
erature where the policing of keeping good workers is outlined, ‘This dis-
tasteful practice of retaining “hard workers” in the laundries and
discouraging their departure—even from short-term Homes—is referred
to frequently in the literature’ (Finnegan 2001, 35). Perhaps Alice was a
hard worker.
The participant sat on a chair and observed a wall of mirror constructed
from Perspex facing them. However, one’s reflection in this mirror began
to fade and one could see a young woman behind this ‘wall’. She moved
painstakingly slowly toward the mirror-wall, stretching out her arm as if to
touch you and opening her mouth in an effort to speak or scream. As she
moved an eerie blue light shone behind her. The mirror-wall alternated
between reflecting the participant’s reflection to revealing this trapped
person behind the wall. The crackle and hum of washing machines inter-
rupted the otherwise resounding silence. Increasingly, as one moved from
scene to scene, the sound design portrayed much of the rhythms and sen-
sory actualities of Magdalene experience. As conversation was banned
between penitents from dawn to dusk, with nuns ubiquitously monitoring
their work, meal times, and dormitories, their silence is a major part of the
sound design. Indeed, without the distraction of dialogue, one’s other
senses are analytically and viscerally heightened, such as engagement
through sight, smell, touch and taste. Howard maintains that:
Space and sound are partners. Scenographers have to embrace sound as a

visual element when evaluating the quality of a potential performing space.
Not just for audibility, but for the ability to create a soundscape that can give
the spectators contextual information that does not need to be repeated
visually. (2009, 16)
As the performance offered very little dialogue, other elements of the

sound design became more pronounced, in particular, the consistent soft
humming of the laundry machines, and indeed, the opening and closing
142 M. HAUGHTON
of heavy bolted doors. While minimal dialogue was spoken by the per-
formers in soft tones, the general vocal silence only became disrupted by
the tears of the audience participants. In the side rooms near the main
entrance to the convent, the open windows, though notably small, allowed
snippets of conversations to wash into the space from passers-by outside.
These conversations were ordinary, but their effect was cruel. It high-
lighted once more, that to the public social world, the Magdalenes were
not only silent, but invisible, hidden and trapped by the walls of their
institutions.
For performance nine, the participant was instructed by a ‘passing’
Magdalene to look through peepholes on the opposite side of the foyer.
The peepholes had been cut out of another constructed wall. Peering
through the hole, the scene was striking by the absence of women. In the
darkness and emptiness, what remained were empty cots and high chairs;
furniture their children had needed until they were put into orphanages or
adopted. This scene was devised from the team’s discovery of a crèche
within the laundry, a room full of highchairs, toys and most notably, no
windows. Laundry not only voiced the stories of these forgotten women,
but also of their children, who may never have been able to find their birth
mother (and father) as a result of the denial of identity that was integral to
Magdalene life. Since 1900, the convents have refused to release the names
of the penitent women detained (‘Short Information Sheet’, JFM).
However, some adoptees have traced their birth mothers. In 2012, one of
those adopted, Samantha Long, brought her story into the public sphere.
She traced her mother to the laundry on Seán McDermott Street, where
this production was staged, and communicated her mother’s history to
Senator McAleese. In this case however, Samantha Long’s mother was not
sent into the laundry because she was pregnant, but because she had been
deemed ‘mentally unfit for education, but fit for work’. When her mother,
Margaret Bullen, entered the laundry and was under the care of the con-
vent, she became pregnant, twice.46 After 35 years of labour, she died from
a disease attacking her kidneys and liver, associated with exposure to
industrial-strength chemicals. Her children are still waiting for their moth-
er’s full records to be supplied to them.
Performances Ten, Eleven and Twelve: These all took place in the Church
part of the building at the back of the laundry. They were the final perfor-
mances to occur within the building. For performance ten, a widowed
Magdalene ‘Pauline’ sat in a pew and asked each participant to sit with her
for a while and hold her hand as she gently explained her circumstances.
She had been married for years but as her husband grew ill he was afraid
she would not cope living independently and urged her to enter a laundry
for protection and comfort in her later years. She had a bag of sweets in
her hand and offered one to her listener while shooting critical glances at
another Magdalene passing by, clearly on the run. This performance was
devised from a testimony where ‘Pauline’ had been grateful for the sanctu-
ary of the laundry and the company of the other women. Pauline had been
raised in the laundry after attacking a local Madam who had fostered her.
She left the laundry when she married. Before her husband died he told
her ‘You have been a good girl and a good wife’ and instructed her to
return to the laundry after his death (Interview, 2012). She initially tried
to live alone in their apartment but barricaded the door every night in a
constant state of fear. She eventually returned to the laundry which she felt
was a haven and also, a place where she would be remembered by the oth-
ers after her death.
Pauline instructed me to enter the confessional at the end of our con-
versation and as I let go of her hand I knew I did not want to enter that
confessional, even more so than usual. Waiting there was a young viva-
cious Magdalene with her boots kicked off and making a poor attempt at
scrubbing the walls. She informed me how she had been told whistling
attracted the devil, and so, she whistled and smiled. She reminisced on a
dance she had attended many years ago where she wore a beautiful dress
with a strap here, a hem like this and a neckline like so, and she took my
arms and we waltzed in the small room, dimly lit by candles. Evidently, the
tragedy here was that she would never wear another beautiful dress or
dance again and her vivacious spirit would eventually fade as she scrubbed
her days until death. Before I exited the confessional, she reaffirmed her
defiance against her confinement by whispering her ‘real’ name in my ear,
‘Christine’.
I was then directed towards a small room to the left of the pulpit and
on this journey one’s eyes are immediately drawn to the figure of Christ
hanging from up high, observing everyone below. The scenographic
design of church buildings offers a history of thought often appropriated
by stage design. Howard details that in scenography, the ‘vertical height
from above to indicate divine space, and the depth below the stage floor
as the demonic space’ (2009, 3–4). Looking up, one observes the figure
of Christ and the pictorial symbols of the Catholic faith. Looking down,
the hard floor tiles the Magdalenes scrubbed, and what may lie beneath,
who knows? However, it would be surprising if the unmarked mass graves
144 M. HAUGHTON
exposed at the High Park Convent in Dublin and the Tuam Mother and
Baby Home were isolated cases. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s
research concerning the spread of panoptic control from prison architec-
ture to all social spaces is immediately applicable. In essence, the power of
the panoptic structure is its gaze, ‘inspection functions ceaselessly. The
gaze is alert everywhere.’47 Foucault concludes that since the late eigh-
teenth century, modern Western civilisation has witnessed ‘the disappear-
ance of torture as public spectacle’ (1991, 7). His claim outlines while the
body remains the instrument on which official power networks inscribe
their law, the mode of regulating the body has shifted from physical puni-
tive methods to observation of the body in a panoptic infrastructure asso-
ciated with prison architecture. This development was in accordance with
the evolution of social power dynamics taking place on a globalised front,
propelled by capitalism’s imperial power. The operation of power with
regard to the social body then became a question of production output
and societal discipline, rather than a display of official authority as embod-
ied by the public torture event. It is this political technology of the body
that Foucault argues acted as the driving impetus in this significant evolu-
tion of official punitive and regulative measures. Indeed, this is an apt
assessment for the development and commercial success of Magdalene
laundries in twentieth-century Ireland.
Through this door one met the woman trying to get out, but to do
this, she required help. ‘Just act natural OK, just act natural’ she begged
me, filling my arms with laundry and looking out the window and back
door to see who was present. The front door would be her best bet she
decides, and she grabs my arm as we re-enter the Church, only pausing to
bow before Our Lord in his Holy House, before exiting the three foyers I
had previously travelled, and out the front door. She pushed me and the
laundry into a taxi which sped away, while she ran. This performance was
devised from a testimony of a lady who escaped frequently, once seriously
injuring herself from doing so. However, she had formed a close bond
with a 94-year-old penitent at the laundry who she referred to as ‘Granny’
and so she returned after each escape in the evening to see her. After the
death of ‘Granny’, she escaped and did not return.
Performances Thirteen and Fourteen: In performance thirteen the taxi
driver cheerfully introduced himself as ‘Den Den’ and explained we were
going to the new laundry not far away. It was not a convent but the place
that opened with the arrival of washing machines. As he drove, clad in his
Dublin GAA jersey, he told his story. He used to deliver milk to the laun-
dry at approximately six in the morning every day. At this time of day, the
Magdalenes were allowed out in the back courtyard and would sing Ave
Maria; after this time they had to remain indoors. He fell in love with one
of them and they wed in the Church in the laundry. Soon after their mar-
riage she told him she was going to the shop to purchase milk, and never
returned. The drive took us through the streets of ‘Monto’48 and the view
was of high-rise council apartments and littered streets. He brought me to
the front door of the laundry and promised he would return shortly to
collect me. Inside the laundry I was put to work counting small change
while listening to the ‘locals’ who were talking at the front of the shop.
One young man talked of his childhood when he lived in the laundry with
his mother until the age of three, after which he was adopted.
Performance Fifteen: When the taxi driver returned, he delivered the
two other participants and me (who had entered the laundry at the same
time) to outside the laundry doors, where the performance had origi-
nated. Before we exited the taxi he gave us each a wrapped bar of soap, the
same soap with the intense and distinctive smell that first assailed the
senses as one entered the building, returning me to the moment I entered
it. On the soap was a label with my name and the date. The performance
had indeed ended, but it became clear then, to a certain extent, it had
never begun. This experience was very much a reality for thousands of
Irish women, their families and friends, and their adopted children who
live both on the island and throughout the world. By staging Laundry,
ANU Productions urged each participant, as a spectator and citizen, of
whatever country, to bear witness to this hidden and often denied trauma
by remembering these women and their families.
Once indicted to a sentence of unknown duration in a Magdalene
Laundry there was little opportunity for escape or release; unlike a prison
sentence for murder or rape for which the state dictates a specific number
of years, as well as a juridical process of trial and appeal. For these women,
a life sentence could mean death. Perhaps a brother would come to claim
his sister but she no longer officially existed. Every day signalled another
test in mental, emotional and physical endurance, while every locked door
and high wall were testament to the shame the established religious, politi-
cal and social ideologies declared they deserved. If the production of
Laundry has conveyed any clear message, it is not the story of fallen
women but of a fallen state and church, and a complicit society. While the
state previously denied involvement, these denials were rebuffed by those
who sought evidence. Smith devotes the second chapter of his book to
146 M. HAUGHTON
confirming the relationship of support and complicity between the Irish

State and the Catholic Church in the management of these institutions.
He outlines:
The state also provided the religious orders with direct and indirect financial
support […] This partnership between church and state encouraged a trans-
formation in Ireland’s Magdalen asylums: they adopted a punitive and rec-
arceral function that increasingly supplanted their original rehabilitative and
philanthropic mission. (2007, 47)
Until a policy of full openness by the convents, state and society informs
the former report and subsequent investigations, the state continues to fall
and the Irish theatrical community continues to stage this journey,
responding to urgent social crisis as their dramatic ancestors did almost a
century ago at the dawn of the Irish ‘Free’ State.
Fundamentally, Laundry is concerned with the representational politics
and consequences of difference. To understand how difference can be
identified, one must first understand how the act of representation is polit-
ical, layered and often misleading. Phelan notes the often reductive inter-
pretation of the relationship between representation and power:
If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white

women should be running Western culture. The ubiquity of their image,
however, has hardly brought them political or economic power. (1993, 10)
As such, to put faith in the totality of representation is naïve. Catholic

institutions in Ireland, supported by the founding nationalist ethos,
declared Irish society noble and religious, and Ireland’s women virgins
and virtuous mothers. Yet the hidden narratives exposed by Laundry and
Magdalene history signal religious institutions were not faithful to their
own claims of morality and compassion. One must consider what is facili-
tated through representation, and significantly, the representation of
absence. Whom do we hide from the dominant hegemonic imagery and
discourse? How are we taught, and teach others, not to see and/or value
certain individuals, communities, places, crimes? How we read and receive,
empirically and corporeally, the ideologies and politics of public and per-
sonal life, impact, but not wholly determine, how we read and receive
performance. Performance can disrupt these patterns of viewing, knowing
and feeling, as the production of Laundry attests.
Phelan expands ‘Representation is almost always on the side of the one

who looks and almost never on the side of the one who is seen’ (1993,
25–26). Irish society, and thus its audiences, has been conditioned to look
and see a limited range of predetermined heterosexual female roles that
operate according to a basic binary division—good women/bad women.
In the performative history of this region throughout modern Irish his-
tory, it seems this extremity of casting was hidden here, from prostitutes
to nuns. However, as Raftery exposed, there were unfortunate similarities
between the scruples of the Madams and the Sisters of Charity.
4.6 The Politics of Reception: From Not Knowing

to Knowing
O’Donnell and O’Sullivan outline in the ‘Preface’ to Coercive Confinement

in Ireland that the information regarding the daily life and conditions
within these systems is difficult to access. They note that:
As for the ‘keepers’, the psychiatrists, members of religious orders, prison

warders and other custodians, their silence—then and since—is more diffi-
cult to fathom. Some, no doubt, felt that they had done nothing wrong and
should not be judged by the mores of another era—the past, as always,
being a different place. Others felt bound by their vows of obedience or a
sense of loyalty to their fellow professionals. Some must have feared the
consequences of speaking out in terms of career progression or perhaps even
criminal prosecution […] All probably became inured to levels of misery
and degradation that, even in more austere times, ought to have been
resisted. Finally, we should not underestimate the cumulative effects of con-
formity (then) and attempts at dissonance reduction (now). (2012, xi)
Thus, how audiences, and indeed society, may journey from a position of
‘not knowing’ to ‘knowing’ will not largely be dictated by the acknowl-
edgements, confessions or whistleblowing of ‘the keepers’. This journey is
often provoked by the narratives of the victims, their families and the artis-
tic interpreters who wilfully seek out hidden lives. In the debates sur-
rounding these histories, the term ‘breaking the silence’ is often invoked,
and for the Magdalene histories specifically, ‘breaking the Rule of Silence’,49
referring to the phrase from convent literature which instructed the imple-
mentation of the ‘Rule of Silence’, as Finnegan’s research details. This
mist of silence, immersing society like an invisible veil, then acts as a gen-
148 M. HAUGHTON
erative force to provoke forgetting, collectively and complicitly. This ‘not

knowing’ of certain traumas, and extensive geographical span of latency
among Irish society became jolted into ‘knowing’, quite brutally, through
a convergence of social, cultural and political factors, one of which being
the role the arts plays in creating a space for these narratives and testimo-
nies to both popular and niche audiences across multiple mediums. The
little that is generally known or heard of relating to Magdalene history in
Ireland in social contexts (not so within scholarship) results from An
Triail, Eclipsed, The Magdalene Sisters, Laundry and Philomena, arguably
more so than the McAleese inquiry. Laundry solicited its audience partici-
pants to acknowledge their roles as witnesses, reminding their paying cus-
tomers they were citizens as well as consumers.
This final section asks if audiences can embody the role of ‘witness’? To
do this, one must accept a position of ‘knowing’. To witness is a con-
sciously active position, with social and political ramifications as well as
personal consequences. I employ this terminology to frame the assertion
that when crimes against humanity are committed out of sight and absent
from official discourse, as Foucault so convincingly argues in relation the
modern Western operation of power in Discipline and Punish, it can take
a jolt to an individual and a society to comprehend the political implica-
tions and responsibilities of being a witness, of bearing witness, and indeed,
to comprehend that one has acted as a witness. If there is a continuum
marking the moments of realisation that one has witnessed crimes against
humanity, then long stretches of dormancy would mark the continuum,
followed by sudden, sharp, shocks of realisation. Again, the trauma para-
digms of latency, and ‘knowing and not knowing’, underwrite this jagged
journey from ignorance to knowledge. Can complicity predate direct con-
sciousness, as well as empirical and embodied knowledge? The potential
answers here are beyond the scope of this study, but important to raise
nevertheless.
One can argue across terminology and meaning, intent and experience,
subjectivity and objective critique when it comes to attempting to analyse
reception and theatre audiences. There is no unified or accepted universal
code of viewing and analysis, mirroring the debate and diversity of analyti-
cal frames employed to interrogate trauma studies. Furthermore, there is
not and never will be an audience which sees a performance, interprets
meaning, or makes judgements identically. This is fortunate I argue,
resulting not in a lack of empirical and coherent research in this field, but
in a considered and fraught openness that must remain regarding the anal-
ysis of audiences and reception. Any study of theatre audiences must begin
from the understanding that subjective experience and ephemeral perfor-
mance forbids master narratives and universal models of qualitative analy-
sis, yet this does not mean that theatre audiences should not be subject to
equal analysis as other performance dynamics. If anything, it suggests the
need for further study, more detailed examination and continued debate
as we find avenues for deeper and more insightful engagements, and hope-
fully, reduce the anxiety for the tradition of finding ‘answers’. Indeed, as is
my personal case with Laundry, a spectator’s response may be not be sin-
gular and cohesive, but split, contradictory, and ever-fluid, as memory and
further lived experience intervene and reinscribe the affect of experience,
making it palimpsestuous and continually active.
Laundry implicitly understood the inevitability of subjective experience
as well as the potential communal power of the collective audience and
constructed the performance to engage with the nuanced political poten-
tial of the individual and the collective. In light of the scope for height-
ened political consciousness inherent in this production as well as the
limitations of totalising collective analysis, this critique considers specifi-
cally my experience of Laundry as a lower middle-class female Irish partici-
pant in relation to representational politics, Irish and international politics
and history, Roman Catholicism, international human rights, and Western
social constructions of gender.
Yet, the study must ask in light of this performance and the socio-
political context it took place in, how does one theorise the role of the
audience when it encounters material that is politically and socially unre-
solved in the contemporary moment? Does the encounter force, or offer,
a role of witness rather than audience/ spectator/ participant? Once the
‘knowing’ has occurred, one cannot return to the comfort of ignorance or
the delicate ground of latency. The employment of appropriate terminol-
ogy is indeed complex and in debate. Helen Freshwater considers the
semantic scope for audience terminology in Theatre and Audience. She
outlines that ‘The terms employed to describe audiences and their rela-
tionship to performance are laden with value judgements. Are they just
viewers, or accomplices, witnesses, participants? Are they a crowd, a mass,
a mob, or critics and connoisseurs?’50
At the end of the performance, we were not a mass mob, but there was
a feeling of boundedness through this shared yet individual experience.
We knew something that the people passing us on the street did not know;
we had an experience that was important; that experience was not finished,
150 M. HAUGHTON
and indeed, neither was our role. We have become tied to that experience.
At the ‘end’ of the performance, my initial group of three who entered the
building together were returned to the front bolted double doors of the
laundry building. Participants were suddenly immersed in daylight after
darkness, surrounded by passers-by following isolation, breathing fresh air
in the wake of dust and chemicals. The two other participants and I tried
to look at each other, but did not know how to react as usual, such as mak-
ing polite small-talk or engaging in post-show commentary. There was no
applause, no facilitated post-show discussion within the conventional the-
atre auditorium or opportunities for social interaction at a theatre bar or
cafe. Personally, there was a question of whether I felt guilty or should feel
guilt. In terms of this issue of guilt, I stress this as a feeling resulting not
from being directly involved in the strategies of containment and incar-
ceration, or accountable for them, but as a result of how little awareness I
had for these histories.
As an audience participant in Laundry, experiencing each scene in isola-
tion but with the constant awareness of other audience participants nearby,
the production harnessed ‘a connection between audience participation
and political empowerment’ (2009, 3). Individual audience members
were often offered opportunities to participate as I have already detailed,
including, helping one woman to escape, listening to a father attempt to
justify his decision to incarcerate his daughter, and react to the remnants
of a former crèche, with the ‘real’ media in the public sphere reporting on
generations of alleged stolen children, sold internationally, at the same
time as this production took place. Political empowerment resulting from
performance derives from how an audience participant engages with the
experience post-performance. In this case, how does one negotiate the
knowledge and visceral embodied experience of life in a laundry created by
Laundry, following decades and centuries of this narrative’s suppression?
As artistic expression has provided more space for these narratives and
memories than state politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
the scope for political empowerment post-performance is already proven
significant. One may ‘walk away’ from performances, building and events,
but not memories.
This study concludes that learning to witness implies learning to react.
How does a society react to this history of control and containment, and
pay respect to the victims and survivors of such traumas? While the last
laundry closed its doors in 1996, in 2011, the Catholic Church owned
and were involved in the running of 90 per cent of primary schools in
Ireland.51 They are involved in the management of hospitals and care cen-
tres, and the role and privileges of Catholic Church in particular, are
embedded in the Irish Constitution. If religious institutions maintain a
parental presence in the construction of the state and its subsequent man-
agement, how does a society relinquish this connection and acknowledge
that the legacy of aid once offered cannot overshadow or erase the legacy
of criminal acts? These are questions Laundry provoked through its stag-
ing, performance, and the politics of its reception.
Howard declares, ‘Theatre is not simply a place you go to but a place
you go through’ (2009, 7–8). Reports into institutional abuse by these
religious authorities have taken place in Ireland, resulting in the Murphy
Report (2009), the Cloyne Report (2011), and the McAleese Report
(2013). A new state inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is underway at
this time of writing. Inquiries into historical institutional abuse by reli-
gious orders in the north of Ireland began in late 2013. While the
Gloucester Street laundry building was run by the religious orders, at the
present moment it is under the management of Dublin City Council.
Today, it remains empty, locked, and looming large in a city centre street.
There is no further use, or need, for this building as it stands, but no deci-
sion has been made to demolish it or repurpose it. Indeed, the building
itself is a metaphor for the current position of the Catholic Church in
Ireland; still present in everyday life, but as entity most pass by en route to
other locations and intentions.
This critique of this contemporary Irish performance conveys how it
continues the Irish theatrical tradition of responding to social crisis as the
twentieth century canon did. Yet, this performance is not motivated by
imagining or representing an Irish state but interrogating the functioning
of a state and society which less than a hundred years ago, was realised into
being. In the 2011 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, there were not
one or two performances which were founded on this concern, but an
entire section, aptly titled ‘Behind Closed Doors’. Susan Bennett notes
that ‘part of what makes us a theatre audience is our willingness to engage
with performances in ways that speak to the most intimate detail of our
experience’.52 Contemporary Irish theatre and performance is a leading
voice that speaks directly to the silencing of these intimate details of per-
sonal and national experiences of trauma, experiences mostly contained
from public and official discourse until recent years. In this way, perfor-
mances such as Laundry highlight ‘the implications of the relationship
between theatre as cultural institution, sharing or challenging the domi-
152 M. HAUGHTON
nant ideology, and the audience’s collaboration in the maintenance or

attempt to overthrow that ideology’ (1997, 8).
The power of this production, witnessed by so few but with a post-
performance efficacy still gathering momentum, lay not only in its inter-
rogation of past wrongs but in its realisation of present wrongs. It is
interesting to note that in the early days of independence the nation was
referred to as The Irish ‘Free’ State. Evidently, some sections of society
enjoyed this new national freedom, whereas others were hidden, silenced
and imprisoned. Let us not forget in the Constitution of the Irish Free
State of 1922, Article Six declares ‘The liberty of the person is inviolable,
and no person shall be deprived of his liberty except in accordance with
the law’53 and in the current 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann,
Article 40.4.1 also designates, ‘No citizen shall be deprived of his personal
liberty save in accordance with the law.’54 These women were deprived of
their liberty, their identities, their babies and their futures. The deceased
have been deprived funerals, graves and death certificates. There is no way
to evade or minimise state, religious and social accountability for these
crimes. The current attempts to do so do not solely reflect concerns about
state capacity for financial compensation; indeed they reflect an ingrained
ideological gendered value to Irish citizenry that continues to subjugate
female lives and experience.
Both Irish constitutional rights and international human rights have
been shunned through Magdalene history. They continue to be shunned
through the McAleese report; an inquiry which took place only due to
urgent and repeated recommendations from the United Nations
Committee Against Torture, not from a willingness within the Irish gov-
ernment, or, pressure from an angered Irish society. While we wait for
state and wider society to catch up with its artists’ willingness to explore
these narratives, we can only try and assist this process through discourse,
protest and remembrance—so please, observe these names once more:
Margaret Blanney, Gertrude Craigh, Mary Fagan, Christina Green.
Notes
1. ANU Productions, Laundry, directed by Louise Lowe at the site of the for-
mer Magdalene Laundry, Seán McDermott Street (formerly Gloucester
Street), Dublin, September 29–October 15 2011. Laundry was premiered
as part of The Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival 2011. Creative Producer
Hannah Mullan, Designer Owen Boss, Lighting Design Sarah Jane Shiels,
Sound Design Ivan Birsthistle and Vincent Doherty, Choreographer

Emma O’Kane. Cast includes Úna Kavanagh, Sorcha Kenny, Catriona
Lynch, Niamh McCann, Stephen Murray, Bairbre Ní Caoimh, Peter
O’Byrne, Robbie O’Connor, Niamh Shaw and Zara Starr. Community
cast includes Martin Collins, Stephen Duigenan, Paddy Fitzpatrick, Tracey
McCann, Laura Murray, Eric O’Brien, Fiona Shiel and Lauren White.
Laundry won ‘Best Production’ at the Irish Times Theatre Awards
2012.
2. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
3. This information is accessed from the 1911 Census data available on the
‘Justice for Magdalenes’ website, relating specifically to the Gloucester
Street laundry. http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/gloucester_st_1911.
htm Accessed 12 May 2016.
4. Louise Lowe, Unpublished Interview with Miriam Haughton. Dublin, 15
May 2012.
5. NASC is The Irish Immigrant Support Centre, and its website provides a
history of Direct Provision in Ireland. http://www.nascireland.org/cam-
paigns-for-change/direct-provision/ Accessed 15 April 2016.
6. Patricia Casey’s article ‘Any Review of Past Abuses Must Extend to
Asylums’, 17 June 2014, for The Independent states that ‘According to the
book Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish 1800–2010 (edited by
Pauline Prior) data from the World Health Organisation showed that
Ireland exceeded all other states in its rate of institutionalisation of the
mentally ill… Moreover, our proclivity to institutionalise continued even
after other countries were dismantling their asylums’. http://www.inde-
pendent.ie/life/health-wellbeing/patricia-casey-any-review-of-past-
abuses-must-extend-to-asylums-30354233.html Accessed 15 April 2016.
7. The survivor advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes updates its website
with their press releases, government responses and media coverage of
this campaign. Further information can be found at http://www.
magdalenelaundries.com.
8. The full report can be accessed and downloaded from The Department of
Justice and Equality website http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/
MagdalenRpt2013.
9. Stephen Collins and Harry McGee, ‘Kenny Criticised for Failure to Issue
Magdalene Apology’, Irish Times, 6 February 2013. http://www.irish-
times.com/newspaper/breaking/2013/0206/breaking5.html Accessed
6 February 2013.
10. In the interview conducted by Claire McCormack broadcast on RTÉ’s
Radio 1’s ‘The God Slot’ at 10 p.m. on 8 March 2013, two nuns reacted
to the allegations regarding suffering and abuse in the Magdalene l aundries
154 M. HAUGHTON
at the hands of the various Orders who managed them, on condition that
the nuns, their congregations, and where they worked were not named.
The voices heard belong to performers. Patsy McGarry reports in
‘Magdalene Nuns Hit Back at Critics and Defend Their Role’ in The Irish
Times, ‘When asked whether an apology might be appropriate after the
McAleese report on the laundries, “Sister A” responded, “apologise for
what?” […] “There was a terrible need for a lot of those women because
they were on the street with no social welfare and starving. We provided
shelters for them. It was the ‘no welfare’ state and we are looking with
today’s eyes at a totally different era.”’ http://www.irishtimes.com/news/
magdalene-nuns-hit-back-at-critics-and-defend-their-role-1.1319508
Accessed 6 August 2013.
11. Harry McGee reports in ‘Nuns Say They Will Not Pay Magdalene
Compensation’ That ‘The Mercy Sisters, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity,
the Sisters of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters Have Informed
Minister for Justice Alan Shatter in Recent Days That They Will Not Pay
into the Fund, Which Could Cost up to €58 Million’, The Irish Times, 16
July 2013. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/nuns-say-they-will-
not-pay-magdalene-compensation-1.1464737 Accessed 6 August 2013.
12. Nigel Rodley, UN Chairman of Human Rights Committee, quoted in ‘A
Misogynist State’, Irish Examiner, 17 July 2014. http://www.irishexam-
iner.com/viewpoints/analysis/a-misogynist-state-275685.html Accessed
18 April 2016.
13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge. Trans.
Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), 3.
14. Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell, ‘Preface’, in Coercive Confinement in
Ireland: Patients, Prisoners, and Penitents (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2012), x.
16. Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins, eds. Performing Site-Specific Theatre:
Politics, Place, Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 3.
17. Justice for Magdalenes ‘Booklet’, accessible on the National Women’s
Council of Ireland (NWCI) website https://www.nwci.ie/download/
pdf/jfm_booklet.pdf.
18. Mari Steed, Committee Director of Justice for Magdalenes (Email
Correspondence with Miriam Haughton, 18 September 2012). Though
stating this number, Steed warns that Justice for Magdalenes are not satis-
fied with this estimated statistic. There is not an official statistic detailing
the number of Magdalene penitents in Ireland. This is due to a variety of
reasons, which include the removal of a woman’s birth name on entry to
the convent, a refusal by the convents to release the names of the penitents
they controlled, and a lack of disclosure in Irish society concerning
Magdalene history. For instance, as a result of the major shame attached to

a family member entering a Magdalene laundry, the woman’s family may
have claimed she had emigrated. The Justice for Magdalene website can be
accessed at http://www.magdalenelaundries.com.
19. The McAleese report. It does not include Protestant-run laundries.
20. Mary Raftery, ‘Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries Scandal Must Be Laid to
Rest’, The Guardian, 8 June 2011. Raftery reports ‘The nuns had been
dabbling on the stock exchange. The results were unfortunate. When a
company they had invested in went bust, they decided to sell off a portion
of their Dublin land holdings to cover the losses. The snag was that the
land contained a mass grave. It was full of “penitents”, the label attached
to the thousands of women locked up in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries.
This particular order, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, ran
High Park, the largest such laundry in the country’ http://www.guardian.
co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/irealnd-magdalene-laundries-scan-
dal-un Accessed 1 October 2011.
21. Frances Finnegan states that ‘The Rule of Silence’ was enforced for periods
throughout the day and most stringently at night in Do Penance or Perish:
Magdalen Asylums in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
22–25. Indeed, as this analysis will detail, this ‘Rule of Silence’ also affected
Irish society. Many of the rules of the Magdalen asylums were circulated in
Conferences and Instructions of Mother Mary of St. Euphrasia Pelletier
(1885), from which the Practical Rules for the Use of the Religious of the
Good Shepherd for the Direction of the Classes was selected.
22. Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in
Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 5.
23. Brian Singleton, ANU Productions: The Monto Cycle (London: Palgrave
Pivot, 2016), 3.
24. Residential Institutions Redress Board, ‘Welcome’ http://www.rirb.ie/
Accessed 5 May 2014.
25. Department of Justice and Equality, ‘Report of the Inter-Departmental
Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen
Laundries’, http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/MagdalenRpt2013
26. McAleese Report, 29 i. ‘Sexual Abuse, ii. Physical Abuse, iii. Psychological
and verbal abuse and non-physical punishment.
27. The Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA). www.hiainquiry.org
28. Amnesty International Briefing, ‘Magdalene Laundry-Type Institutions in
Northern Ireland’. ‘Appendix 1: List of Magdalene Laundries and Similar
Institutions in Northern Ireland, 8–9. http://www.amnesty.org.uk/sites/
default/files/doc_23218.pdf Accessed 5 May 2014.
156 M. HAUGHTON
29. Rosita Boland’s article ‘Tuam Mother and Baby Home: The Trouble with
the Sceptic Tank Story’, Irish Times, 7 June 2014, details that ‘Catherine
Corless’s research revealed that 796 children died at St. Mary’s’. http://
www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/tuam-mother-and-baby-home-
the-trouble-with-the-septic-tank-story-1.1823393 Accessed 15 April 2016.
30. Patricia Burke-Brogan, Unpublished Interview with Miriam Haughton.
Galway, 18 January 2013.
31. Melissa Sihra, ed. Women in Irish Theatre: A Century of Authorship and
Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 1.
32. Carl O’Brien, ‘Up to 100 Illegal Adoptions Uncovered’, The Irish Times,
12 January 2013. O’Brien reports ‘State authorities have uncovered about
100 cases of children who were born to unmarried women and may have
been illegally transferred to adoptive parents as recently as the 1970s.
These informal adoptions were conducted outside the law and have left the
children in circumstances where it may be impossible to trace their real
birth parents. In many cases the children are believed to have been given at
birth to other families who then falsely registered these children as their
own. Gardaí have investigated whether adoption agencies and doctors
were involved or acted illegally by falsely registering the births. However,
there have been no prosecutions to date due to a lack of evidence and the
lapse of time since the events. […] Following the introduction of the 1952
Adoption Act, it became an offence to adopt a child without a formal
adoption order. This legislation also included safeguards aimed at protect-
ing the mother, such as ensuring that a child be at least three months old
before an adoption is authorised. The Adoption Authority of Ireland is
aware of in excess of 100 cases where there are no records for people who
say they were adopted. This indicates their birth registration records may
have been falsified. However, some cases took place before the 1952 legis-
lation, when there was no law against informal adoptions. http://www.
irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2013/0112/1224328743265.
html Accessed 13 January 2013.
33. Finnegan’s research in Do Penance or Perish claims that ‘they [Irish women]
were extremely active in “recommending” women to Magdalen Asylums;
and more significantly, where family members were responsible for such
admissions, 72 per cent of those “brought” to the Good Shepherd Homes
were consigned to the institutions by female relatives. Further, the largest,
most successful and most enduring Refuges to which penitents were con-
fined (and this was the case in Britain too) were staffed and managed exclu-
sively by nuns (2001, 3).
34. James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s
Architecture of Containment (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2008), xv.
35. Pamela Howard, What is Scenography? Second Edition (London:

Routledge, 2009), 49.
36. I refer to ‘postdramatic theatre’ according to Hans-Thies Lehmann ‘s the-
orisation in Postdramatic Theatre, Trans. Karen Jurs-Munby (London:
Routledge, 2006), 27. He states, ‘The adjective “postdramatic” denotes a
theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama, at a time “after” the
authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre. What it does not mean is an
abstract negation and mere looking away from the tradition of drama.’
37. For further context on experimental forms and themes of Irish theatre in
the twentieth century, see Ian R. Walsh, Experimental Irish Theatre: After
W.B. Yeats (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012).
38. According to the ‘About us’ section of the Legion of Mary website, ‘The
Legion of Mary is a lay apostolic association of Catholics who, with the
sanction of the Church and under the powerful leadership of Mary
Immaculate, Mediatrix of all Graces, serve the Church and their neighbour
on a voluntary basis in about 170 countries. The first meeting of the
Legion of Mary took place in Myra House, Francis Street, Dublin, Ireland,
on 7 September, 1921. […] Drawing its inspiration from the True
Devotion to Mary, as taught by St. Louis Marie de Montfort, and which
had a profound influence on the founder of the Legion, the Servant of
God, Frank Duff, the Legion is at the disposal of the Bishops and Priests
for use in the mission of the Church’. http://www.legionofmary.ie/
about/ Accessed 2 August 2012.
39. Sara Keating, ‘Review of Laundry’, Irish Theatre Magazine, 29 September
2011. http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Ulster-Bank-Dublin-
Theatre-Festival-2011/Laundry Accessed 1 February 2012.
40. Louise Lowe, ‘Louise Lowe in Conversation with Patrick Lonergan’ at the
J.M. Synge Summer School for Irish Drama 2012. 30 June 2012. Avondale
House, Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow. Public event.
41. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993), 148.
42. Michel Foucault, ‘The Stage of Philosophy: A Conversation Between
Michel Foucault and Moriaki Wotanabe’, New York Magazine of
Contemporary Art and Theory, 1–21 (1978), 6.
43. Louise Lowe, Laundry Seminar which took place at UCD Drama Studies
Centre in Dublin on 26 October 2011.
44. In earlier performances, this man’s ‘daughter’ would have been present in
the room also, still fighting her father’s order to enter the laundry as a
result of her pregnancy. However, she was also performing in World End’s
Lane at the time of my attendance.
45. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be found
online. The website offers the history of the document, ‘The Universal
158 M. HAUGHTON
Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Assembly

on 10 December 1948, was the result of the experience of the Second
World War’. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/history.shtml
Accessed 2 August 2012.
46. An article published in the online media source The Journal, ‘A Life
Unlived: 35 Years of Slavery in a Magdalene Laundry’, maps the life and
death of Margaret Bullen as retold by her daughter, Samantha Long. The
article outlines ‘Samantha Long’s mother Margaret Bullen was placed in
Gloucester Street (now Seán McDermott Street) Laundry c.1967 and died
35 years later, never having been released into society and her own home.
Margaret died of an illness known as Goodpasture Syndrome, a disease of
the kidneys and liver—one of the causes is exposure to industrial strength-
chemicals such as those used in the laundries. […] At roughly the age of 16,
Margaret was sent to the Magdalene Laundry at Gloucester Street. The
exact time and circumstances of her move there are not clear because
Samantha and her sister are still waiting on full records to be supplied to
them on their mother’s past. She became pregnant—twice—with Samantha
and her twin sister Etta, and later with another daughter, while officially
under the care of the Gloucester Street nuns. The circumstances of these
conceptions are again shrouded in mystery but Samantha says her conversa-
tions in later life with her mother when they were reunited led her to believe
that Margaret had been the victim of sexual abuse and predators several
times”. http://www.thejournal.ie/magdalene-laundry-true-story-marga-
ret-bullen-samantha-long-614350-Sep2012/ Accessed 22 January 2013.
47. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), 195.
48. For most of the earlier performances, this taxi-drive would have incorpo-
rated performance from World End’s Lane which was taking place en route.
Performers from World End’s Lane would stop and enter the taxi, asking
questions of the participant inside it.
49. Evelyn Glynn, an artist and activist for women’s rights, set up a website
documenting the oral histories of women attached to the Limerick
Magdalene Laundry. She named her project ‘Breaking the Rule of Silence’.
Her website can be accessed here http://www.magdalenelaundrylimerick.
com/biography.html.
50. Helen Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009),
2–3.
51. Emma O’Kelly, ‘Schools and the Catholic Church’, RTÉ News, 6 April
2011. http://www.rte.ie/news/special-reports/2011/0406/299556-
catholic/ Accessed 30 January 2014.
52. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception.
Second Edition (London: Routledge, 1997), vii.
53. Constitution of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Eireann) Act 1922, Article 6.
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1922/en/act/pub/0001/sched1.html
54. Bunreacht na hÉireann 1937, Article 40.4.1 http://www.constitution.ie/
constitution-of-ireland/default.asp Accessed 17 May 2012.
Bibliography
Print Sources
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated
by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.
———. 1998. The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by
Robert Hurley. London: Penguin.
Freshwater, Helen. 2009. Theatre and Audience. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Howard, Pamela. 2009. What is Scenography? 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramtic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jurs-
Munby. London: Routledge.
O’Sullivan, Eoin, and Ian O’Donnell. 2012. Coercive Confinement in Post-
Independence Ireland: Patients, Prisoners, and Penitents. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Singleton, Brian. 2016. ANU Productions: The Monto Cycle. Palgrave Pivot.
CHAPTER 5
Exile: Sanctuary (2013), Directed by Teya

Sepinuck
A New Playhouse Theatre of Witness Production,
Derry, North of Ireland/Northern Ireland
5.1 Introduction: Hope

The performed testimony of Maryama Yuusuf, a Somalian mother of nine
who fled her country following war, famine, kidnap, imprisonment, slav-
ery and rape, concludes on a note of hope, as she declares ‘Maybe tomor-
row will be my day. Maybe tomorrow I will begin my new life’ (Sanctuary
Sanctuary is the fourth and concluding part of the Playhouse Theatre of Witness
Programme directed by Teya Sepinuck in partnership with Holywell Trust from
2009 to 2014. The four main productions include Sanctuary (2013), Release
(2012), I Once Knew a Girl (2010), and We Carried Your Secrets (2009). The
ToW website also details further supports and projects. ‘In January 2012, the
Northwest Play Resource Centre was awarded a PEACE III grant for the Theatre
of Witness Project. Objectives include (1) Develop and deliver a 6-month Theatre
of Witness mentoring programme with two local theatre practitioners, (2) Select
and train individuals to tell and perform their own stories, (3) Script, produce and
direct Theatre of Witness productions based on the life stories of the individuals,
(4) Perform and tour the productions/performances in schools and community
venues throughout Northern Ireland/Border Counties, and (5) Create and
distribute film and web material to be used on a local, national and international
basis to demonstrate the Theatre of Witness Model in promoting peace and
reconciliation.’ http://www.theatreofwitness.org. Accessed 18 April 2015.

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1_5
162 M. HAUGHTON
Performance Text,1 2013). Assisted out of her native land by an ‘agent’,

she had hoped to go to America to reunite with her family who escaped
there, also forced to flee their country. Instead, she was first taken to
London, then Dublin, and then Belfast. She has lived, or waited rather, in
hospitals, hostels, and detention centres, some of which were so dirty
‘rats crawled out of the walls’ (Sanctuary). She is not allowed to work or
receive education. 2013 [the year the performance premiered] is the
ninth year since that journey began, and those nine years have not offered
sanctuary nor reunion with her family, but further turmoil, isolation and
personal disempowerment. The manner in which she utters those words
is conveyed in a controlled, patient and serious tone. Her concluding
sentiment performs a double function. It acts as a reminder to herself but
also to the audience that her spirit of hope cannot be detained along with
her body in the detention centres of contemporary Europe, Ireland and
the UK specifically in her case. Hope is both an idea and an emotion, but
its impact is affective. It can act as a catalyst for personal force. It signals
future motivations and delineation from the continuous impact of past
experiences. Hope cannot be contained irrespective of documentation
and judicial infrastructures. She must cling to this hope, as reliance on
judicial process regarding her political status would lead her to despair.
Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan contextualise various and distinct
forms of institutionalisation in Coercive Confinement in Post-Independence
Ireland, summarising, ‘Never in living memory, it would seem, had societ-
ies resorted to locking away so many of their citizens, and at the same
time, been so indifferent to the consequences.’2 While their study focuses
most specifically on Ireland, this insight is made in relation to the wider
context of modern global prison populations, which O’Donnell and
O’Sullivan attest, has reached a record high. I do not intend to present a
simplistic conflation of detention centres with prisons, but their research
does confirm that a milieu of ‘penal confinement’ becomes apparent in
these and the wider social institutions examined in their study, which
largely focuses on psychiatric hospitals, workhouses, and Magdalene laun-
dries in the twentieth century. This current record high in global prison
populations reflects the continuum of ‘coercive confinement’, to borrow
from the title of their book, that characterises the state-led response to
individuals and families in a state of precarity as a result of crises regarding
political and ethnic conflicts, citizenship, civil warfare, famine and poverty
in the places that they departed or escaped from. It suggests that govern-
ments and societies do not know how to offer support and safe haven as a
EXILE: SANCTUARY (2013), DIRECTED BY TEYA SEPINUCK… 163
top-down, integrated approach that is made possible through public pol-

icy and social infrastructure. It also characterises the ‘looking the other
way’ response that ultimately develops into semi-conscious complicity by
wider society who coexist with these cold centres of detention for strug-
gling and scared people.
The performance of Sanctuary exists on a spatio-temporal liminal tight-
rope, dangling precariously somewhere between the past, present and
future. The laws, wars, histories and tensions of Somalia, Zimbabwe,
Northern Ireland, Britain and Ireland play domineering roles in this per-
formance. The processes, privileges and discriminations of each territory
are inscribed on the performers’ embodied territories and the potential for
their futures. The performers tell their personal testimonies of past events
in stylised and rehearsed sequences communicating directly to the audi-
ence. One of the dominant motivations and outcomes for this production,
from process to performance, is the potential for affect and transformation
on the audience, as well as for affective and transformative experience for
the performers while they share their personal histories. Lisa Fitzpatrick
considers the relationship between the production aesthetics and affect
offered and facilitated by an earlier ToW production, I Once Knew a Girl
(2010), and her argument is applicable to the production and perfor-
mance dynamics in Sanctuary. Fitzpatrick details that, ‘It seems the work’s
aesthetic potential is often limited, and that the desired transformation is
actually interpersonal and is about activating a moment of feeling together
and a release of emotion.’3 This intended feeling of ‘togetherness’ is one
of the primary objectives of ToW, where performers and audiences focus
on and remember the significance of their shared community, through
listening and being affected by the experiences of each other. As Fitzpatrick
expands, ‘As spectators we do not only recognize the character’s fear, we
also feel in our own bodies the tension evoked by a skilful performance of
fear or the effective creation of suspense and threat. Thus ‘affect’ is a fea-
ture of theatrical reception’ (2015, 130).
This chapter will unfold in five sections, exploring the processes of ‘act-
ing out’ and ‘working through’ as theorised by Dominick LaCapra, a pro-
duction history of ‘Theatre of Witness’ as well as the politics of the
performance of Sanctuary, the staging and performance environment of
Sanctuary, analysis of how concepts of ‘home’ are performed in Western
theatre, specifically, recurrent pathologies of belonging and escape, and
finally, this chapter will examine the notion of ‘communion’ between per-
formers/performance and audience.
164 M. HAUGHTON
Opening the performance event with a succinct introduction, US direc-

tor Teya Sepinuck declares that Sanctuary explores what ‘safe haven’ means
and what ‘home’ means. The connotations of the language she employs
may lull the audience into a sense of ease regarding the tone of the perfor-
mance and potentially, some sense of acceptance that these performers
have acquired regarding their personal traumas and present conditions.
‘Sanctuary’, ‘haven’, ‘oasis’, ‘trust’, ‘love’, ‘faith’; these are the words
embedded in the programme and Sepinuck’s introduction. Yet, one by
one, we hear stories of exile, imprisonment, abuse, torture and loss.
Sanctuary is what they seek; hell is what they endured. ‘Sanctuary’ is both
the title of their performance and shared goal, but what does this mean for
them individually, communally, and for their audiences? Popular defini-
tions for the noun ‘sanctuary’ tell of ‘a holy place’, ‘a consecrated building
or shrine’, ‘a sacred building where fugitives were formerly entitled to
immunity from arrest or execution’ and ‘a place for refuge, asylum’.4 Such
religious etymology is surely resonant in the civic place of production,
spanning Derry and Belfast, places infamous as a result of the religiously
and politically infused civil wars from the earliest days of colonisation by
the British Empire to the late twentieth century, the most recent outbreak
referred to as the ‘Troubles’5 (1968–1998). Significantly however, in the
narratives that are presented in performance, some of the performers clearly
articulate that it was not problems of religion that led to their traumatic
experiences, so much as the violence enacted in the name of the relation-
ships between religion and territory, and their ensuing exile as a result of
those conflicts. David Grant and Matt Jennings confirm this point in their
analysis of the wider performance environment, whereby ‘the structure of
conflict and the significance of these labels has long been established to
hinge upon the ethno-political dichotomy of British Unionism versus Irish
Nationalism, rather than an actual conflict over religious doctrine per se’.6
Derived from the Old French sanctuaire in the fourteenth century,
which in turn, comes from the Latin sanctus, meaning holy (Collins), the
audience is equally faced with polysemantic interpretations regarding its
meaning(s) for this performance. Does the title refer to the performers’
hopes for the future? Clearly, it does not reflect their present state of dis-
placement or past traumatic experiences of violence, violation and persecu-
tion. Does it refer to the place of ‘Northern Ireland’? ‘Northern Ireland’,
in legal terms, is the state that is part of the ‘The United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland’. If one refuses to recognise the authority of
the Crown on the island of Ireland, then one calls this place the north of
Ireland. This is a place inscribed with the material and psychological debris
of famine, emigration and war, and yet it has journeyed to a post-conflict
stage (largely recently, though tensions remain). Increasingly, if at times
problematically, the north’s cultural identity is re-inscribed with the dis-
courses of reconciliation and peace. In the wake of Brexit, it is evidently
unclear (at this time of writing) if former arrangements of governance
made possible by the Good Friday Agreement7 signed in 1998 to establish
a power-sharing government led by oppositional political parties will con-
tinue. In summary, the Good Friday Agreement:
[…] gives prominence to the ‘principle of consent’ which affirms the legiti-
macy of the aspiration to a United Ireland while recognising the current
wish of the majority in Northern Ireland to remain part of the United
Kingdom. (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ireland)
Hence, these performers are working through personal traumas in a place

of national instability, which is informed by a heightened consciousness
regarding the impact of trauma on individuals, families, and communities
because of the violence of the recent past.
In this chapter, I explore the idea that the performers seek sanctuary as
a psychical embodiment of ‘working-through’ the traumas that they expe-
rienced. This notion of ‘working-through’ is traditionally intended to halt
the ‘repetition compulsion’ associated with post-traumatic experience,
stemming from the dynamic of ‘acting-out/working-through’ prevalent in
contemporary trauma discourse, argued by Freud and further theorised by
Dominick LaCapra. However, this ‘working-through’ does not necessarily
signal that the ‘acting-out’ or the ‘repetition compulsion’ is in any way
‘cured’ or wholly resolved in some utopian sense. For those traumatised, a
complete break with the trauma is not always possible. What the process of
‘working-through’ can achieve, however, is a sufficient break with the past
so that the individual can psychologically and emotionally commit to living
in the present and anticipate a future somehow demarcated from the domi-
nance of the past traumatic encounter. This level of commitment and
engagement with the present can radically alter from person to person, and
so the study of trauma must be considered on an individual case by case
basis. The split or fragmentation that occurs within the self/ identity nar-
rative as a result of trauma largely prevents the individual from returning to
the rhythms of their daily life, post-trauma, with the same, similar, or even
a manageable sense of personhood from which to feel secure and perform
166 M. HAUGHTON
cognitive and physical activities. Within the modern dialogues of post-trau-

matic stress disorder (PTSD), the challenge facing victims of trauma is the
challenge of return; returning to their previous narrative of self regardless
of how unified or contented that narrative was. Until, or if, they find a path
which leads to a personal sense of community and inclusion, whether
reconnecting with their former identity and life-narrative or creating a dis-
tinctly new one, their existence may be over shadowed by feelings and
conditions of exile. This exile, and shadowed existence, journeys on in a
liminal space where the past dominates the present in a preventative way,
limiting experience, and isolating them from their peers, socially and psy-
chologically. Indeed, it is this great aporia dominating their existence which
inspires the title of this chapter, ‘Exile’, employed to suggest a traumatic
state of ‘Other’ that dialogues with the heterogeneous and overlapping
constructs of ‘Other’ spanning postcolonial to postmodern studies, as well
as performance, affect and migration discourse.8
It is essential to stress from the outset of this enquiry that it is clearly
signalled from the beginning of the performance that the individuals on
stage have possibly, if not probably, ‘worked-through’ their traumatic
experiences significantly. Thus, the encounters the audience is invited to
share during the event of performance appear almost as a celebration of
their survival and anticipation of their future journeys. As previously men-
tioned, increasingly, scholars and professionals working within the inter-
disciplinary trauma studies field, from medics to humanities, acknowledge
that this return may never be fully mastered in the cohesive or peaceful
sense often longed for. Indeed, the place they wish to return to is but a
memory, and thus, essentially flawed. Yet through therapeutic activity one
may reach a ‘coming to terms with’ their past, and thus, attend to their
present and future without the debilitating dogged haunting of the trau-
matic encounter.
This chapter will begin its analysis of Sanctuary by examining its pro-
cesses of ‘staging trauma’ followed by an overview of the production his-
tory of Sepinuck’s ToW practice, and a close reading of the performances
I attended in Derry and Belfast. Both Sanctuary and ToW will be critically
analysed led by trauma and performance theories to examine the impact
such a performance and its wider meanings reveal. Though the chapter
will consider the politics of reception later on, it is worthwhile to note at
this juncture, that the performances of Sanctuary were free, and that there
is no playtext available. Thus, my analysis stems from my notes of the two
performances of Sanctuary that I attended in Derry and Belfast, as well as
recording of the performance generously made available for my research

by the Derry Playhouse.
I will explore each performed testimony individually, but a bird’s eye
view of the forthcoming narratives is thus: Six performers, or ‘real’ people,
tell their real stories directly to the audience, though not in monologue
form. Choreographed movement sequences made up of trust exercises on
a minimally dressed well-lit stage against the backdrop of live music ensure
these personal historical narratives are conveyed theatrically, yet simply.
For Everson Taelo, Loyd Ncube and Maryama Yuusuf, their histories have
traversed the international borders of Zimbabwe and Somalia. For
Margaret McGuckin, her story begins at the orphanage her parents sent
her to in Belfast, where abuse was a frequent occurrence. For Ryan
Doherty, the suffering he endured arose from a deep depression that lasted
years, provoked by a series of life events he still does not understand. For
Therese McCann, sanctuary means a mother’s love; the love she did not
receive from her own mother as a result of the stress of living through
evacuation and violence during the Troubles, as well as resulting from her
teenage pregnancy. Running from gunfire, McCann went into premature
labour and her baby girl did not survive. Decades later, she tries to give
that mother’s love to her son, as he lies in a hospital bed in the wake of
further sectarian violence. Thus, each of these individuals, who do not
come to this process from a background of trained performance, seek
some kind of ‘working through’ of their traumas and a sense of peace.
The performers’ state of exile (sometimes geographically, sometimes
psychologically, and indeed sometimes both) reinforces the memory and
impact of their traumatic experience. Definitions of the noun ‘exile’ speak
of ‘a prolonged, usually enforced absence from one’s home or country;
banishment’, and ‘the expulsion of a person from his native land by official
decree’.9 Derived from the Latin exsilium, meaning ‘banishment’, this in
turn stems from the Greek alasthai, meaning ‘to wander’ (Collins).
Synonyms include ‘refugee’ and ‘outcast’ (Collins). The act of ‘wander-
ing’ and the status of ‘outcast’ are useful in terms of comprehending their
present experience. They are ‘wandering’ in that the direction or course
that their lives will take remains unclear to them, whether by personal
reasons or law. They feel or have felt at some time like outcasts due to their
personal experiences of trauma; the trauma marked their psychic and cor-
poreal selves, relegating them to the position of ‘Other’ in society. Both
the lack of direction and their marginalised status destabilises personal and
public autonomy and security.
168 M. HAUGHTON
In Yana Meerzon’s insightful Performing Exile, Performing Self, she

signals the scope of meaning of exile according to the dominant Western
genealogy, beginning with Ancient Greek forms. The ‘experience of exile,
as it was practiced in the period of the Greek Democracy, took the forms
of torture, both physical and emotional, and death from hunger and thirst
in the desert. The democratic state used exile as a form of punishment and
as a mechanism of self-defense.’10 Meerzon links this experience of banish-
ment, exclusion and torture directly to trauma, outlining:
The political exile—an act of removal and banishment for us by the histori-
cal narrative of the Greeks—remains even today the most powerful para-
digm of physical, spatial, and temporal separation from one’s native land.
Accordingly, the word exile evokes such meanings as trauma, muteness,
impossibility of reconciliation, and the deficiency of any personal or collec-
tive closure. It also signifies a displacement and a falling out of time phe-
nomenon. (2012, 6)
Meerzon’s study considers artists from a variety of media who ‘speak about
the complexity of the exilic condition that not only can manifest an exilic
subject’s humiliation and challenge, but also can reveal one’s dignity and
prepare one’s personal, economic, or artistic success’ (2012, 2). Sanctuary,
to an extent, provides glimpses of both these paths. The performers tell of
their devastation from the past, but their performance is telling of their
strength, creativity, and plans for the future. Sanctuary’s performance style
taps into some of the traits Meerzon associates with the aesthetics of what
she refers to as ‘exilic theater’. These include ‘the prevalence of a poetic
utterance: an utterance that embraces theater performances based on plays
written in verse and in prose; performances based on non-verbal expres-
sion, movement and image; reciting poetry as professional and personal
performance; and creating meta-cinematic constructs’ (2012, 4–5).
Sanctuary constitutes the fourth and final segment of the Derry Playhouse
Theatre of Witness cycle in Northern Ireland (2009–2014). Twelve guiding
principles11 constitute Sepinuck’s development of ToW practices. She is
clear from the outset that in ToW productions, theatre and performance act
as a vehicle for social change, and are not motivated primarily by aesthetic or
dramatic objectives. The goal is the fruits gathered from the process itself,
not the final performance as a product to be packaged and purchased in the
typical neoliberal framework for cultural consumption of entertainment.
This is not always the case with forms of ‘theatre of the real’ as Carol Martin
unpacks in Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. She identifies that
‘Theatre and performance that engages the real participates in the larger
cultural obsession with capturing the “real” for consumption even as what
we understand as real is continually revised and reinvented.’12 Indeed, while
the social aims and impact of ToW may appear specific or unique on first
acquaintance with them, further research, such as Martin’s recent collec-
tion, proves similar motives traverse much of contemporary theatre-making
today, presenting many objectives and processes for analysis, celebration and
critique. In that sense, Sanctuary and ToW are more in line with the forms
of documentary theatre that Martin recognises as ‘infused with leftist poli-
tics’ (2010, 1). However, while drawn from testimony and experience,
Sanctuary remained a theatrical event. As Martin outlines, ‘Much of today’s
dramaturgy of the real uses the frame of the stage not as a separation, but as
a communion of the real and simulated; not as a distancing of fiction from
nonfiction, but as a melding of the two’ (2010, 2).
5.2 Staging Trauma: ‘Acting Out’ and ‘Working

Through’
In ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, LaCapra identifies the stakes involved when
addressing traumatic histories. He asks ‘whether attempts to work through
problems, including rituals of mourning, can viably come to terms with
(without ever fully healing or overcoming) the divided legacies, open
wounds, and unspeakable losses of a dire past’.13 In Writing History,
Writing Trauma, LaCapra identifies the post-traumatic compulsion to
‘act out’ which can lead to (but not always) ‘working through’ as a way of
navigating affect and representation:
Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disori-

entingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what
one cannot feel. Working through trauma involves the effort to articulate or
rearticulate affect and representation in a manner that may never transcend,
but may to some viable extent counteract, a reenactment, or acting out, of
that disabling dissociation. (2001, 42)
LaCapra argues the distinctions and indeed crossover in the processes and
potential impact relevant to both ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’,
returning to Freud’s formulations of ‘mourning and melancholia’.
Claiming that ‘mourning might be seen as a form of working-through,
170 M. HAUGHTON
and melancholia as a form of acting-out’ (1999, 713), he warns that mel-

ancholia and acting out in these contexts can be ‘characteristic of an
arrested process in which the depressed, self-berating, and traumatized
self, locked in compulsive repetition, is possessed by the past, faces a future
of impasses, and remains narcissistically identified with the lost object’
(713). Mourning, and working-through however, more typically allow for
possibility of ‘engaging trauma and achieving a reinvestment in, or reca-
thexis of, life that allows one to begin again’ (713).
In Sanctuary, through rehearsals, personal reflection, analysis, and the
processes of performance, the performers seek to move beyond ‘that dis-
abling dissociation’, caused by trauma, more commonly referred to as ‘the
repetition compulsion’ which can manifest through ‘acting out’ and ‘melan-
cholia’. This is lightly but potently reflected in the scenic space through the
elements of material scenography which are simple yet symbolic, in particu-
lar, the presence of a type of grotto and a doorway; suggestive of prayer and
transformation. From the outset the scenography of the performance is
intended to mark movement on their journey, from exile to a new road,
perhaps one not yet travelled. They are employing their roles in this theatri-
cal event, a dialogic encounter reliant on representation, as a process which
intervenes in their suffering as a result of the traumas they experienced. This
sense of sanctuary will differ largely for each performer. What ties them
together is a personal experience of a traumatic event or encounter which
results in their present state of exile; exile from a homeland, exile from a
community, and exile from a narrative of self that is stable, linear, and known.
Indeed, the process of ‘acting out’ may accentuate and become part of
the ‘repetition compulsion’, or, it may facilitate the process of ‘working
through’. There are no guarantees though, but indeed, many risks with
these theories and therapies. LaCapra teases out the more exacting func-
tions and stages of ‘working through’:
Working through is an articulatory practice: to the extent one works through

trauma (as well as transferential relations in general), one is able to distin-
guish between past and present and to recall in memory that something
happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is liv-
ing here and now with openings to the future. (2001, 21–22)
Indeed, this coterminous timeframe of past and present is applicable to

the performers in Sanctuary. While the performers’ traumatic events dif-
fer significantly, the thread of commonality in performance relates to this
clarity of temporality and clarity of purpose. Their specificity of language,
their rhythm of speech, their precision in movement and the pace of

performance are cohesive as a group, though they perform their testimo-
nies individually. This sense of precision in performance can only occur
as a result of focused consideration in rehearsal and perhaps in personal
therapy, counselling or reflection also. The clarity of temporality in this
sense is testament to the personal achievements of these performers.
Being able to ‘recall’, means they can ‘look back’. To ‘look back’ then
tells us, on some level, they now view these events largely as past events.
That is not to say potentially PTSD cannot remain or reoccur at varying
moments in varying ways. It does suggest however, that this is no longer
a dominant or overwhelming force in their present. LaCapra explains:
This does not imply either that there is a pure opposition between past and
present or that acting out—whether for the traumatized or for those empa-
thetically relating to them—can be fully transcended toward a state of clo-
sure or full ego identity. But it does mean that processes of working through
may counteract the force of acting out and the repetition compulsion. These
processes of working through, including mourning and modes of critical
thought and practice, involve the possibility of making distinctions or devel-
oping articulations that are recognized as problematic but still function as
limits and as possibly desirable resistances to undecidability, particularly
when the latter is tantamount to confusion and the obliteration or blurring
of all distinctions (states that may indeed occur in trauma or in acting out
post-traumatic condition). (2001, 22)
Indeed, this potential to ‘counteract the force of acting out and the repeti-
tion compulsion’ embeds the performance of Sanctuary with the underlying
force of hope, as discussed in the introduction. This is a signal to a future,
embedded throughout the performance, while simultaneously narrating
horrific traumas. This is a major point of distinction in staging between this
case study and the subject matter at the heart of the case study ‘Violation’.
While On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr is a play of fiction and not drawn
from material reality as is the case with Sanctuary, the dynamic of ‘acting out’
and the ‘repetition compulsion’ dominate the action overwhelmingly, and
without any signal to a future disruption or intervention by the characters in
the world of the play. LaCapra coins this as a type of ‘fidelity to trauma, a
feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it (2001, 22). He expands:
Part of this feeling may be the melancholic sentiment that, in working through
the past in a manner that enables survival or a reengagement in life, one is
betraying those who were overwhelmed and consumed by that traumatic past.
172 M. HAUGHTON
One’s bond with the dead, especially with dead intimates, may invest trauma
with value and make its reliving a painful but necessary commemoration or
memorial to which one remains dedicated or at least bound. (2001, 22)
In this way, Carr’s play points to the intergenerational and historical lega-
cies as exemplars of the ‘repetition compulsion’ by ancestry and society,
and so, is in almost direct contrast to the performers in Sanctuary, who are
consciously committed to breaking with the horrors of the past.
The ethical and performative difficulties of this type of performance are
queried by many scholars, particularly in recent years as contemporary
performance seems so closely interlinked with the politics of traumatic
narratives, histories and processes of ‘working through’. In Fintan Walsh’s
Theatre and Therapy, he reviews the ‘range of embodied, participatory
contemporary theatre and performance practices, from the perspective of
writers and theatre-makers, solo performers, audiences and communi-
ties’.14 In so doing, he points to ‘some of the ways contemporary theatre
and performance can be seen to evolve neo-Aristotelian notions of cathar-
sis, by centralising confession, physical and emotional intimacy, and richly
affective encounters’ (2012, 6). At the same time, he opens his enquiry
with a useful warning and one I wish to express regarding the monograph
in its entirety. While these case studies, Sanctuary included, may be seen
by some to provide richly affective and transformative experiences, oppo-
sitional arguments can also be made. Therapy culture is prevalent in
Western popular and medical cultures in recent decades, and both theatre
artists and their audiences may capitalise on this in distinct ways. Related
to this, at times, one may confuse their role as theatre artist with therapist.
Though not necessarily reflective of his own position, Walsh summarises
the viewpoint of critical dissent that, ‘As a profiteering industry, therapy
culture is committed to producing a vast spectrum of neoliberal subjects
who believe that there is always something wrong with their emotional
lives, or that they are impossibly vulnerable to distress’ (2012, 4–5).
However, one may also argue that this is a symptom of the wider socio-
cultural post-World War II, postindustrialised, postmodern, digital and
neoliberal climate, in which a pervasive sense of fragmentation and disori-
entation increasingly permeates individualised social experience, and thus
collective community experience can be difficult to come by.
Yet, in approaching encounters which detail traumatic narratives, medical
professionals, historians and critical theorists alike repeatedly note the dan-
gers of confusing Self with Other. This is not what Sepinuck desires when
she calls for ‘seeing the Other as Self’. It is commonly noted in contempo-
rary trauma discourse that as one attempts to convey empathy for the Other,
one can become overwhelmed by or interact too closely with the trauma of
the Other, and begin to bear symptoms of victimisation also. This can also
be seen as a wider tendency in the analysis and experience of traumatic nar-
ratives, for distinctions to blur, and sometimes, collapse. LaCapra warns that
‘Unchecked identification implies a confusion of self and other which may
bring an incorporation of the experience and voice of the victim and its
reenactment or acting out’ (2001, 28). He notes that this can be observed,
to varying degrees, in the history of the arts. LaCapra details ‘Some of the
most compelling forms of modern art and writing, as well as some of the
most compelling forms of criticism (including forms of deconstruction),
often seem to be traumatic writing or post-traumatic writing in closest prox-
imity to trauma’ (23). He cites multiple reasons for this, but one in particu-
lar, whereby the issue of displacement occurs in relation to the search for a
sacred space or relationship in a secularly driven cultural moment; an idea
that occurs repeatedly in discourses of contemporary neoliberal cultures.
LaCapra suggests that ‘One’s relation to every other—instead of involving
a tense, at times paradoxical, interaction of proximity and distance, solidarity
and criticism, trust and wariness—may be figured on the model of one’s
anxiety-ridden “relation without r elation” to a radically transcendent (now
perhaps recognized as absent) divinity who is totally other’ (23–24).
In response to this, I argue that Sanctuary and ToW produced by the
Derry Playhouse push the boundaries of theatre and politics to interact
more closely, particularly on issues such as trust, forgiveness, acceptance and
renewal. They are committed to using the arts as a vehicle for social change
and dedicated to inviting former suppressed or repressed experiences of
trauma to take centre stage for the purposes of validation, respect, healing if
possible, and ultimately, communion between Self and Other. Their agenda
and strategy is simultaneously courageous and questionable, but utopian
most of all. Employing personal testimony as the raw material for narration
and embodiment in performance ensures that slippage between reality and
representation, place and space, affect and empathy will inevitably occur.
Perhaps however, this space of slippage could become a positive, useful, or
generative force for performers and audience, rather than a space of mud-
dled confusion and misinterpretation. On testimony, LaCapra notes the
power of the narrative body in creating spaces for meaning-making:
Testimonies serve to bring theoretical concerns in sustained contact with the

experience of people who lived through events and suffered often devastat-
ing losses. They also raise the problem of the role of affect and empathy in
174 M. HAUGHTON
historical understanding itself […] The looks and gestures of survivors also
call for reading and understanding. At times, nothing can be more graphic
and significant than the body language, including the facial expressions, of
the survivor-witness in recounting a past that will not pass away. (2001, xiv)
Entitling a performance reliving personal terrors Sanctuary has enabled

those debilitated by ghosts of past and the threats of the future to map a
safe space, however liminal, in the battleground of theatre and politics,
finding unexpected allies and unexpecting audiences along their hopeful
search for peace.
5.3 Theatre of Witness: Production History

and the Politics of Performance
In Theatre of Witness: Finding the Medicine in Stories of Suffering,

Transformation, and Peace (2013), Sepinuck maps the performance his-
tory of ToW since she established it in 1985 in the United States. She
introduces its primary objective:
The purpose of this form of theatre is to give voice to those who have been
marginalized, forgotten, or are invisible in the larger society, and to invite
audiences to bear witness to issues of suffering, redemption, and social jus-
tice. (2013, 1)
In the critical response to ToW, one of the most immediate frameworks

for questioning Sepinuck’s directorial position is led by potential reli-
gious affiliation. Grant and Jennings in their analysis of and interview
with Sepinuck focus on her relationship with ‘the spiritual’. They open
their interview noting that Sepinuck, as ‘a Jewish Buddhist, has no hesi-
tation in explaining her approach within the framework of a humanist
“spirituality” that explicitly deploys Judeo-Christian terminology’
(2013, 314). Perhaps elsewhere, religious affiliation or faith may also be
a significant issue concerning how such processes and productions are
influenced, but in the north of Ireland, it is typically the opening issue.
While she utilises terms that suggest a commitment to ‘humanist spiritu-
ality’, such as asking participants if they have a ‘prayer life’, this terminol-
ogy is not intended to encourage any form of established religious
practice into the rehearsal room but to open a dialogue regarding each
participant’s personal journey of reflection and healing, and indeed, to
ascertain their abilities and readiness for a challenging process of critical

self-reflection.
In her writing, she declares that one of the core guiding principles of
participating in a ToW production is to ‘find the medicine’ (2013, 47) in
a participant’s story. ‘Finding the medicine’ constitutes a fundamental part
of a performer’s journey of healing, and thus, part of their personal trans-
formation, and potentially an affective encounter for the audience. She
theorises and distinguishes ToW from other forms of testimony:
It means to find the healing that resides somewhere in a performer’s story

or persona. In practice, it means to walk with someone through his or her
wounds until the place of strength, redemption, or transcendence reveals
itself. Without it, stories of suffering might just become a litany of distress,
despair, and victimhood. (2013, 228–229)
This chapter will return to these guiding principles as they shed light
on the performance sequences in Sanctuary. For the moment, it is
noteworthy that even at this juncture in the process when ToW is
focusing on the potential for transcendence for the performer and the
audience, the role and scope of the creative context remains central to
this enquiry. Sepinuck details that, ‘In scripting performers’ stories,
the question must be asked, “Why does the audience need to hear this
story?”’ (2013, 228–229). Responding to her own question, she notes
that this constitutes the point of change [my emphasis], concluding
‘Often it’s the place where victimhood changes to survival, and denial
into accountability. Finding the medicine can be thought of as a re-
imagining of what might originally have been a one-dimensional or
hardened story in the mind of the storyteller into a story with breadth,
depth, paradox, and spaciousness’ (2013, 228–229). Thus, ToW pro-
ductions are motivated by the notions of efficacy and affect, and the
understanding that efficacy, affect and transformation occur through
personal therapeutic reflection and analysis, and the sharing of this
journey in structured public encounters such as performance.
However, while the process is led by this philosophy for change, the
framework for participation is led by the practicalities of giving full-
time commitment, which requires financial support. On this, Sepinuck
confirms, ‘I believe it’s essential in Theatre of Witness work that per-
formers are paid. They sign a contract agreeing to be on time, come
to all rehearsals, abide by the principles of confidentiality and respect
176 M. HAUGHTON
agreed on by the group, and finish the product. The producing agency
agrees to pay them an honorarium for rehearsals and performances.’
(2013, 28)
Critical responses, and not necessarily cynical responses, may suggest
that Sepinuck’s mission statement for ToW productions could include all
of humanity then, rather than a socially and politically marginalised, for-
gotten, and/or invisible segment. Is there an individual, community or
nation who escapes the experiences of pain and suffering, whether through
violence, discrimination, or illness? The critics would be fairly accurate,
though not in the way they expect. Through the ‘sacred space’ of sharing
and listening created in Sepinuck’s ToW productions, the hardened shells
of strangers loosen to become the fluid borders of a community. Personal
stories of suffering and trauma are divulged by the individual, detailing the
unique, incomparable and incomprehensible manner in which events
unfolded around them and to them. Yet, the realisation manifests that suf-
fering and trauma is a fundamental and inescapable part of life and living,
and thus, universal in how it is unique. What becomes central to engaging
with a ToW production then is not necessarily the story of trauma or suf-
fering (though indeed, these are individual and personal), but more so,
the context of their trauma and the context of the performance event.
ToW productions work from the premise that the space of performance is
sacred, and, inherent in the ritual of showing and telling in the current
postmodern, postindustrial, neoliberal Western societies, remains the
potential for personal healing, social transformation, and political conse-
quence. If one is to engage with a ToW production, a leap of faith and
open mind is required as much from the audience as from performers, and
in the current age of postmodern cynicism, perhaps this is where Sepinuck’s
major challenge lies.
Sepinuck’s monograph recounts major productions in the United
States and Europe. The ‘real’ people at the centre of her productions have,
at certain times, experienced feeling and being treated like the ‘Other’. By
the time she arrived to work in Derry, she had developed her ToW practice
for 25 years. Her previous productions (outlined in her monograph, but
dates for each production are not always listed) include working with the
elderly in Growing Old is About the Growing (US, 1985); working with the
homeless in I Make Myself at Home Wherever I Am (US, 1991); working
with refugees and immigrants in Death is an Everyday Thing (US, 1992);
with women and girls in Growing up Female (US); with prisoners in Living
with Life (US, 2001) and Steal the Stars and the Moon (Poland); with run-
away girls in Standing at the Doorway (Poland, 2003); with inner-city vio-
lence in My Neighborhood is a Cemetery (US, 2004); with domestic abuse
in Sucking Water from Mud (US); with war in Did You Understand What
You Were Dying For (US); and with families of prisoners in Holding Up
(US). However, she is quick to acknowledge from the outset of her reflec-
tions regarding her time in the north that:
I came to Northern Ireland very much an outsider. As a Jewish/Buddhist

American woman who knew very little about the ‘Troubles,’ this outsider
status held me in good stead. I wasn’t Catholic, Protestant, British, or Irish
and I had no stakes in the conflict. I came to listen, learn, bear witness, con-
nect, and, I hoped, help to give voice to some of the hidden stories. I didn’t
know that I would also come to heal myself too. (2013, 153)
The Derry Playhouse Theatre of Witness Programme began in 2009, sup-

ported by the EU’S Peace III Programme, managed by the Special EU
Programmes Body by Pobal. The four productions directed by Sepinuck
include We Carried Your Secrets (2009), I Once Knew a Girl (2010),
Release (2012) and Sanctuary (2013). The programme also offered work-
shops, talks and a mentorship programme culminating in Unspoken Love
(2014) directed by Thomas Spiers and Our Lives Without You (2014)
directed by Alessia Cartoni.
The ToW cycle began in 2009, eleven years after the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998. It concluded in 2014 at the time of the twenty-year
anniversary of the 1994 IRA ceasefire. The space of theatre, particularly
since the Troubles, has constituted an ideological battleground in which
paramilitaries, community activists as well as theatre artists have engaged
their personal and political views and histories. The traumas experienced
by the communities throughout the Troubles are multiple and complex.
Deep scars remain with communities, families, institutions and individu-
als. Theatre and the creative arts has played a major role in acknowledging
and exploring the depth of these traumas, attempting to value and validate
the oppression and suffering of the country, including civilians, soldiers
and paramilitaries. Bill McDonnell considers the history of community
theatre in Theatres of the Troubles, foregrounding the political significance
and power of creative spaces and artistic expression in this context. He
states ‘The theatre space was part of the battleground, both literally as a
potential space of warfare and actual violence, and symbolically as a space
of resistance and as the ground of cultural action.’15
178 M. HAUGHTON
Yet the traumas of the Troubles are not the only injustices that
occurred in its recent history. Discrimination and stigmas resulting from
identity politics outside of the predominant binaries of Irish–British,
Catholic–Protestant are increasingly voiced. In particular, injustices
resulting from prejudices relating to gender and sexuality, race and eth-
nicity, and mental illness have reached points of crisis. While the Troubles
dominated national and political attention for decades, some would
argue that social injustices not led by sectarian politics did not receive
appropriate attention or investigation as a consequence. In Sanctuary,
Sepinuck produces narratives that interweave well-documented sectarian
crises with multiple lesser-known cases of identity politics, discrimina-
tions and personal crises.
ToW is critically praised and challenged. Overall, the community
response is more positive than negative, and well documented in Grant
and Jennings’ article. Opening their review of ToW’s navigation of
northern Irish communities, history and politics, they firstly outline that
Sepinuck is the latest ‘outsider’ as opposed to the first in this regard of
community arts as social intervention. They remind readers that ‘There
has been a long tradition of artistic interventions, often by Americans,
aimed at promoting peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland’
(2013, 316). Concluding that certain ‘pitfalls’ inevitably remained for
Sepinuck as faced by her predecessors, consequently, her endeavours
become a greater achievement. ‘All the more remarkable, then, is the
sheer extent of the positive audience response to the production
recorded on the project website’, (2013, 16) they determine. They are
quick to follow on with critical concerns expressed by the (then) Ulster
University Professor of Drama, Carole Anne Upton. She notes that con-
ventionally, storytelling offers the teller space to change, challenge and
disrupt the narrative in various ways. Yet with the fixed script and thus,
fixed action, set to repeat night after night, Upton points to the ‘inher-
ent ambiguity of the participants’ dual role as witnesses and actors’
(2013, 16), which potentially dooms them to the same traumatic fate, a
point of clear significance for this particular study. In the end, there is
validity both to the positive and critical feedback. They should not be
viewed as in opposition but part of a studied spectrum of response to
issues and experiences equally complex and diverse. Perhaps the most
powerful response to the processes and productions of ToW are those
voiced by the participants, which are extremely conscious of the pro-
cesses they participated in. As Grant and Jennings note, ‘The sense of
autonomy and empowerment that emerges from these participant

responses represents a persuasive challenge to concerns that they are
passive instruments of the Theatre of Witness process’ (2013, 318). To
explore this ‘process’ with greater critical insight, this analysis will situ-
ate this form of performance according to theatre studies debates
regarding ‘documentary theatre’ and one of the leading cultural para-
digms of trauma studies, the ‘memoir boom’.
In their introduction to Verbatim Verbatim, editors Will Hammond
and Dan Steward declare that verbatim theatre is not a form but a tech-
nique. They explore the term verbatim, which:
[…] refers to the origins of the text spoken in the play. The words of real
people are recorded or transcribed by a dramatist during an interview or
research process, or are appropriated from existing records such as the tran-
scripts of an official enquiry. They are then edited, arranged or recontextu-
alised to form a dramatic presentation, in which actors take on the characters
of the real individuals whose words are being used.16
There were no actors involved in Sanctuary, though the subject matter

was arranged for performance with the support and involvement of a
director. Interestingly, one may ask, is Sanctuary more closely associated
with ‘documentary theatre’ and its affiliated truth claims due to the
removal of the actor? Or, ironically, is it less recognisable as ‘documentary
theatre’ due to its more immediate links with its truth claims, by dealing
only with the ‘real people’ whose testimonies constitute the core of the
production? Arguably, and infuriatingly, both positions could gain equal
purchase in this terminology–territory excavation.
Considering form and function in the ever-expanding domain of trauma
studies and the medical humanities, could the Theatre of Witness project
operate as a staged version of the ‘memoir boom’? Memoirs offering per-
sonal stories of trauma, sometimes acquired through recovered memory
therapies, entered a boom period in the 1990s, alongside the peak in pop-
ular interest in television talk shows such as Oprah Winfrey, Rikki Lake
and Jeremy Kyle. Roger Luckhurst notes:
While often dismissed as symptomatic of a mass culture of narcissism, the

success of the trauma memoir is merely further evidence of the affective
transmissibility of trauma I’ve tracked across virtually every arena of dis-
course, whether scientific or cultural, professional or amateur, high or
low.17
180 M. HAUGHTON
Luckhurst contextualises his critical historicisation of the memoir boom,

whether in print or audio-visual media, albeit in high or low form, with
the point that all such efforts of making personal experiences of trauma
public suggest a need or desire ‘not to undermine but guarantee subjectiv-
ity’ (2008, 119), and potentially, ‘these works help to narratively recon-
vene the self’ (119), which responds to the ‘acting out’ to ‘work through’
paradigm previously examined.
Notable trends in the memoir boom include ‘pathography’ writings
regarding illness, female literature exposing childhood sexual abuse (often
accessed through recovered memory techniques), a reworking of cultural
engagement with the act of confession, and interrogation of memory
through autobiography resulting in what Luckhurst terms ‘autofiction’
(120). Reading from John Wiltshire and Anthony Giddens, Luckhurst
places this paradigm in the context of postmodern, first-world, industri-
alised societies, where the experience of being human, consisting of men-
tal and physical needs and encounters, is increasingly relegated as
something out of the ordinary, interfering with one’s ‘normal’ life, i.e.,
work, and referred to ‘specialists’, typically medical. Giddens refers to the
late modern ‘sequestration of experience’ (Giddens 1991, 144) where in
advanced capitalist societies:
[…] encounters with extremity are suppressed: birth, death, insanity, even
direct experience of nature are all removed from the everyday and placed
under technical and institutional demand. That has its evident benefits, but
it is also a ‘protective cocoon’ that is fragile and liable to crack if routine
experience is disturbed.
One should not critically examine these performances and memoirs solely
in terms of veracity or authenticity. There should not be a Foucauldian
court of confessional truth. There is no ‘money shot’ as in Oprah. This is
part of their process of self-learning, and understanding the life they are
living.
However, reading from Leigh Gilmore, Luckhurst warns of the conse-
quences that can occur once one’s memoir arrives in print or audio-visual
material for public consumption:
The aim of memoir might be broadly therapeutic and educative, but publi-
cation transposes the story into a different terrain of author’s rights and
responsibilities, where claims about traumatic pasts become open to charges
of defamation or libel. Therapeutic resolutions might be publicly unravelled,
a story of survival becoming a retraumatization by public humiliation or

denunciation. (2008, 136–137)
Hence, whether the traumatic memoir in print or the staged testimony in

performance, these forms of ‘truth-telling’ through creative acts maintain
a mass following. They leave one’s private space of personal history and
enter a public forum dominated by processes of consumption. This has
indeed characterised the streams of reception that Sepinuck and ToW
faced. Its similarities to what is considered ‘documentary theatre’ and links
to the established literary culture of ‘the memoir’, ensure that expecta-
tions are already inscribed with a wariness of previous exploitation and
opportunism. This wariness and default cynicism can only be counteracted
or checked by the individual experience of attending a ToW production:
thus, liveness and presence. Those that did, largely, acknowledge integrity
to the process and performance, and those involved in the productions,
largely, express their gratitude for Sepinuck’s faith in them as part of their
journey to transformation, renewal and healing.
5.4 The Performance Environment: Situating

Performers, Audiences, Victims, Perpetrators,
Citizens, Others
I must begin an analysis of the performance of Sanctuary and its staging
of these specific traumas by briefly revisiting the focus on the process of
‘working through’ via the medium of performance, or the ‘vehicle’ as
Sepinuck identifies it. This ‘working through’ is to be understood as dis-
tinct from the ‘acting out’, though crossovers in experience and represen-
tation occur. ‘Acting out’ in the trauma studies context is considered an
inherent part of the repetition compulsion, drawing from Freud’s formu-
lation of this condition. However, depending on the stage or specifics of
any individual case of PTSD, personal development and guided expertise,
the ‘acting out’ can be a necessary part of the journey to ‘working
through’. In Sanctuary, the acting out in rehearsals and on stage is part of
a structured process guiding them to ‘work through’ their experiences.
LaCapra outlines the steps involved in ‘working through’:
Working through is an articulatory practice: to the extent one works through

trauma (as well as transferential relations in general), one is able to distin-
guish between past and present and to recall in memory that something
182 M. HAUGHTON
happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is liv-
ing here and now with openings to the future. (2001, 21–22)
LaCapra opens his own analysis by foregrounding the temporal distinc-

tions as the crucial point in relation to the ‘working through’ process.
One’s aim in attempts to ‘work through’ is to demarcate a space, to what-
ever extent personally and psychologically, away from the traumatic
encounters of the past which are infiltrating their present. By doing so, the
focus on living in a present and the anticipation of a future not dominated
by the repetition compulsion, is available or achievable. This does not
mean that one forgets the past traumatic encounter or that it has become
neatly categorised in a narrative time marked as ‘the past’, reaching a uto-
pian closure and bearing no further impact on their holistic state of being.
Indeed, in Sanctuary, many of the performers cannot move on in the
manner that they desire as they are dependent on and quite significantly
limited by the material structures of state bureaucracies, inefficiencies and
discriminations. Rather, the process of ‘working through’ via performance
process and production marks some type of personal closure to or separa-
tion from the period of crisis arising from the traumatic encounter.
As I previously stated, the performance itself does not constitute the
beginning of this process of working through but rather a significant point
on this journey in the context set out by the Playhouse ToW team in Derry
led by Sepinuck. The dominant part of this process is the critically reflec-
tive engagement in the interview and rehearsal phases. By performing
some of the results of these processes to audiences, further outcomes are
potentially addressed, such as, the personal gain for performers in speaking
aloud these histories and realisations to their communities, and, the per-
ceptions and reception dynamics of the audience. Directly and indirectly,
Sanctuary as well as the three previous ToW productions insinuate that
the ‘working through’ process must be in tandem with the performers
(real people) and the audience (the wider community) for substantial and
meaningful social engagement to take place. The traumas they are work-
ing through belong to the contemporary society that they are citizens of,
and reflect major current crises. These are shared problems and potential
threats. ToW offers an alternative perspective of addressing this culture of
crisis and resolution from the established paradigms. Northern Irish the-
atre scholar Mark Phelan expressed his reactions to the second show of
this quartet, We Carried Your Secrets, ‘I actually think this will germinate
more goodwill and genuine reconciliation through truth, as opposed to
recrimination through truth that we have too much of in this place/.

(quoted in ‘Processing the Peace’, 2013, 316).
Part of Sanctuary’s performance ethos extends to the dynamics of the
wider performance event, including audience demographics, scenography,
and general milieu in the foyer as well as the performance space. With
community-focused performances such as ToW, however, these produc-
tion elements take on increased significance and potency, and I argue that
the detail of this performance environment impacts the performance quite
directly, as well as its post-performance efficacy. I attended the premiere
performance at the Derry Playhouse before attending a second time at the
Brian Friel Theatre at Queen’s University Belfast. Both performances were
filmed, and a clearly visible sign ‘Filming in Progress’ was displayed to
audiences as they moved from the foyers to the performance spaces. At
both performances, the (free) tickets were booked out and there was a
queue of people waiting for standby tickets. When a young student asked
to be put on a waiting list at the QUB Friel Theatre, the box office atten-
dant replied ‘It’s a long list’. However, both venues are intimate theatre
spaces, with a maximum seating capacity of 152 in the Derry Playhouse,
and 120 in the Friel Theatre. Also at both performances, there was a clear
familiarity among the audience as they conversed jovially in the lobby and
in the auditorium while waiting for the performance to begin (I arrived an
hour prior in both cases to observe the audience interaction in the foyer
space). Many people, particularly at the Derry performance, moved among
the seating bank to greet each other warmly in the minutes prior to the
beginning of the performance.
The demographic of the audiences, based on my visible perceptions
alone (not supported by quantitative information) appeared diverse. The
demographic varied across age groups, gender, and masses of couples,
families, friends, and single spectators, from the elderly to what appeared
as university students and teenagers, but with a majority of the age group
between the 30s and 60s approximately. At both venues, there was a
minority of racial and ethnic diversity. At the Derry performance, every-
one in the audience was of Caucasian ethnicity with the exception of one
lady who appeared to attend the performance without company. At the
Belfast performance, the vast majority of the audience was also Caucasian,
though approximately ten people of African and Middle Eastern ethnicity
were also present. This is clearly in stark contrast to racial proportions on
stage, as three of the six performers are from African countries, represent-
ing 50 per cent of the cast. Interestingly, at the Belfast performance, there
184 M. HAUGHTON
were more adult males in the audience than adult females. Most quantita-
tive studies of contemporary theatre audiences will showcase a direct
reverse in that gender trend. Did these performed testimonies speak more
directly to male experience in the north, and if so, why?
Before the performance began in both venues, Sepinuck arrives centre
stage to address the audience directly, following a short introduction from
the stage manager. Full house lights warm the end-on staging in the the-
atre space, and Norah Jones’s whispered crooning fades out in the
background. The packed auditorium becomes hushed as they observe the
petite well-dressed lady approach centre stage. Sepinuck tells the audience
that this production sprang from the question ‘What does it mean to feel
home?’ She tells us, ‘You’re here to bear witness, to create a sacred space’
(Sepinuck, Sanctuary). Immediately, before we hear from ‘people playing
themselves, not actors’ (Sepinuck, Sanctuary), Sepinuck presses upon the
audience that they must play a role in this production. The audience will
not move from their seats or enter the playing space as is sometimes
expected in a theatre production termed ‘immersive’, yet, the audience is
implicated and immersed; socially, emotionally, and politically. However,
she delivers this information in a calm tone of voice, and addresses the
audience warmly. Adding to the already jovial and familiar atmosphere
created by the audience and the music, Sepinuck’s introduction reinforces
a sense of intimacy and community in the performance space. Sepinuck
also introduces two counsellors to the audience at both performances.
These counsellors stood along the tiered stairs by the seating bank. The
audience was informed should they wish to speak about anything follow-
ing the end of the performance, these counsellors and a private room
would be available to them.
It must be noted that from beginning to end, this performance event
is directly loaded with urgent questions regarding ethics in performance,
in storytelling, and in society. The audience members were made con-
sciously aware and frequently reminded they were not regarded by the
ToW team as consumers attending a show, or even, as an audience with
no further responsibility than to sit in the conventional level of silence
and appear to pay attention. Theatre in this case is operating as a ‘vehicle
for transformation’ (Sepinuck, Sanctuary), and through this event, the
audience must learn to see ‘the Other as Self ’ (Sepinuck, Sanctuary).
Therefore, Sanctuary directly implicates the audience in the performers’
futures; what happens to them tomorrow becomes a communal respon-
sibility. Thus, when Yuusuf utter her hopes that ‘maybe tomorrow will
be her day’, her hope and her future is unveiled as existing at the mercy
and actions of the community, many of whom, are sitting in the audi-
ence, or hearing about the play from the media, or discussing it with
friends and associates. When audience members are offered prepared let-
ters for the Home Secretary that they only need sign and post, their
theatre experience is directly resituated in the civil and political context
as well as the artistic and cultural. The performance environment for
Sanctuary provides a scenography of warmth, community, transforma-
tion, and political action.
5.5 Performing Home: Pathologies of Belonging

and Escape
The repetition of the word ‘home’, which is loaded politically and person-
ally, and the linking of ‘home’ with ‘sanctuary’ and ‘safe haven’ sets up
multiple complex associations. Contradictions in ideologies of home, and
the material realities of home, are stark. The place of ‘home’ is tradition-
ally assumed as the place of the family, yet also, where people are most often
under threat, particularly women and children.18 In contemporary Ireland
and the UK, homelessness has never been so widespread. In the twentieth
century in Ireland, as outlined in greater detail in Chap. 4, ‘Containment’,
the colloquial expression ‘being sent to the home’ refers to a social form
of penal detention, which contributes to Ireland’s significantly institu-
tionalised population. Detention centres for immigrants and refugees
resonate with this tradition of coercive confinement, inhumane living
conditions, and dismissive treatment by domestic authorities and society
in Ireland and the UK. The ideas of ‘home’ which Irish communities
mythologised, feminised, glorified and ideologically policed both during
and after colonisation, became further romanticised through the needs
and narratives of the diaspora as a result of intergenerational emigrant
legacies. This has quickly given way to the rules governing societies deter-
mined increasingly by multinationals and less so by the unstable and
unconvincing national leadership. In the United Kingdom, both state and
society waited with bated breath for the outcome of the Scottish referen-
dum on national independence, re-energising their debates on ‘home’
and ‘nation’. Indeed, the ‘Brexit’ campaign unearthed decades if not cen-
turies of national tensions which seep through attitudes and infrastruc-
tures, regarding ‘Englishness’, ‘Empire’ and Europe. The significance of
these referenda, regardless of the electorate’s mandates, is telling of how
186 M. HAUGHTON
important the home/identity/nation interplay remains and its increasing

instability and precarity.
Indeed on the island of Ireland, the instability of identity and official
borders of home presents a dialogue all too familiar for its residents. Thus,
‘home’ is a political and psychological site, where the borders are strin-
gently policed and subject to collapse. As Grant and Jennings summarise,
the space of ‘home’ remains fraught, and personal negotiation needs to
occur alongside the political. They conclude:
The very idea of a ‘Peace Process’ implies (as the Derry dramatist Dave
Duggan has pointed out) the absence of a Peace Product. Despite the pas-
sage of nearly two decades since the first IRA Ceasefire (in 1994) reminders
of unresolved issues arising from the years of violence confront those living
in Northern Ireland on a daily basis. The continuing activities of paramili-
tary punishment squads and dissident Republicans attract occasional media
attention, but for the most part people in poorer parts of Northern Ireland,
who bore the brunt of the Troubles, feel left behind by the over-arching
rhetoric of peace. As exemplified by these two productions [We Carried
Your Secrets and I Once Knew a Girl] directed by Teya Sepinuck for the
Theatre of Witness, community-based arts have a clear and vital role in help-
ing to address this deficit. (2013, 318)
Thus far, this analysis has pointed to the difficulties of remaining at home
due to political, social and civic crises. However, there is also the desire to
escape ‘home’ as domestic and familial conflicts coalesce to promise the
diegetic space of the wider world must be a better fit than the kitchen sink
setting most common to spaces of habitat.
In Una Chaudhuri’s treatise, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern
Drama, she argues that modern Western drama is embedded with the
politics of home, manifest in the swinging pendulum of departure and
exile. Referring to the characterisation of place as problem as ‘geopathol-
ogy’,19 she outlines the structure this pathology provides, ‘The dramatic
discourse of home is articulated through two main principles, which
structure the plot as well as the plays’ accounts of subjectivity and iden-
tity: a victimage of location and a heroism of departure’ (1997, xii). In this
postdramatic performance, perhaps there is a subversion of this dynamic.
The three African performers do not desire to leave their homeplace for
lands anew. They were forced to flee from their homeplace for safe haven
somewhere else due to political and military tensions outside of their
control. They did not necessarily choose Ireland or the UK, but through
the troubling systems of human migration, they arrived there. For the
performers from the region, place as problem is also central to their trau-
mas, though they look to resolve them and create a sense of home that is
also safe, and a haven, from the homes they have previously known and
suffered in.
The change in music, pace, and lighting cohere to ensure the live event
is reframed and clearly designated as performance throughout the height-
ened realism of the performers’ testimonies. This provided a sense of
familiarity for the audience, and perhaps security via distance, as the tradi-
tional frame of performance is being challenged consistently from pro-
gramme information, Sepinuck’s introduction, and the testimonies shared
by the performers. Before the performance begins, Sepinuck instructs the
audience that while they are observing theatre, they are also here as com-
plicit witnesses to recent historical events. The traditional audience role of
strangers in the darkness who may leave at the end of the show and dismiss
the experience should they wish is directly challenged. The audience had
also been instructed not to clap following each testimony, which allows
the heightened theatricalisation of the ensemble movement sequences to
flow in the wake of each narrated account. These intermittent movement
sequences, accompanied by bracing music scores and lighting changes,
sustains the theatricalisation of the event, and prevents it from unfolding
as group therapy. It provides the audience some space to digest the trau-
matic history narrated by a performer, and prepare oneself, as much as
possible, for what may come next.
Before the performers emerge on stage a large screen plays a recording.
The first sequence showcases some of the worst atrocities from the
Troubles, including news and media reports visually and semantically
detailing the widespread devastation. The voice-over booms that people
are being ‘petrol-bombed and burned out of [their] home’ and parents
reassuring children the evacuation was part of a holiday. It tells of a minis-
ter under threat due to the dialogue he supported with a priest, and he
describes himself as ‘a dead man walking’. All these people were in desper-
ate need of sanctuary, and safe haven, as their homes and identities were
under siege. These sequences are followed by the video detailing a discov-
ery of six Ethiopian immigrants who stowed away on a potato boat arriv-
ing to escape the famine ravaging their own country. The links between a
famine and exile weighs heavy on Irish cultural psychologies, both sides of
the border. Fortunately, they did find sanctuary, and a home in this region.
Beginning the performance with this recording, which takes a precarious
188 M. HAUGHTON
situation of Third-World immigrants arriving on this island who are thus

welcomed, protected, and loved, is a strategic move which sets the tone
from the outset. It ensures the first critical reflection of the wider society
the audience meets on this journey is the memory of an open and loving
community who provided shelter and acceptance to strangers. The film
continues to show how well-integrated the Ethiopians became in the com-
munity and the warm relationship that ensues between them and the peo-
ple who took responsibility for their welfare, concluding with a joyous
sound-bite from the-then Home Secretary stating that they can stay and
live in Northern Ireland.
The image the audience is presented with at the end of the film portrays
a wealth of extreme experiences, from crises resulting from war and famine
to new and unexpected relationships of love and friendship. Both exile and
sanctuary are depicted here, suggesting that the community is capable of
both, and thus reinforcing the notion that individual and collective social
responsibility decides how experiences of crisis can turn to experiences of
transformation. At the end of the video, the six performers walk centre
stage, dressed in what appears as their ‘everyday’ clothes of the present
period, as opposed to some kind of costume that would mark them as
performers in the traditional fictive sense or a specific past time. This is
important, as the stakes of trauma and ‘working through’ largely focus on
the play of temporality. They break into three pairs of man–woman, sitting
on the floor. The men rise, and help the women stand. Together, the six
face the audience and walk towards the audience, as one group. They turn
to each other once more, looking at each other in the eye, and then
Therese McCann begins her story.
McCann’s childhood memories are held together by crises within her
family and crises within her community. The violence of the Troubles in
Derry, specifically the time of the evacuation and subsequent temporary
living accommodation in a town hall, are more potently evoked for
McCann through the memory of needing to be with her mother.
Motherhood, both in terms of needing her mother and the unexpected
teenage pregnancy she faced aged 17, forced McCann into a position of
vulnerability from a young age. Her mother’s nervous breakdown denied
the stable parental care she craved, and Derry’s outbreak of war forced
McCann to run from gunfire in the streets, resulting in her premature
labour. Giving birth to a little girl weighing just over a pound, her baby
died shortly after birth. McCann, sitting on chair facing the audience,
works through her story carefully. Tremors in her voice calm after a time
and stylised gestures aid the pacing of her narrative. She claims her need
for a strong mother’s love, absent from her youth, informed her journey
leading her to an abusive marriage, depression, and attempted suicide.
Yet love materialised in unexpected places, such as the women’s shelter
she found refuge in and the counsellors she opened up to. When her
young adult son Michael was badly assaulted in a sectarian attack more
recently, McCann felt a shift in her own consciousness concerning per-
sonal and political traumas. She realised her and her family’s response
must prevent escalation and more trauma to them or those who initiated
this violent attack. As her son awoke and the family gathered, McCann
demanded ‘No revenge’. McCann’s story concludes with her five peers
joining her onstage, accompanied by live music. The music is threatening
and tense, and as it builds, the ensemble begin more stylised trust exer-
cises, with McCann allowing herself to fall and the others catch her and
return her body upright. There is strength circulated among this ensemble
of six, including confidence and reassurance. Their strength as a group is
convincing and consistent. It encourages the audience to tap into this
certainty of narrative and purpose, creating a milieu of heightened energy,
affect and critical attention. My notes discuss the unspoken certainty
among this audience that we are witness to something important and
unique, perhaps a rare expression of the meaning of community, and the
potential inherent in creativity. This performance is both political and
peaceful. How many will leave the performance remembering her declara-
tion ‘No revenge’? The affect of this cannot be mapped or quantified, the
experience of witnessing it cannot be fairly articulated through language,
but yet, it remains solid, substantial and present.
The two male African performers, Loyd Ncube and Everson Taelo,
emerge centre stage following the scene change from the ensemble move-
ment interaction sequence. Their sequence is set up as an account of their
experience at an immigration office. Ncube details that he is seeking asy-
lum here to escape the military in Zimbabwe who killed his father. The
military attempted to recruit him against his will. He escaped through a
small hole in the fence of the training camp they brought him to. A male
agent helped his escape. To look someone in the eye directly is considered
rude in his country, which is why he does not do so to the immigration
officer. However, in Europe, not looking someone in the eye directly
while speaking can be considered rude. Thus, the officer thinks his behav-
iour is rude. He prays now. He has a daughter in Zimbabwe, aged six,
being cared for by his mother. Taelo’s personal journey to this moment
190 M. HAUGHTON
has similarities. He tells that he was caught printing leaflets for the
opposition party in his school. He was doing this to raise money to help
his father buy a tractor for the farm. They beat him at school in front of
everyone. They beat his uncle to death. An agent helped him to escape.
He can no longer contact his family as the phone lines no longer work.
Maybe they are in hiding or maybe something has happened to them. He
states ‘I put them in danger.’
Their statements are precise and economical. They do not theatricalise
or heighten the horrors they faced. Evidently, the violence and persecu-
tion from their home nation is devastating. However, their experiences at
the immigration office in Northern Ireland are also destructive, and
potentially, not isolated encounters. The apparently simple gesture of
looking someone directly in the eye is packed with meanings, histories and
associations in Western culture. This gesture is embedded with entirely
different meanings, histories, and associations from distinct cultures.
Through the lack of top-down, state-led, intercultural education and
interaction, basic and required processes of communication become
potentially discriminatory and negative.
Ncube ends his testimony with the mention of his six-year-old daugh-
ter, whom he remains separated from since his departure; he does not
know when he will see her or care for her again. Taelo ends his testimony
singing a song for his mother. This trauma, of breaking a family unit and
keeping parents from children, begins an intergenerational legacy.
Communities and families on the island of Ireland are embedded with
histories of broken family lines and displacement from emigration as a
result of colonisation, poverty, and violence. Contemporary cultural and
sociological scholars and commentators will discuss the intergenerational
impact of such traumas, and their present-day consequences visible
through high rates of alcoholism and depression. The long-term impact
on racial and ethnic tensions within these communities will sprout through
each generation as they learn of the nation’s laws which prevent the unifi-
cation of parent and child. Furthermore, it may sustain a distance between
these new immigrant and citizens, and the country they have come to call
or may consider calling, ‘home’.
As these young men’s testimonies conclude the ensemble returns car-
rying a puppet or doll-like figure, which resembles a nun. This figure is
dressed in black and constructed on a stick, raised high so it towers above
the performers. Noticeably, the figure does not have a face. The moment
this caricature of a religious order enters the performance space, my own
reaction is gut-wrenching dread. Media outlets and government inqui-

ries in recent decades are dominated with recovered histories and survi-
vor testimony of sexual and physical abuse suffered during state and
religious education, both usually managed by the Roman Catholic clergy
in the majority, and the Protestant clergy in the minority. Multiple reports
investigating the level of abuse, and the level of state and religious cover-
up of the abuse, have been carried out, or remain ongoing. Thus, once
the large, faceless puppet-doll appears on high, audiences may instantly
assume a story of child abuse is forthcoming, which is exactly what
occurs.
Margaret is dressed casually in denim and a voiceover is played. The
lighting design produces an image of bars, resembling a prison. Margaret
tells the audience about life in the Catholic Nazareth House Girls’ Home
her parents sent her and her sisters to on the Ormeau Road in South
Belfast (not an area associated with high levels of sectarian violence),
when she was about three years old in 1958.20 Her parents had separated
and her father could not cope raising four children alone. This orphanage
was connected to a Magdalene laundry, and the grounds were vast. Today,
the site is surrounded by stylish apartments and large residential homes in
one of the most sought-after residential locales in Belfast. Yet looming
amid this leafy suburb, peppered with cafes and Montessori schools, the
large redbrick structure remains, surrounded by high walls, high gates,
silent but steadfast, as is typical with the architecture of religious institu-
tions on the island of Ireland. Its secrets are not yet revealed, but Margaret
McGuckin’s story and the ongoing inquiry suggest these walls may be
penetrated one day.
She talks of life in the orphanage characterised by constant humiliation,
and a cycle of fear and dread. It was supposed to be a place of sanctuary
but they were just part of the ‘scrapheap’. The children were always hun-
gry, and their food was sold to a pig farmer. ‘We were slaves’, Margaret
claims. Publicly releasing the details of her experience in a Belfast Telegraph
article by Deborah McAleese in 2009, McGuckin tells of the lack of love
that pervaded the orphanage, and the Sisters’ policy of keeping children
separated from family, ‘They [the Sisters] wouldn’t even let me speak to
my sister which might have helped. Anytime I saw her through the railings
in the segregated playground, we were pulled away from each other if we
tried to talk or hold hands’ (McGuckin, ‘Survivors’ NI).
The emotional hardship and neglect was compounded by physical
abuse. McGuckin provides details of the physical labour the children were
192 M. HAUGHTON
forced to do on an ongoing basis, and also, the direct violence she suffered
at the hands of the Sisters. She recalls:
I remember one day being beaten the whole way to a cupboard by one of
the Sisters. When she got me there she kept beating me with a stick and tell-
ing me I was evil and a liar and the worst type of person that walked the
earth. When I cried she battered me even more, telling me to stop crying.
When she left me in the cupboard I cried out for someone to come and take
me away so many times, but no one came to rescue me (McGuckin,
Survivors’ NI).
The horrors outlined in the quotation above not only provide direct tes-
timony of the violence and hardship young children in that institution
were prey to, but the absence of intervention by any adult within or exte-
rior to the institution. This is horrifying on another level. What
McGuckin’s testimony reveals, as do those published in the Ryan,
Murphy, Cloyne and McAleese reports to varying degrees, is that ‘good’
society does not intervene in the abuse of designated vulnerable groups.
How many reports and inquiries are required before social intervention
becomes a direct and immediate response, as opposed to a decades-late
reluctant apology?
At 11 years old, one day, Margaret states, ‘I was dismissed—no social
worker, no money, no plan.’ She was given a dress from the attached laun-
dry. Her entire experience in the orphanage was governed by shame,
which she tried to suppress within her internal landscape. In the end, she
found an outlet through the expression of anger and violence. Then the
Troubles started. She became known as ‘Mad Maggie’, and an infamous
newspaper photo showed her beating a soldier with a hurley for which she
was applauded for being a good rioter (Sanctuary, 2013). She was arrested
and taken to Castlereagh police station, and charged with blowing up the
Wimpy Café (in the performance she states she did not do it). She was
subsequently moved to Armagh Jail. She refused to sign up to a political
group. She received some bad counselling and wrong advice. Then she
met a GP, who she describes as ‘someone [who] finally listened to my
cries’ and ‘began my own healing’ (Sanctuary, 2013). Much later, she saw
a girl on TV talking about institutional abuse. Six thousand people had
signed a petition to set up an inquiry. Now she is a leader of that campaign
and an advocate for justice in these issues. Every day she is contacted by
people looking for peace and solace. She stands on stage and looks at the
nun-doll, then exits by herself.
Herman summarises the psychological dynamic women face as a result

of trauma, detailing, ‘The conflict between the will to deny horrible
events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psy-
chological trauma.’21 Yet, while for decades she, like some of her fellow
performers, followed Herman’s consideration of the ‘ordinary response’
to atrocities which is ‘to banish them from consciousness (1992, 1) truth
will out. Herman opens her ground-breaking work in this study, Trauma
and Recovery, by concluding, ‘Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who
refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. […] Remembering
and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the
restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.’
(1992, 1).
Maryama Yuusuf enters the space, bows and begins to pray. Standing at
the grotto, she describes the beauty of Somalia and her community, a past
she can no longer return to. In 1991, the government fell and civil war
broke out. She states that tribes were fighting each other and killing inno-
cent people. People began to flee to neighbouring countries, while others
died of starvation or drowned. Girls were raped, she tells, and the sea is
poisoned with nuclear waste, so the fish die. She is from a minority tribe,
where the boys are recruited as soldiers, and the girls violated and used as
slaves. Somalia, her country and community of beauty, has become one of
the most dangerous places on earth. She leaves her house and nine chil-
dren one day to find food, taking the Koran with her and hiding it under
her dress. When she returns, everyone is gone but her uncle. She is then
taken by soldiers and forced into their slavery. She and the other female
slaves she is with cannot decide whether to die or stay alive. One woman
is pregnant and they help her give birth, cutting the umbilical cord with a
dirty knife. They have no clean clothes, no food, no water; no hope. They
decide to escape, deciding, ‘if we die, we die’ (Sanctuary, 2013). She
reaches a Red Cross refugee camp where she learns her uncle fled to the
United States. He sends money for an agent to take her also to America to
be reunited with her family. Instead, she is taken to the UK. That was nine
years ago (in 2013), as stated at the opening of this chapter.
The final testimony is performed by Ryan Doherty, a Northern Irish
man who appears to be in his 30s, dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans.
He opens by producing techno-music sounds, followed by the declara-
tion ‘Music was my passion and my life’ (Sanctuary, 2013). He detailed
his experiences of nightclubs, identifying them as ‘transcendental’,
where you could leave your troubles (one assumes a reference to ‘the
194 M. HAUGHTON
Troubles’) at the door. Amidst this immersion in music and clubbing, at

age 26, his routine and identity becomes shattered by ‘a series of dra-
matic events’, which ‘he still does not fully understand’. His wording
immediately evokes common trauma studies analogies of the smashing
of glass with shards so split and multiple that the former cohesive object
can no longer be grasped. He spoke of the deep depression he became
submerged in throughout the following months and years. He describes
his attempts to work through it with therapists, pills and a ‘healer’ he
encountered, who he believes worsened his health. After three years of
suffering, he moved in with his parents. He reflects that he ‘didn’t want
to live, but didn’t want to die’. Asking ‘God’ for a sign, he opened the
Bible at psalm 23, which reads, ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ He attends
Mass the following day, and concluding communion, the priest narrates,
‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ It is at this point that the realisation surfaced
that only he was the one who could ‘work through’ his health problems;
that there was no other way. This realisation changed everything, and
his path to recovery revealed itself. It has not been an easy or simple
path. At Christmas, his counsellor took his own life. Yet, he highlights,
these extremes have taught him the importance of being heard, and,
resilience; never give up. He concludes that through great suffering he
has learned of moments of real joy. Placing a testimony of mental health
crisis, experienced by a young male, alongside those who became vul-
nerable as a result of war, ethnicity, class and gender is a significant
choice by Sepinuck. It keeps the focus on the ability of the individual to
work through suffering, regardless of its roots, bias or geopolitical con-
text. It focuses on the common humanity at stake in suffering and trans-
formation. It denies the power of silence from histories of stigma, shame
and secrecy to keep its hold in the performance space. It makes the
purpose of the performance space affective personally and politically:
acknowledging the individual, the narrative, and the shared space of the
community.
Herman, on the disruption to silence such as forms of public acknowl-
edgement, argues, ‘When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can
begin their recovery’ (1992, 1). On the recognition of repressed or
silenced traumatic narratives and histories, Herman outlines how these
moments occur individually and communally, stating ‘Clinicians know the
privileged moment of insight when repressed ideas, feelings, and memo-
ries surface into consciousness. These moments occur in the history of
societies as well as in the history of individuals’ (1992, 2). These testimo-
nies made an attempt to break through certain layers of silenced social

narrative. Indeed, Herman talks of:
The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public aware-

ness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation oper-
ate on a social as well as individual level. The study of psychological trauma
has an ‘underground’ history. Like traumatized people, we need to under-
stand the past in order to reclaim the present and the future. Therefore, an
understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovering history.
(1992, 2)
Towards the end of the performance, the six performers walk towards the
doorway, which is then flooded in bright yellow light. The light, like sun-
shine, washes over their faces, and then, they walk ‘through’ the door.
They regroup at the grotto and then focus their stare directly at the audi-
ence. The stage manager draws back curtains and another video plays, this
time, snippets from the performers’ time together in workshops and
rehearsals. Candles are lit, they are sharing a meal, and laughing, with the
production team also present. Sanctuary concludes with this image; the
image of community.
5.6 The Politics of Reception: Communion

The Oxford English Dictionary online notes that while the term ‘commu-
nion’ is ‘of multiple origins’, a leading interpretation is ‘The action or fact
of sharing or holding something in common with others; mutual partici-
pation; the condition of things so held, mutuality, community, union.’22
These actions, of ‘sharing’, ‘holding something in common with others’,
‘mutual participation’ necessarily invoke forms of affect. ANU’s (the case
study in Chapter 4, Containment) primary goal of creating ‘moments of
communion’ constitute affective experiences between an audience mem-
ber and a performer, multiple audience members, or an audience member
and its encounter with an object or memory. Yet these are not contempo-
rary theatrical conventions or objectives; they are as old as the craft itself.
Indeed, notions of ‘affect’ and ‘efficacy’ in the theatre are fluid, often
contradictory, and malleable according to the ideologies of cultural and
historical moments and places. For example, the motives and ideologies
framing Aristotelian catharsis in ancient Athenian tragedy will lead to dif-
ferent results from medieval morality plays. Indeed, the physical connec-
tions harnessed between performer-spectator in Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre
196 M. HAUGHTON
practices in twentieth-century Europe will differ from the immersive par-

ticipatory experience of the The Living Theatre in the United States in the
1960s and 70s. Nevertheless, one can identify a continuum of performer-
participant cognitive and physical engagement from ancient Greek theatre
to the present day, whereby a production’s entertainment or aesthetic
goals do not necessarily constitute the dominant or complete aims of the
performance.
Sepinuck and Sanctuary centralise the political presence of the audience
not only in terms of the scope of performance, but through the implica-
tions and duties of their contemporary materiality post-performance. The
performers’ struggles and injustices are ongoing now—[how] will this
audience intervene? What then is the role of the audience on this journey
of theatre and politics between the past and the future? As these distinc-
tions of time, performance and politics become increasingly blurred, and
indeed, commune, the trauma theorist will inevitably consider the ques-
tion of Derridean différance in querying the meanings of this event. While
some may point to the role of scapegoat that this collapse of distinctions
can sometimes provide, LaCapra argues that:
[…] undecidability and unregulated difference, threatening to disarticulate

relations, confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions, including that
between past and present, are related to transference and prevail in trauma
and in post-traumatic acting out in which one is haunted or possessed by the
past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic
scenes—scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalis-
tically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop. (2001: 21)
Indeed, is there a point where Sanctuary stops working as an aesthetic

theatrical performance and increasingly as a political gathering? These
questions may not achieve universally accepted answers. However, this
analysis works to produce a context from which we can understand why in
the current Western, postmodern, postindustrial, neoliberal age, we are
increasingly faced with this ironic and paradoxical dynamic. Often, people
now make and go to certain theatre and performance events [spaces and
venues fundamentally created and designed for the production of play and
fantasy] for truth, personal transformation, and access to political engage-
ment, as the politics of the ‘real’ world no longer seems capable of credi-
bly fulfilling this mandate in the ‘post-truth’ climate of ‘alternative facts’.
As the performativity of everyday life increases, the aesthetics of actual
theatrical performances appear to decrease. In Verbatim Theatre (2008),

writer/performer Robin Soans addresses this point:
The arts are more than mere entertainment. In my view they should also be
the vessel which houses the conscience of a nation; they should ask the dif-
ficult questions others would rather leave unasked. In recent years, as those
in power have grown cleverer and cleverer in news manipulation, the need
to ask such questions has grown. It can be no accident that, as the art of spin
has become more sophisticated, leading to a decline in standards of honesty
in public life, there has been a simultaneous proliferation of political theatre.
(2008, 17)
This cannot be true of all performances globally, but there are sufficient
examples of this in recent decades to acknowledge it now exists as a com-
mon trope. The freedom of creative spaces and encounters, and the contem-
porary cynicism towards civil administrations are also central to this trend of
‘truth-telling’ and/or politically affective experiences in performance.
This trend is not contemporary in and of itself, but part of a wider his-
tory of affective and politically motivated performances. Richard Schechner
theorises the ‘entertainment-efficacy braid’ in Performance Theory where,
in summary, he outlines a continuum of performance history depicting the
interrelating dynamic between efficacy and entertainment. Schechner
maintains that ‘At all times a dialectical tension exists between the effica-
cious and the entertainment tendencies’23 as the system is one that yields
change and does not denote ‘improvement or decay’ (2003, 134). In
terms of Sanctuary, it clearly sits nearer the edge of the efficacy region on
this braid, as its attempts to ‘ritualize performance, to make theater yield
efficacious acts’ (131). However, that is not to say it ignores the signifi-
cance of entertainment in how these testimonies are arranged and deliv-
ered to their audiences. Stylised movement, theatrical scenography, and
the injection of light humour where possible submerged the entire perfor-
mance in a tone that firmly kept the event as tipping the balance more
towards performance then primarily a political gathering.
According to Schechner’s historicisation, then, the current momen-
tum behind such directly political and personal performances are part of
a re-emergence of perhaps not the dominance of efficacy on mainstages,
but sufficient activity to acknowledge it remains. Following on from
Aristotelian catharsis, Schechner notes that, ‘The late medieval period
was dominated by efficacious performances’ (134), where he cites church
198 M. HAUGHTON
services, court ceremonies, moralities, cycle plays, carnivals, fairs, pag-

eants to support his point. In keeping faith with the movement on the
braid, he details that, ‘As the Renaissance took hold took hold in England
these began to decline and popular entertainments, always present,
became predominant in the form of Elizabethan public theatres’ (134).
Thus, while this efficacy-entertainment braid cannot be comprehended as
a simplistic pendulum which swings to and fro, Schechner argues the
point that this type of potently personal storytelling in performance,
which directly seeks personal and political transformation in its actuality
and wake, is by no means new to the annals of theatre history.
Consequently, throughout this chapter, I employ the term ‘affect’
according to the particular identified aims of the Theatre of Witness
project, which Sepinuck introduces and problematises through her pub-
lications, public talks and workshops. In terms of the relationship
between affect and performance, contemporary scholars also debate its
increasing value and presence in current politicised theatre. In
Performance Affects, James Thompson theorises affect as ‘the sensory
responses to both social and artistic processes’24 warning that by failing
to recognise these ‘bodily responses, sensations and aesthetic pleasure—
much of the power of performance can be missed’ (2009, 7). In Theatre
and Therapy, Fintan Walsh considers affect in relation to effect, specifi-
cally referencing Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness productions as an
example. He details that those working in theatre and theatre-goers in
general, can discuss the theatrical encounter as ‘transformative’ at times.
Walsh claims that:
In attempting to understand the way theatre might directly contribute to

personal change, we can speak of its therapeutic effect. The victim of trauma
who participates in one of Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness projects only
to develop a strong sense of insight and reconciliation might attest to this
capacity, for instance. Many people claim that the charged nature of live
performance can produce an intensity of thought and feeling whose impact
is more subtle and resonant over time that it is immediately measurable. In
considering this appeal, we might refer to theatre’s therapeutic affect.
(2012a, 1–2)
In Sanctuary and indeed Sepinuck’s previous ToW productions in the

north, the performers and practitioners involved are driven from the
beginning of the creative process to the final performance events and life
thereafter to facilitate affective encounters for performers and audiences.
In her study of ToW, Fitzpatrick situates the potential for affect in rela-
tion to the neoliberal political project implemented throughout the
United Kingdom. She observes:
While contemporary neoliberal politics in the United Kingdom and beyond

will tend to identify the Theatre of Witness Project as part of a body of work
that aims to normalize Northern Ireland, bringing its practice of everyday
life into line with the rest of the United Kingdom through dialogue and
reconciliation and so attracting trade and industry to the region, the project
as it has developed, seems instead to undermine neoliberal assumptions by
reasserting the importance of community engagement and shared responsi-
bility, and by incorporating elements of ‘disappeared’ or taboo stories and
experiences into performances of otherwise conventional, ‘mythologized’
stories of the Troubles. (2015, 136–137)
While Fitzpatrick continues that this might be the result of the established
cultural context in the north, nevertheless, it is a positive consequence for
theatre and community throughout the island of Ireland and the United
Kingdom.
Recognising the ‘Other’ as a ‘Self ‘is one of Sepinuck’s key goals in
achieving the aims of a successful TOW production. The twelfth and final
guiding principle of TOW ‘Everyone is Me’ is directed at the audience
recognising the ‘Other’ represented through the body/identity/narrative
of the performer, but also that the performers are accepting themselves, in
their post-traumatic lives, as ‘Other’ and not as ‘Other’. Sepinuck writes it
concerns:
[…] learning to see oneself not only in others, but as “the other” […] This
goal of seeing oneself in every human life isn’t easy to attain. Perhaps it can
only be an aspiration. But leaning towards this way of viewing the human
condition helps us to negate the judging, small mind and invites real empa-
thy and love. Maybe another way to say it is that it encourages communion
with the other. (2013, 235)
If both ToW participants and audiences undertake this objective, the

ideal impact for this communion among performers and audiences is the
lessening of isolation dominating the performers’ sense of self and other,
forging and reforging connections to self and Other, ideally, to return
following exile. Perhaps it may not fully ‘dissolve the boundaries’ (235)
that Sepinuck strives for, but keeping a utopian goal to motivate the
200 M. HAUGHTON
project can be a positive generative force for change, and push those
involved to take a step further than anticipated. This may extend to post-
ing the paperwork to the Home Secretary that ToW clearly encourages
and facilitates its audience to do, but also, one of the most powerful
affective experiences audiences can garner from the theatrical event is the
knowledge and consciousness-raising that emerges from seeing, listen-
ing, and thinking. Put simply by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth,
‘In practice, then, affect and cognition are never fully separable—if for
no other reason than that thought is itself a body, embodied.’25 The
impact of this knowledge is difficult to quantify yet remains directly
immediate and long-term, embedded into thought and discourse, action
and reaction, with the potential to change or inform habits, attitudes
and behaviour.
To achieve this level of impact, the production stakes largely invest in
the role of affect through performance practice and the performance
event to lead to positive generative change. This utopian idealised affect
does not assume an idealised resolution or conclusion. Moments of com-
munion do not always occur; indeed, moments of blockage are often the
result of Sara Ahmed’s ‘unhappy’ objects in one’s horizon, which are not
sufficiently ‘away’. Ahmed details in ‘Happy Objects’, ‘Some bodies are
presumed to be the origin of bad feeling insofar as they disturb the
promise of happiness, which I would re-describe as the social pressure to
maintain the signs of “getting along.” Some bodies become blockage
points, points where smooth communication stops.’26 The performers
could indeed represent these bodies, as their existence and life experi-
ence acts as the landscape housing histories that lead to unhappy feel-
ings, which society learns to keep at a distance. As Ahmed details, ‘Those
things we do not like we move away from. Awayness might help establish
the edges of our horizon; in rejecting the proximity of certain objects,
we define the places that we know we do not wish to go, the things we
do not wish to have, touch, taste, hear, feel, see, those things we do not
want to keep within reach’ (2010, 32). In Sanctuary, Sepinuck intro-
duces audiences to histories of unhappy objects which are often secluded
to the field ‘awayness’; child abuse, rape, mental illness, and war. Through
the performers’ journeys from the exile of their traumas to the desired
communion with their audiences, they illuminated a circular path, from
here, to away, to here again.
Notes
1. By performance text, I refer to my notes from the two performances I
attended at the Derry Playhouse and the Brian Friel Theatre at Queen’s
University Belfast.
2. The argument by O’Donnell and O’Sullivan in Coercive Confinement in
Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2012) is related to world prison populations primarily.
They state that, ‘The eighth edition of the World Prison Population List,
published in 2009, estimated a global prison population of more than
9.8 million compared with around eight million when the first edition of
the list was published in 1999. Never in living memory, it would seem, had
societies resorted to locking away so many of their citizens, and at the same
time been so indifferent to the consequences.’ (1). Maryama Yuusuf is
being held in detention centres, not a prison, but the same culture of coer-
cive confinement is being applied, as I argue further in Chapter 4,
‘Containment’.
3. Lisa Fitzpatrick, ‘Gender and Affect in Testimonial Performance’, Irish
University Review, 45:1 (2015), 28–29.
4. Collins online. http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/
sanctuary?showCookiePolicy=true Accessed 1 April 2014.
5. ‘The Troubles’ refers to the outbreak of civil war in Northern Ireland in
1968, largely characterised by guerrilla warfare. The Good Friday
Agreement in 1998 is often used to signal the official ‘end’ of ‘the
Troubles’, though sporadic violence and attacks still occur to this day,
often around tense temporal traditions, such as 12 July, and community
rituals that include marches and flags. It is difficult to refer to any specific
historical account, or media outlet, that summarizes ‘the Troubles’, as bias
and sympathies remain rife to both dominant sides involved.
6. David Grant and Jennings, Matt, ‘Processing the Peace: An Interview with
Teya Sepinuck’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23:3 (2013), 314.
7. See The Good Friday Agreement information on the Irish State’s
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website: https://www.dfa.ie/
our-role-policies/northern-ireland/the-good-friday-agreement-and-
today/ Accessed 20 June 2017.
8. For further recent context on performance, migration and interculturalism
in Ireland, see Charlotte McIvor, Migration and Performance in
Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2016).
9. Collins online. http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/
exile Accessed 8 April 2014.
202 M. HAUGHTON
10. Yana Meerzon, Performing Exile, Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film
11. In Sepinuck’s monograph, Theatre of Witness: Finding the Medicine in
Stories of Suffering, Transformation, and Peace (London: Jessica Kingsley,
2013), she lists and summarizes the twelve guiding principles, 227–235.
These are: (1) Not Knowing, (2) Bear Witness, (3) Find the Medicine, (4)
The Blessing is at the Center of the Wound, (5) Deeply Listen with the
Ears of your Heart, (6) Become the Vessel, (7) Hold the Paradox, (8) Find
the Gold, (9) Take the Problem and Make it the Solution, (10) Fall in
Love, (11) Trust the Process, and (12) Everyone is Me.
12. Carol Martin, ed. Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2010).
13. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry, 25:4
(1999), 697–698.
14. Fintan Walsh, Theatre and Therapy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 6.
15. Bill McDonnell, Theatres of the Troubles: Theatre, Resistance and Liberation
in Ireland (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008), 4.
16. Will Hammond and Dan Steward, Eds. Verbatim Verbatim: Contemporary
Documentary Theatre (London: Oberon, 2008), 9.
18. In the 2005 report ‘A Strategy for Addressing Domestic Violence and
Abuse in Northern Ireland’, the ‘Introduction’ details that domestic vio-
lence and abuse ‘accounts for 1 in 5 cases of violent crime here. On average
every year 5 people are killed as a result of domestic violence and about
700 families have to be re-housed. Every day about 12 women and 4 men
report an assault by a partner to the police, yet it is known that violent
incidents in the home are seriously under-reported’ (2005, 4) http://
www.womensaidni.org/assets/uploads/Tackling-Violence-at-Hom.pdf
Accessed 18 March 2015.
19. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann
Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1997), xii.
20. Margaret McGuckin has posted her story on the website ‘Survivors NI:
Survivors and Victims of Institutional Abuse’, in the ‘Survivors’ Stories’
section. She states she thinks it was the year 1958 when she was sent to the
Nazareth House Girls’ Home. The testimony here is an extract from an
article by Deborah McAleese first published in the Belfast Telegraph on 20
October 2009.
Terror (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 1.
22. OED online, word search ‘communion’ (n). http://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/37318?redirectedFrom=Communion#eid Accessed 5 June 2015.
23. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 2003),

134.
24. James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of
Effect (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 8.
25. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–3.
26. Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’ in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa
2010), 39.
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———. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Martin, Carol, ed. 2010. Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Meerzon, Yana. 2012. Performing Exile, Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film.
Schechner, Richard. 2003. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge.
Sepinuck, Teya. 2013. Theatre of Witness: Finding the Medicine in Stories of
Suffering, Transformation, and Peace. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Thompson, James. 2009. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of
Effect. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Walsh, Fintan. 2012. Theatre and Therapy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
CHAPTER 6
Conclusion: Relationality
6.1 Staging Trauma, Offering Intimacy

What is on offer when one experiences theatre and performance? In par-
ticular, what is on offer by those productions that promise tragedy, dan-
ger, loss, hope, glimpses of other worlds, and indeed, radical revisionings
of this world? Firstly, there is the general yet individually unique commit-
ment of participation and presence by diverse people, laying the founda-
tions for a potentially affective encounter. This includes the experience of
planning to attend the event independently and/or communally, com-
mitting financially to the ticket price and also committing with one’s time
and energy, making the physical and geographical journey, engaging
(cognitively, physically, emotionally, socially) in the event or choosing not
to, reflecting on the event independently and/or communally, and
repeating this experience time and again. Risk, repetition, and reaction
are central to this process, experience and encounter, as they are to the
staging of trauma. This is not to claim that the event of theatre and per-
formance is in anyway inherently traumatic but to reassert that the pro-
cesses of creation, staging, liveness, performance and audience
engagement coexist on a heightened continuum of consciousness and
affect. There is a multidimensional network of investment by all con-
cerned. Consequently, as Brian Singleton notes specifically in relation to
the staging strategies of ANU’s work, the audience can become, ‘impli-
cated through intimacy’.1

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1_6
206 M. HAUGHTON
The impact and affect of potential registers from this experience ranges
from the social, to the didactic, to the efficacious, to the spectacle, and
derives from a historical lineage of practice spanning thousands of years.
This experience emerges and adapts as communities mutate and political
ideologies shift. However, certain commonalities across this lineage of
practice become evident, including the dominating desires for together-
ness, and creative, imaginative encounters, as well as the necessity of
organisational management by theatre makers. To put it more concisely,
humans want to be together, they want to share stories, they find diverse
ways to produce these encounters despite various challenging conditions,
and that matters. To be more specific, as Shannon Jackson outlines in
Professing Performance:
In sum, performance is about doing, and it is about seeing; it is about

image, embodiment, space, collectivity, and/or orality; it makes commu-
nity and it breaks community; it repeats endlessly and it never repeats; it is
intentional and unintentional, innovative and derivative, more fake and
more real.2
Thus, theatre and performance offers the potential for intimate connec-
tions that create meaning and harness relationality. When this occurs with
productions which stage trauma, particularly traumatic encounters or his-
tories speaking directing to the audience’s wider socio-cultural frame-
works as examined in this volume, the stakes are high for affect, creative
inspiration, socio-political consciousness-raising, and indeed, relationality
among diverse people and ideas, in both personal and public contexts.
This is not say that the staging of trauma is not at times deeply problem-
atic. Suzanne Little summarises both the cynical and ambitious perspec-
tives in this regard:
[…] seeking to repeat the pathological repetition of traumatic experience in

performance may produce further distortions. It may also contribute to
contemporary ‘wound culture’, characterized by ‘a collective gathering
around shock, trauma and the wound’, indicative of ‘a breakdown in the
distinction between the individual and the mass, and between private and
public registers’ (Seltzer 1979: 3). Nevertheless, trauma is often seen as
tantalizing proof of ‘real’ experience: ‘our only remaining guarantee of the
reality of the past in a new era of technologically mediated memory’ (Meek
2009: Introduction, section 2, paragraph 4). Arguably, the inclusion of
CONCLUSION: RELATIONALITY 207
trauma can thus elevate a theatrical performance from a space of mimesis

and representation to a site of ‘truth’ and historical recovery.3
Indeed, in a post-truth and revisionist historical moment, creating the

conditions for analytical engagement, critical thinking, creative inspira-
tion, and personal and collective intimacy and affect is a significant, and
increasingly rare, act.
In Immersive Theatres, Josephine Machon explores theatre and perfor-
mance companies and practices that prioritise human contact. Yet what
does human contact mean in a neoliberal, globalised, digital age? Does the
field of theatre and performance have access to greater scope for intimacy
and relationality as a result of its own centralisation of embodied knowl-
edge, encounters and communication, or, less? Even if there is greater
scope, does that mean it is more meaningful or useful? What if less is
more? Is the theatrical event increasingly holding itself responsible to
ensure human contact is prioritised as a result of these conditions which
reduce and problematise the integrity and intimacy of human contact
more generally? If this concluding chapter offers more questions than
answers, perhaps the most telling insight from this study is its position at
the beginning of a new phase in a global cultural epoch. In Vicky Angelaki’s
Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain, she notes the urgen-
cies dominating this contemporary moment of major social change.
Angelaki’s focus begins with crisis, observing it as an:
[…] indeterminate territory that is as worrisome as it is promising and it

captures the process of attempting a transition. The transition may not deliver
immediate results, but it produces the possibility of change through dialogue
and exposition that allow space for feeling and are not bound to rhetoric.4
At this moment of writing, former embedded Westernised master narra-

tives and concerns of social experience, both embodied in and reflective of
conventional or dominant modes of theatre-making, are subject to major
scrutiny, doubt, dismissal, decline, and indeed, transformation. One does
not know where the chips will fall and resettle, but the case studies in this
volume do suggest there is a greater desire for relationality, not as an end
in and of itself, but to produce respect in material and behavioural ways, as
evidenced from the momentum for intimacy harnessed through perfor-
mance environments and encounters.
208 M. HAUGHTON
6.2 Bodies in Shadow, Bodies in Light

If the case studies under analysis in this volume spoke to bodies in shadow,
their staging speaks to a shift in ways of seeing and knowing by theatre
artists and audiences which bring them closer to the light of day and the
forefront of social consciousness. Staging performances addressing and
exploring instances of trauma, including the historical, the testimonial, as
well as the fictional and mythical, publicly centralises and illuminates these
spaces and experiences of darkness. If the unknowable, the unspeakable
and the unrepresentable can be explored through the potentially utopian
space and encounter of performance, then there is meaning and value to
be generated. That is not to assume that performance encounters neces-
sarily or intentionally create ethical moments or come from ethical places.
Indeed, in Silvija Jestrovic’s Performance, Space, Utopia, she considers Jill
Dolan’s ethical utopian performatives in relation to her study of both per-
formance and the performativity of Sarajevo and Belgrade in the late twen-
tieth century. However, while Jestrovic utilises Dolan’s concept as
originally theorised, she also builds on it to consider two further categories
relevant to her study. One examines ‘utopian performatives as ideologi-
cally and politically unstable’,5 while the other considers what she coins
‘seductive performatives’ [original emphasis] which ‘describe those
instances when a more sinister side of utopia in performance surfaced’
(2013, 3). By this, she pays close attention to what happens when a pro-
duction ‘created an alchemy of the ideological and the emotional and acti-
vated the audience, but in a very different direction and through a very
different political ethos’ (2013, 58).
In this study however, Dolan’s utopian performative is referred to and
drawn upon as a mode of identifying a sense of togetherness and the
potential for relationality. In contemporary theatre-making in Ireland and
the UK, artists and audiences are dedicated to ensuring expressions of
community and liveness occur, which often generates relationality and at
times solidarity, in innovative and yet problematic ways. Machon notes the
potential affect of prevalent digital communications in this context, where
the theatre companies and practitioners interviewed for her volume note
‘a desire for genuine physical connection’ (2013, 25). She suggests that
‘Technologically driven forms of communication, so predominant in work
and socialising today, mean that the opportunities for sentient human
interaction have been greatly reduced’ (25). While the prevalence of tech-
nology often ensures that forms of human communication are constantly
ongoing and perhaps have never been so accessible or consistent, evi-

dently, these digital-led communication encounters do not offer a certain
quality of liveness, embodiment, and intimacy that physical human inter-
actions can provide. On this, Machon’s research tells that ‘there is a genu-
ine wish to make human contact, often with another human as much as
with the work itself; an enthusiasm for undergoing experiences that both
replace and accentuate the live(d) existence of the everyday world’ (25).
Thus, such tense demands of performance encounters simultaneously sug-
gest that there is widespread instability, precarity and anxiety in contempo-
rary society, which performance both articulates and responds to, providing
meaning and anchor across spaces of disorientation. In Elin Diamond,
Denise Varney and Candice Amich’s more succinct words in their recent
collection Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, such
performances respond to the ‘lived experiences of precarity, dispossession,
and struggle in neoliberal times’.6
Angelaki juxtaposes affect and effect to illuminate how the contempo-
rary momentum for affect in performance encounters is part of a wider
narrative of change in contemporary British theatre-making, which is
reacting to social changes in that society. In this context, her argument is
also largely applicable to contemporary Irish and northern Irish theatre-
making. Of affect, she details that it ‘as a term is built on intersubjectivity,
empowering the spectator through dramaturgy that imagines them as an
active agent’ (2017, 3). However, with ‘effect’, the term ‘imagines the
spectator as a receiver, or, worse yet, a recipient with limited and predeter-
mined active agency, whether emotional, physical or intellectual’ (3).
Distinguishing between the terminology is crucial she warns, as ‘individu-
alism has become a fraught term, tied to the narrative of neoliberalism’
(3–4). Terminology is indeed crucial, as one of neoliberalism’s major suc-
cesses is the proliferation of the term ‘postfeminism’. As Diamond, Varney
and Amich pithily rebuke, ‘Postfeminism is the happy creature of neolib-
eralism’ (2017, 3).
In Machon’s study, she recognises the profound impact that perfor-
mance art, live art and installation art from the 1980s has played in con-
temporary theatre and performance, particularly in relation to affective
experience and relationality, most notably in dramaturgies produced by
British companies.7 Her research intends:
[…] to get to the heart of what it is that makes up those immersive theatres
that are physical, sensual and participatory. It surveys a strand of immersive
210 M. HAUGHTON
practice that arises from the fusion of installation art and physical and visual
theatres of the 1980s and owes its sensual aesthetic primarily to a mix of
ingredients involving landscape, architecture, scenography, sound and
direct, human contact.8
I would add to her insights that an identifiable parallel is recognisable in

contemporary Irish theatre and performance, where form, structure, site,
story and audience engagement are revisioned and remodelled as a result
of these multidisciplinary artistic histories, most comprehensively explored
in Áine Phillips’ seminal Performance Art in Ireland: A History. In the
Irish context, this can be observed as beginning most prominently in the
1970s coinciding with the outbreak of civil war in the north of Ireland,
most commonly referred to as the ‘Troubles’ outlined further in Chapter
5, ‘Exile’, as well as the beginnings of second-wave feminist energies, as
articulated by the establishment of the Irish Women’s Liberation
Movement. Phillips refers to these personal and political roots of live and
performance art in Ireland, both sides of the border, summarising that:
[…] much of it is politically active and deeply socially engaged. […] in

Belfast responding to the conflicts (1970–1990s), by feminist artists
responding to gender inequalities (1980–2000s) and by a current genera-
tion of performance artists taking on issues of social justice.9
The case studies in this volume, On Raftery’s Hill, Colder Than Here,
Laundry and Sanctuary offer varying levels of scope to generate relation-
ality and instigate a spatio-temporal context for intimacy with their audi-
ences. Not all of these productions would accommodate Machon’s
application of ‘immersive’ theatre. However, while this study is indebted
to her theorisation and historicisation of immersivity in performance and
theatrical encounters, this study also seeks to push or expand on her find-
ings if possible. For example, she refers to the rules of play in ‘conven-
tional theatre’, summarising them as:
[…] to be in place in any spectatorial, theatre production where the audi-

ence/actor (us/them) relationship is defined by the delineation of space
(auditorium/stage) and role (static-passive observer/active-moving per-
former) where the audience is viewing the action ahead of them. This is
theatre experience which, on analysis, suggests it does not matter if you are
there or not; the audience could get up and walk out and it would carry on.
(2013, 27)
In On Raftery’s Hill, Colder Than Here, and indeed Sanctuary, these rules
are in place but the suggestion that the observer is ‘static–passive’ is not
persuasive for the potential affective engagement on offer. The audience is
seated and they are not asked to participate in a verbal or physical manner
directly during the performance. Yet, they are asked to participate. In
Sanctuary, it is an explicit request from the performance’s open, as the
director Sepinuck addresses the audience explicitly, as do the performers
throughout the playing time. As detailed in Chapter 5, ‘Exile’, the audi-
ence is given further participatory invitations before they leave, such as
writing to the political establishment to voice concerns and request
changes to policy. With On Raftery’s Hill and Colder Than Here, the rules
for audience participation remain more conventional, yet the dramatic
action is urgently significant and relevant to the immediate crises unfold-
ing in the wider social, cultural and political arenas in which these produc-
tions were staged. Domestic violence, gendered violence, eco-violence
and terminal disease inform and devastate everyday life, weakening the ties
of family and society. Integrity and respect for humanity is what is at stake
in the dramatic action of these productions. The impact of each audience
member cannot be quantified in any conventional mode of measurement
in these contexts. However, relationality is offered by these productions.
Due to their general marginalisation or ‘shadowing’ in public discourse
and political priorities, a potential intimacy is offered too. By collectively
and consciously knowing the unknown and centralising subject matter
often dismissed to the margins, an intimate space is activated as is an inti-
mate offer for engagement.
Furthermore, if an audience member walks out mid-performance or a
significant proportion of audience members do so, these productions may
not carry on. If they do continue, it is likely that they would be deeply
destabilised in energy and pace. Remaining audience members would
likely be distracted as a result and there would most certainly be ramifica-
tions regarding the future programming schedule for productions, oppor-
tunities for touring and indeed, the commissioning of productions with
similar content or themes.
In Laundry, Machon’s theorisation of immersive theatre is more readily
applicable: She outlines that:
[…] with immersive practice the audience is thrown (sometimes even liter-
ally) into a totally new environment and context from the everyday world
from which it has come. These environments are seemingly outside of
212 M. HAUGHTON
‘everyday’ rules and regulations and always have expectations of physical

interaction. All elements of theatre are in the mix, establishing a multidi-
mensional medium in which the participant is submerged, blurring spaces
and roles. (27)
The site-specific convent building in which Laundry’s audiences/specta-

tors/participants were thrown into (though not literally) cannot be con-
sidered a ‘totally new environment’. The majority of people educated in
Ireland are educated in institutions (often convent buildings or attached
to convents) owned and/or managed by the Roman Catholic Church. In
that sense, my personal spatial experience during the performance of
Laundry was deeply familiar. However, my performance experience was
new. Laundry was the first immersive theatrical encounter I experienced in
Ireland and remains the most affective immersive theatrical experience I
have had the privilege of participating in to date. Inevitably, part of this
potent connection comes from the first-time experience. As Machon
warns, immersive theatre audiences, ‘intoxicated by “that first thrill of
immersion”, can easily become dulled to its pleasures and challenges. This
places an onus on practitioners to be inventive, to surprise; not to be com-
placent nor rely on formulaic approaches’ (25). However, its ongoing
impact is not due to an initial sense of surprise but the intimacy it offered
and the context for relationality with historical events that it provided. In
this way, Laundry’s immersive encounters spoke ‘to the ways in which the
work evolves, exists and lasts beyond the immersive moment’ (25).10
To generate, support and critique modes of relationality in terms of
meaningful interexpressions, not only verbal but visceral, between indi-
viduals and groups, the primary fundamental condition to do so, is
respect. What is respect, though? And how does it manifest or reveal
itself in and as a result of relationality and subjectivities in performance
environments? In this volume, respect becomes most threatened in the
personal and communal, private and public, political and social institu-
tion of the family. The family operates as a palimpsestuous concept,
political entity and cultural framework that cannot be everything to all
people. History’s demands remain imprinted on its carcass and continue
to drive its activities. Breaking with this history of form and function
seems possible but only for a minority. Thus, a radical revisioning of
what a family can be and what it may offer to its immediate members, its
wider society and the nation-state, must be addressed if these cycles of
intergenerational trauma are to be halted.
6.3 Revisioning the Family

The family occurs as the leading site of trauma in these case studies. The
analysis reveals that in each instance of staging trauma, there is a pervasive
ongoing battle for ideological and material control of the family from
vying forces across political, religious, cultural, traditional, community
and individual spectrums, historically as well as in the present moment.
These productions stage the trauma(s) experienced by the individual
which are the result of familial crisis or embroiled in family crisis, most
often manifest through encounters of violence and tragedy. These instances
are not presented as a result of familial relations being inherently trau-
matic, but because of wider conditions that inscribe and prescribe the lim-
its of what family can mean, how it can operate, and whom it represents.
Indeed, what the characters and dramatic worlds desperately seek is a form
of family that is positive, supportive, stable, and welcoming, which remains
fluid and permeable as a socio-cultural entity. The performances do not
advocate the destruction of the traditional family henceforth, but they do
highlight the destruction of the individuals within the family as it has been
conceived of thus far.
Considering the dominant popular dramatisations of ‘the family’ in
theatre to identify the lineage of this major structure and function in
Western theatre, an obvious example is the work of nineteenth century
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). Ibsen’s radical
employment of naturalistic dramaturgies suggest that the family as insti-
tution and material structure are indeed irrevocably embedded with dis-
eases and dysfunction stemming from inherited genetics, psychology, and
society. The morality associated as intrinsically linked to family life in that
era is the subject of questioning in his plays, shocking his contemporaries
and audiences. A brief review of A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881) or
Hedda Gabler (1891) centralises the family and its inherent morality (or
lack thereof) as being built from faulty foundations. This leads to the
plays’ crises concerning the brink of destruction of the family unit in
Western society. Suicidal women, houses that become centres of contain-
ment, male sexual deviance, marriages of convenience and the intergen-
erational reproduction of deceit leads to spoiled lineage and disasters
from which the next generation cannot escape. Ibsen’s families tell of
trauma as physical and psychic, personal, and political. They reveal the
hypocrisies and forces of control which stifle society, and indeed, continue
to resonate.
214 M. HAUGHTON
A century and a bit on, the family as the dominant social unit of civilisa-
tion, embedded with ‘moral’ status and historical backdrop suggesting the
appropriate plan for reproduction and consumption, is deeply unstable.
Interestingly however, perhaps the destruction no longer holds the same
potential for social and political damage that it once appeared to possess.
Regardless, how and why does it cling on as the dominant category and
frame for social and community coherence? Or, is the family fulfilling the
major functions of consumption in neoliberal climates—from weddings to
mortgages to children—but is no longer imbued with the same social and
political instruction for its role and significance? Have the choices of con-
temporary globalised neoliberal communities removed the notion of ‘for-
ever’ in a lifetime, as attention spans drift, and pressures to remain
committed also wane?
On television, the most successful series of the twentieth century is
HBO’s The Sopranos. With Tony Soprano as its key protagonist, viewers
move from his personal and psychological crises voiced in his therapist’s
office to the façade he desperately tries to maintain with his wife’s sophis-
ticated complicity within the family home. However, these are both the
private spheres, that of the healer’s space and that of the family space.
There is a third personality Tony Soprano must perform, his public and
professional role. As head of the New Jersey ‘family’, his Mafia business
dealings occur at the back of a butcher’s shop and the back of a nightclub.
Both locations result in large amounts of slaughter. Central to the contin-
ued façade of his family life and his need for psychological intervention is
the economic-power motives driving his existence, as patriarch, provider
and head honcho.
What links Ibsen’s dramas on nineteenth-century European stages with
The Sopranos on twenty-first century broadcast media? The family (hetero-
sexual and reproductive) is a dominant link operating as the site of ‘imag-
ined community’, which exposes the follies and faults of the master
narratives to which they should subscribe to and are inscribed by. The
consequences of the other communities, imagined and yet material, the
laws of their nation, the teachings of their Gods, the pressures of the
home, and the capitalist power to purchase, eventually lead to disease for
the individual, and the fragmentation of the family, more bound by shar-
ing habitat than interpersonal connections. From the sins of the father to
the sins of society, a clear historical lineage of traumatic destruction is
evident in the name of protecting the family.
Both Laundry and Sanctuary centralise the victimhood that results

from state policies on institutionalisation and migration, and state-
implicated violence in relation to identity politics, which have destroyed
families. Both On Raftery’s Hill and Colder Than Here stage families in
crisis, one which tells of the destruction of the individual within it, and
one which tells of the destruction of community and habitat in which the
family live. Thus, the family functions as a structural vehicle for trauma,
and indeed violence, yet simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically, as
the overarching desired link or framework between people and place. The
role of the family in these case studies is in tension. They are destructive
yet desired. Materially, they do not work, but in a utopian space, they
remain sought after. What will family mean at the turn of the twenty-
second century? As the post-millennium global cultural instabilities gather
pace, ideologies of family have happily expanded as a result of post-
heteronormative policies and attitudes, but have also been callously ripped
asunder by international humanitarian crises and postcolonial legacies.
One of the most striking and significant parallels across these case stud-
ies is the role, history and impact of motherhood within the material fam-
ily structure but also as it has been appropriated mythologically by
structures of nationhood. In Colder Than Here, Wade’s dramatisation cen-
tralises the death of the matriarch in a Westernised industrialised context
and subsequent anticipated crises, particularly the intertwined embodied
crises of the human-body and the earth-body. On inspection, certain links
can be made between the dramaturgy of contemporary English playwright
Wade and contemporary Irish playwright Carr. In particular, debilitating
family relationships and absent/ dying mothers dominate in both these
case studies. However, in Carr’s dramaturgy, a glaring attack comes
through: mothers, and indeed women (though not as interchangeable
entities), are not allowed to live as independent subjects equal to their
male counterparts within the cultures they inhabit; thus, they have no
choice but to seek solace and agency in a good death, often by their own
hand. On this, Carr admits:
What I cannot bear is not to be alive when you are living. Being alive and
not being there. I can’t bear it. It is like removing yourself from yourself.
And that is what we do, so much. I don’t know why Western society is so
much constructed around pretending you are everything except what you
are. I find that terrifying.11
216 M. HAUGHTON
Carr speaks of a form of exile of self from self, but not necessarily self-
driven or directed. In On Raftery’s Hill and indeed Colder Than Here, the
toxicity of these environments, socially, politically and ecologically, violate
the agency of womanhood and motherhood to the extent that the women
face death, whether as a chosen escape route or inevitable annihilation.
Furthermore, this imposed exile of self as a result of local, national and
international cultural conventions and legalities intersects with the struc-
ture of the family and the staging of trauma. Indeed in ANU’s Laundry,
mothers who did not correspond to the social customs (enforced through
constitutional and religious law) were criminalised and enslaved, as Chap.
4, ‘Containment’, details. In addition, in Sanctuary, the performers we
meet have all but lost their family units through war, civil and personal, as
outlined in Chapter 5, ‘Exile’. In summary, in each case study in this book,
the assumed fixed stable point of the family, as the ‘centre of the bike
wheel, and they’re [the remaining family members] are all spokes’,12 no
longer functions as the centre point. The family unit is not or no longer
connected and interacting. In all these case studies there is a crisis around
the very idea and structure of the family as a social unit, resulting in dis-
tinct traumatic registers in the narratives and experiences performed. The
lineages then, of family and community, are in crisis, deeply inscribed by
intergenerational traumas. What remains is a sense and space of exile, dis-
tinctive to each case study. Chapter 5, ‘Exile’, is situated as the final major
study in this book, not only in following a timeline that ends with the
most recent performance, but also as a signal of the increasing affective
consequence of trauma. Exile as a term has multiple connotations and a
history of meaning that is located in classical Greece. In Performing Exile,
Performing Self, Yana Meerzon reflects on exile in antiquity, noting its
relationship with trauma:
The political exile—an act of removal and banishment for us by the histori-
cal narrative of the Greeks—remains even today the most powerful para-
digm of physical, spatial, and temporal separation from one’s native land.
Accordingly, the word exile evokes such meanings as trauma, muteness,
impossibility of reconciliation, and the deficiency of any personal or collec-
tive closure. It also signifies a displacement and a falling out of time
phenomenon.13
Meerzon offers her study as a way to ‘to speak about the complexity of the
exilic condition that not only can manifest an exilic subject’s humiliation
and challenge, but also can reveal one’s dignity and prepare one’s per-
sonal, economic, or artistic success’ (2012, 2).
Have Westernised ideologies of religion and nation exiled women from
society, most punishingly so when they become mothers? In the dramatic,
mythical and representational worlds of the case studies in this volume,
mothers struggle to exist within these historically designed family units,
and the family units collapse without the traditional or conventional pres-
ence and role of motherhood to support their existence. Neoliberalism
further intensifies this dynamic, as the current emergent moment of fourth
wave feminism illuminates.
6.4 Staging Fourth Wave Feminism: Onwards

Diamond, Varney and Amich’s collection tackles the damage wreaked by
neoliberalism across local and global socio-political networks, as well as
forms of resistant response from contemporary theatre artists, found across
precarious and anxiety-ridden labour forces and societies internationally.
The contributions support David Harvey’s assertion that neoliberalism
constitutes the return to power of a ruling-class, building on this to argue:
[…] that it is also the restoration of patriarchal power, reconstituted less in

terms of the family and the state than by the ‘invisible hand’ of corporate
capital. By way of incentivizing competition, capital markets demand the
dismantling of labour rights and health services, with disastrous conse-
quences for women, who are the traditional caretakers of children and the
elderly. (2017, 2–3)
Patriarchy is traumatic for women and men, children and adults, the
domestic and public spheres. It is visible and invisible, insidious in all
networks and communities, so that all networks and communities con-
tinue to reproduce its strategies and hierarchies, under the guise of ratio-
nality, empowerment and social protection. It demands that male privilege,
most commonly white, heterosexual, and middle-class remains the ruling
class, whether led by corporate, aristocratic or ascendency dynamics.
Patriarchal concerns condition cultural and social rites of passage as well as
political and economic policies; indeed, patriarchy is a performative, ritu-
alistic, self-sustaining act. Patriarchy is inherently traumatic in its conse-
quences for the majority, most acutely experienced by women, as I argue
in this volume’s introduction, as an extraordinary everyday experience.
218 M. HAUGHTON
According to Sontag, the integrated response by all political, social and

cultural networks to centralise male experience in imagery, representation
and multi-modes of discourse, and when it comes to trauma, traumas that
centralise male experience can be located in the seventeenth century. She
speaks of photography most specifically, but looks to how nationalism and
realignments of political power informed the images artists made, framed,
and circulated. She details:
The practice of representing atrocious suffering as something to be deplored,

and, if possible, stopped, enters the history of images with a specific subject:
the sufferings endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious
army on the rampage. It is a quintessentially secular subject, which emerges
in the seventeenth century, when contemporary realignments of power
become material for artists.14
Sontag’s point is that as imagery (paintings, photographs, news record-

ings) became a major mode of communication and interpretation of world
events, wars in particular, the male protagonist of war also became central-
ised. Power becomes constituted through the nation-state globally, and
this nation-state is founded, won, and strengthened on a binary narrative
of male heroes and villains; ultimately, male leaders.
In Cathy Leeney’s Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939, she speaks to
the politics of identification that occur throughout theatre and perfor-
mance in Ireland, though her argument is applicable in global contexts.
She details:
[…] the general issue of identification holds in any patriarchal cultural con-
text where the male gaze of the audience is confronted with women’s worlds.
The truths of womanhood, the quality of women’s experience are consid-
ered partial, in both meanings of the word: that is to say, women’s experi-
ence is defined as applying only to a subset of humanity, and it is inflected
with bias. Unlike men’s experience, it has not been defined as universal. It
has not been understood to be metaphorical of wider categories: the national,
the ethical, the human. Through training and habit, women identify with
the male point of view. If they did not they would have a dull time of it. Men
however, are rarely skilled at taking the female point of view. Thus, in the
process of making performance, the audience’s identification with the stage
is infected with gender division. Where the male audience sees significance,
the female audience may follow. Where the values of women are represented,
the male audience measures that vision against the standards of patriarchal
convention and finds it puzzling, partial, or entirely inaccessible.15
This is a point made in this volume’s introduction, and indeed subsequent

chapters, but it is necessary to reiterate it at this point of conclusion.
Women and children are treated as secondary in status and citizenship
according to the value systems of modernity. This political and social real-
ity is reflected in each of the dramatic and theatrical worlds examined in
these case studies, selected from distinct geographical locations, histories,
cultural politics, and production contexts. This is part of the traumatic
context that allows and contributes to further suffering. Their traumas—
which are enacted every day, particularly through widespread state-
implicated domestic violence—are not centralised in imagery (paintings,
photographs, news recordings). Historically, they do not get constructed
as protagonists in world events, and recently, the ‘token woman’ is so
often embroiled by neoliberal politics that she remains a patriarchal con-
struct and only furthers the patriarchal agenda. The ‘iconography of suf-
fering’ (2003, 36) as Sontag coins it, further serves the agenda. Thus,
there is the trauma, and then there is the shadowed space where the trauma
resides, unless some unique circumstances requiring its acknowledgment
materialise. Staging trauma constitutes one form of those unique
circumstances.
In Emer O’Toole’s Girls Will Be Girls, she reflects that growing up, she
‘learned to use language that privileged make experience and identity—
language that puts women second’.16 By continuing her personal and
political journey into adulthood and the theatre, she became critically
aware that, ‘Our bodies are coded and costumed to turn us into easily
identifiable men and women, creating artificial divisions in society and
limiting the identities that people of any gender feel confident performing’
(2015, 12). How can we conceive of worlds, especially in the theatre
where we can conceive of anything, that are not patriarchal? How can we
materially construct these worlds, step by step? Can we imagine a feminist
future? While patriarchy marches on, trauma, specifically intergenerational
trauma, remains.
If a glimpse in the distance of a post-heteronormative society is poten-
tially on the horizon, a post-patriarchal one most certainly is not. A global,
interconnected, fourth wave of feminism17 is urgently required to destabi-
lise this patriarchal planet, if there is to be hope of creating and sustaining
healthier ways of social experience, interaction and coexistence in this
damaged environment. Aston, drawing from Chantal Mouffe’s descrip-
tion of a ‘network of resistance’, identifies a recent renewal of feminist
energies which agitate for change. She ‘conceives of theatre politically as a
220 M. HAUGHTON
series of heterogeneously formed sites of oppositional and affirmative

activity, each linked into articulating dissent from neoliberalism and the
desire for socially progressive change’.18 Indeed it is increasingly difficult
to produce theatre and performance in such precarious public-spending
climates, and indeed, to make explicitly feminist theatre and performance
which is affective for its audiences, while at the same time resisting and
criticising the neoliberal cultural it exists within. Regardless, potent femi-
nist affective performance encounters are also increasing, and as the e ditors
Diamond, Varney and Amich declare, generating ‘a renewed sense of the
political in performance’ (2017, 5).
Traits of fourth wave feminism certainly include an intersectional focus,
drawing from heightened social concerns regarding the environment, the
increasing gap between rich and poor, the ageing population, the precarity
of the neoliberal model, and further strengthening dialogues across already
established intersectional relationships with identity politics informing
race, class, ethnicity, religion, distinct abled bodies, and the LGBTI com-
munities. Angelaki speaks of contemporary British theatre-making creat-
ing ‘a new form of theatre responsive to the complexities of our time’
(2017, 4). This volume identified four case studies across Ireland, the
north of Ireland, and Britain that are extraordinarily distinct in their forms,
themes and production contexts. Yet, they each speak to the ‘complexities
of our time’. These include the need to address traumatic histories and
ideas in the remaining public spaces, not yet swallowed by neoliberalism,
that support relationality, complexity, and affective encounters. Staging
encounters of Violation, Loss, Containment and Exile do not offer a total-
ising account of these complexities, but they do speak to the extraordinary
everyday experience of women and the ecological, cultural and political
anxieties of contemporary Western society. Acknowledging this shadowed,
intersectional, and interdisciplinary discourse is one step further towards
staging fourth wave feminism. Onwards.
Notes
1. Brian Singleton, ANU Productions: The Monto Cycle (Palgrave Pivot,
2016), 2.
2. Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from
Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 15.
3. Suzanne Little, ‘Repeating Repetition: Trauma and Performance’,
Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 20:5 (2015), 44–45.
4. Vicky Angelaki, Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain

(London: Methuen Bloomsbury, 2017), 2.
5. Silvija Jestrovic, Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile
6. Elin Diamond, Denise Varney and Candice Amich, eds. Performance,
Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 2.
7. For a more comprehensive picture of British theatre companies, see: John
Bull, ed., British Theatre Companies 1965–1979 (London: Methuen
Bloomsbury, 2016); Graham Saunders, ed., British Theatre Companies
1980: 1994 (London: Methuen Bloomsbury, 2015); Liz Tomlin, ed.,
British Theatre Companies 1995: 2004 (London: Methuen Bloomsbury,
2015).
8. Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in
Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), xv.
9. Áine Phillips, ed. Performance Art in Ireland: A History (London: Intellect,
2015), 8.
10. Following the production of Laundry in 2011, its ongoing impact led to
dialogues among peers and colleagues working in Irish theatre and the arts
internationally to establish the Irish 1916 centenary multidisciplinary arts
and research project, ‘1916: Home: 2016’, which explored and staged
lesser known and marginalised histories related to the creation of the Irish
state. Projects took place throughout Ireland, the UK, US, Canada and
Brazil, alongside an inter-institutional conference at NUI Galway and
UCD. The project website was selected to become part of the National
Library of Ireland’s ‘Remembering 1916, Recording 2016’ digital archive,
and an edited collection is forthcoming.
11. Marina Carr, ‘Marina Carr in Conversation with Melissa Sihra’, in Theatre
Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, eds. Lilian Chambers, Ger
FitzGibbon and Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001), 60.
12. Laura Wade, Unpublished Interview with Miriam Haughton. London, 24
June 2015.
13. Yana Meerzon, Performing Exile, Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film
15. Cathy Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939: Gender and Violence
on Stage (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 7.
16. Emer O’Toole, Girls Will Be Girls (London: Orion, 2015), 10.
17. By a fourth wave of feminism, I do not mean ‘postfeminism’, but a form
of socialist feminism that is responsive to the complexities of the current
moment. Further research on this resurgent feminist energy globally can
be found in Contemporary Theatre Review’s special issue on contempo-
rary feminist theatre and performance (2017). See: https://www.
contemporarytheatrereview.org Accessed 26 June 2017. I would also
222 M. HAUGHTON
point to the establishment and activities of the #WakingTheFeminists

movement that began in Ireland in 2015 as evidence of this ‘fourth wave’
that speaks to the intersectional focus and neoliberal precarity dominat-
ing contemporary experience. See: http://www.wakingthefeminists.org
Accessed 26 June 2017.
18. Elaine Aston, ‘Agitating for Change: Theatre and a Feminist ‘Network of
Resistance”, Theatre Research International, 41:1 (2016), 5–20, 5–6.
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Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS Alcoholism, 190

#WakingTheFeminists movement Alice, 87
(2015), 222n17 Alternative facts, 196
‘1916: Home: 2016’ project, 221n10 Amich, Candice, 209, 217, 220
Amnesty International, 128
Anderson, Benedict, 86, 106,
A 108–110
Abramović, Marina, 13 Anderson, Patrick, 15, 20
Absence, 11 Angelaki, Vicky, 12, 207, 209, 220
‘Acting out’ theory, 93, 163, 165, 180 Anglo-Irish Treaty, 119
‘Acts of God’, 24 Animals, 41–44, 63–66
Adoption, 119, 129, 130, 156n32 Ann Lovett tragedy, 78n25
Adoption Act (1952), 156n32 Anthropology, 12, 81, 83, 93, 98
Adoption Authority of Ireland, Anxiety, 82–83, 112, 217
156n32 Aporia, 9
Aetiology of Hysteria, The, 7, 58–59 Aristotle, 51, 172, 195, 197
Affect, 163, 166, 195–196, 209 Aristotelian catharsis, 51, 102, 172,
therapeutic, 198 195, 197
Affective engagement, 13 Aston, Elaine, 29, 219
Aftermath of Feminism, The, 30 Asylum seekers, 119
Ageing society, 105–106, 111, 176 Atlee, Clement, 89
Ahmed, Sara, 28, 71, 108, 112, 200 Audience demographics, 183–184
AIDS, 94, 95 Auschwitz, 125
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1
232 INDEX
Autobiography, 180 Cameron, David, 87–88

Autofiction, 180 Cancer, 105
See also Terminal disease
Cannadine, David, 96
B Capitalism, 16, 25, 56, 83–84, 86, 89,
Barber, Brendan, 110 99, 103, 106, 111, 113, 180
Beckett, Samuel, 47 Capitivity, 60–70, 72
Belgrade, 208 Carr, Marina, 5, 10, 17, 23, 41–74,
Bennett, Susan, 86, 106–107, 109, 141 115n13, 171, 172, 215–216
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 7 Caruth, Cathy, 11–12, 26, 83, 117,
Bial, Henry, 94 122, 126
Billington, Michael, 20 Case studies, 17–26
Birmingham riots (2005), 110 Casey, Patricia, 153n6
Bodies in light, 208–212 Catch, 87
Bodies in shadow, 208–212 Catholic Church in Ireland, see Roman
Boland, Rosita, 156n29 Catholic Church
Boys of Foley Street, The, 134 Catholicism, 44, 131, 143
Breastfeeding, 140 Celtic Irish heritage, 21
Breathing Corpses, 87 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 101
Brexit, 23, 111, 164, 185 Charnow, Sally, 77n22
Brian Friel Theatre (QUB), 183 Chaudhuri, Una, 186
Brief History of Neoliberalism, A, 16, Children, sexual abuse, see Sexual
89 abuse
British Empire, 18, 99, 110, 119, 122, Christianity, 96, 143, 174
139–140, 165, 185 Churchill, Caryl, 30, 87
British National Front (BNF), 111 Class power, 16, 87–89
British theatre companies, 221n7 Cloyne Report (2011), 49, 77n16,
British Unionism, 164 151
Buddhism, 174, 177 Coercive confinement, 121, 162, 185,
Bull, Andy, 110 201n2
Bullen, Margaret, 142, 158n46 Coercive Confinement in Ireland:
Bullingdon Club, 87–88, 114n9 Patients, Prisoners and Penitents,
Burke-Brogan, Patricia, 128 121, 147, 201n2
Bush, George W., 102 Coercive Confinement in Post-
Butterworth, Philip, 61 Independence Ireland, 162
By the Bog of Cats, 45 Colder Than Here (2005), 5, 19–20,
23, 81–114, 210–211, 215–216
bodies in shadow, 101–106
C contaminated bodies, 97–101
Calendrical time, 110–111 performing lineage, 106–114
Cambridge Introduction to politics of reception, 106–114
Scenography, The, 61 slow violence, 101–106
INDEX
233
staging trauma, 90–97 D

threshold people, 81–86 Daily Mail, The, 87
writing for theatre and film, Dark tourism, 133
86–90 Dean, David, 2, 25
Collective memory, 125 Death, 81–114
Colonial ideology, 130 ‘good’ death, 115n13
Colonisation, 18, 21, 47–48, 99, 110, See also Terminal disease
140, 163 Death in England, 94, 99, 106
Communion, definition, 195, 202n22 Death is an Everyday Thing, 176
Compulsive repetition, see Repetition, Department of Work and Pensions
compulsion (UK), 105
Confession, 180 Depression, 167, 169, 189, 190, 194
Conservatism, 111, 131 Derrida, Jacques, 196
Conservative Party (UK), 111 Derry Playhouse Theatre of Witness
See also Thatcherism; Tory Programme, 168, 177
government Detention, 185, 201n2
Constitution Act (1983), 8th Diamond, Elin, 209, 217, 220
Amendment of, 63 Did You Understand What You Were
Constitution of Dáil Éireann, 36n9 Dying For, 177
Constitution of Ireland 1937, see Irish Didi-Huberman, Georges, 8
Constitution Différance, 196
Constitution of the Irish Free State Digital communications, 16, 208–209
(1922), 152, 159n53 Dimbleby, David, 88
Containment, 220 Disability, 125
Contemporary British Theatre, 11 Discipline and Punish, 102, 144, 148
Contemporary trauma culture, 84 Disease, 95–66
Contemporary, definition, 4 of affluence, 106
Contradiction, 3, 5 See also Terminal disease
Conventional theatre, 210 Disorientation, 3, 4, 11
Coogan, Steve, 129 Disrupted linearity, 3, 4
Cool Britannia, 16 Dissociation, 58, 169, 170, 195
Cool Hibernia, 16 Do Penance or Perish, 124, 156n33
Cosmology, 108 Docudrama, 5, 13
Crime Survey of England and Wales Documentary theatre, 17, 169,
(CSEW), 27, 38n37 179–181
Critic’s Circle Theatre Award, 87 Doherty, Ryan, 167, 193–194
Critical theory, 63 Dolan, Jill, 29, 32, 208
Cubism, 133 Doll’s House, A, 213
Cultural discourse, 13 Domestic violence, 202n18, 211, 219
Cultural identity, 23–24, 165 towards women, 15, 18–19, 27,
Cultural studies, 13, 190 37n35, 38n36–37, 75n8, 176,
Cultural values, 107–108, 110 211
234 INDEX
Double consciousness, 58 Fairplay: Art, Performance and

Doublethink, 58 Neoliberalism, 23
Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Family, 76n14, 81–82
Stage, 169 revisioning of the, 213–217
Druid Archive, 77n18 Famine, 161, 162, 165, 188
Druid Theatre, 41–74 ‘Feeling the atmosphere’, 109
Druid/Royal Court Co-production, Feeling the Loss of Feminism, 29
see On Raftery’s Hill (2000) Feminism, 2, 4, 14, 26–30, 48, 60,
Duff, Frank, 134, 157n38 108, 209–210, 221n17
Duggan, Patrick, 8, 13, 19, 30, 32, fourth wave of, 217–220
34, 83, 91–92, 112 Fine art, 13
Finnegan, Frances, 124, 141, 147,
155n21, 156n33
E First-World issues, 105
Eclipsed, 128, 148 Fitzpatrick, Lisa, 163, 199
Eco-violence, 211 Foucault, Michel, 23, 58, 102, 121,
Edward VII, king of England, 88 123, 130–131, 137, 144, 148,
Efficacy, 195–196 180
See also Entertainment-efficacy braid Freshwater, Helen, 149
Elitism, 87–89 Freud, Sigmund, 6–7, 9, 11, 26,
Embodiment theories, 2 57–59, 122, 125, 165, 169, 181
Emigration, 16, 165, 185 Friendship, 188
Emotion, 2, 109, 112, 172
Ensemble-led documentary theatre, 11
Entertainment-efficacy braid, 197 G
See also Efficacy Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA),
Epistemology, 14 137, 144
Ethics in performance, 184 Gardaí, 156n32
ethical encounters, 133 Gardner, Lyn, 133
ethical murkiness, 3, 4 Gaze, 144, 218
Ethiopian refugees, 187–188 See also Reciprocal gaze
European Union Peace III Gender equality, 76n14
Programme, 177 Generation of Postmemory, The, 4
Euthanasia, 111 Geopathology, 186
Exile, 166–169, 188, 199–200, George Devine Award, 87
210–211, 216–217, 220 Ghosts, 213
‘Extraordinary everyday experience’, Giddens, Anthony, 180
26–30 Girls Will Be Girls, 219
Gitting, Claire, 94–95
Globalisation, 15–16, 35n8, 73, 94,
F 103, 105, 113, 207, 214
Fagan, Terry, 136 Gluhovic, Milija, 14, 21
INDEX
235
Glynn, Evelyn, 158n49 Hirsch, Marianne, 4

Goffman, Erving, 83 Hirschman, Lisa, 37n35
Good Friday Agreement (1998), Historical Institutional Abuse Bill
36n9, 165, 177, 201n5 (2012), 127–128
Good Shepherd Homes, 156n33 Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry
Goodpasture Syndrome, 158n46 (2017), 49
Grant, David, 164, 174, 178, 186 History, 13, 26, 29, 108
Graveyards, 85 historical trauma, 125
Great Famine, 18 History, Memory, Performance, 2
Greece, ancient History of Sexuality, The, 121
exile, theme of, 216 HIV, 94
Greek Democracy, 168 Holding Up, 177
Greek theatre, 9, 44, 50, 75n9, 84, Home, concepts of, 163, 185–187,
196 190
Gregg, Melissa, 200 Homelessness, 176, 185
Gregory, Lady Isabelle Augusta, 51 Hope, 161–162
Grief, 84, 98, 100, 104, 114 Horizons of Expectations framework,
Grotowski, Jerzy, 195 106–107
Growing Old is About the Growing, Hospice movement, 96
176 Howard, Pamela, 132, 135, 143, 151
Growing up Female, 176 Howe Kritzer, Amelia, 19
Guardian, The, 110 Human contact, 207–210
Gunne, Sorcha, 15 Human trafficking, 127
Humanism, 174
Humanitarianism, 16–17
H humanitarian theatre, 17
Hammond, Will, 179 Humanity, 95, 218
Happy Objects, 71, 200 Huopainen, Hilkka, 7, 9, 29
Harpin, Anna, 9, 13, 28, 30, 32 Hussein, Saddam, 102
Harvey, David, 16, 89, 217 Huyssen, Andreas, 125
Harvie, Jen, 23, 31 Hysteria, 6, 56–58
Hayes, Vivienne, 27 Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, 19
HBO, 214
Healing, 175, 193
Healthy Society: 1918–98, The, 99 I
Hedda Gabler, 213 I Make Myself at Home Wherever I Am,
Hegemony, 74 176
Herman, Judith, 5, 14, 24, 26–27, I Once Knew a Girl, 161, 163, 177,
34–35, 37n35, 42, 48–49, 51–60, 186
63, 66–67, 72–74, 193–195 Ibsen, Henrik, 213–214
High Park Convent, 128, 134, 144, Iconography of suffering, 219
155n20 Identification, 218–219
236 INDEX
Identity, concept of, 52, 186 Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939,

Imagined communities, 106–109 218
Imagined Communities, 108 Irish Women’s Liberation Movement,
Immersive theatre, 211–212 210
Immersive Theatres, 207 Irishness, 17–19, 47–48
Immigration, 99, 176, 185, 187, 188, Islamophobia, 111
190
Incest, 17–18, 29, 37n35, 41–74
Individualisation, 22–23 J
Individualism, 209 Jackson, Shannon, 2, 206
Industrial accidents, 111–112 James, William, 57
Industrialisation, 105, 112, 180 Janet, Pierre, 57–59
Institutionalisation, 21, 119, 124, Jauss, Hans Robert, 106
128, 153n6, 215 Jennings, Matt, 164, 174, 178, 186
Insurance, health and life, 111 Jestrovic, Silvija, 208
Integrated experience, 4–5 Johnson, Boris, 88, 114n9
Interculturalism, 16, 190, 201n8 Jordan, Eamonn, 74n9
International financial institutions Joyce, James, 47
(IFIs), 16 Judaism, 174, 177
Intersubjectivity, 209 Jupp, Peter C., 94–96, 99
Intimacy, 205–207, 211 Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), 69,
Intolerable Acts, 9 78n26, 124, 131, 134, 136, 142,
Invention of Hysteria, 8 153n3, 7, 154n17, 155n18
IRA (Irish Republican Army), ceasefire
(1994), 177, 186
Iraq War (2003), 102 K
Ireland Kane, Sarah, 107
Direct Provision system, 119, Kathleen ni Houlihan, 51
153n5 Kenny, Enda, 119–120
political geography of, 36n9 Kerry Babies Case, 78n25
Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Kilkenny Incest Case (1993), 69,
Nation’s Architecture of 76n16, 78n25
Containment, 131 Knowingness, 121–122, 125, 139
Irish Census (1911), 118, 139 Kristeva, Julia, 46
Irish Constitution 1937 (Bunreacht na
hÉireann), 62, 122, 151–152,
159n54 L
Irish Free State, 36n9, 119 LaCapra, Dominick, 9–11, 84, 93,
Irish Immigrant Support Centre 163, 165, 169–173, 181, 182,
(NASC), 153n5 196
Irish language, 128 Latency, 122–123, 149
Irish Literary Revival, 18 Latin/o American studies, 25
INDEX
237
Latour, Bruno, 84 Look Back in Anger, 90

Laundry (2011), 5, 17–18, 21–22, Loss, 11, 220
117–152, 210–212, 215–216, See also Colder Than Here (2005)
221n10 Lost Child of Philomena Lee, The, 129
ANU productions, 132–135 Love, 188, 189
artistic context, 128–132 Lowe, Louise, 5, 117–152
bodies of the past and present, Luckhurst, Roger, 7–9, 34, 84, 91,
117–120 111, 114, 121–122, 125, 179–180
critical context, 128–132 Lyotard, Jean-François, 1
Irish theatre, 132–135
knowingness, 120–128, 147–152
performing silence and invisibility, M
128–132 Machon, Josephine, 207–212
political context, 128–132 Macmillan Cancer Support, 105
politics of reception, 147–152 Madness, 77n19
shadows of lives and space, 135–147 Madness and Civilization, 131
staging trauma, 120–128 Magdalen Memorial Committee
Laura Wade: Plays One, 89 (MMC), 78n26
Lee, Philomena, 129 Magdalene laundries, 20–21, 117–152
Leeney, Cathy, 218 Magdalene Sisters, The, 128, 148
Leftism, 16, 169 Mai, The, 45
Legion of Mary, 134, 157n38 Mail Online, 87
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 11, 133, Marriage, 21, 76n14, 143, 189, 213
157n36 Marriage Referendum (2015), 63
Leonard, Madeleine, 49, 72 Martin, Carol, 17, 168, 169
LGBTI communities, 220 Mass ceremony, 109
Life storytelling, 17 Mass graves, 124, 143, 155n20
See also Storytelling Material culture, 12
Limbo, 87 Maxwell, Margaret, 69
Liminality, 81–83, 113, 166, 174 May, Theresa, 22
Linguistics, 2 McAleese, Deborah, 203n21
Lips of Thomas, The, 13 McAleese, Mary, 142
Literature, 13 McAleese Report (2013), 49,
Little, Suzanne, 2, 206 119–120, 127, 151, 154n10,
Live performance, 3, 5, 13, 108–109, 155n19, 155n26
210 McAuley, Gay, 64–66
Living Theatre (US), The, 196 McCann, Therese, 167, 188–189
Living with Life, 176 McDonagh, Martin, 87, 107
London bombings (7/7), 86, McGarry, Patsy, 154n10
110–111 McGee, Harry, 154n11
See also Terrorism McGuckin, Margaret, 167, 191–192,
Long, Samantha, 142, 158n46 202n20
238 INDEX
McKinney, Joslin, 61 Nationhood, 106, 215

McRobbie, Angela, 30 Natural Death Handbook, The, 90
Medieval morality plays, 195, 197 Nazareth House Girls’ Home, Belfast,
Meerzon, Yana, 2, 25, 168, 216 191–192, 202n20
Melancholia, 9–12, 28, 169, 170, 196 Ncube, Loyd, 167, 189–190
Memoir boom, 179–181 Neoliberalism, 4, 15–18, 20, 22–23,
Memory, 25 30, 32–34, 88–89, 91, 103, 106,
See also Remembrance culture 113, 168, 172, 176, 196, 199,
Menon, Jisha, 15, 20 207, 209, 214, 217–220
Mental asylums, 119, 153n6 neoliberal capitalism, 14–16, 19, 23
Mental illness, 200 neoliberal individualisation, 22–23,
Middle East, political crises in, 108, 209
111 Network of resistance, 219–220
Migration, 16, 111, 166, 201n8, 215 Neurology, 6
Mirror, The, 87 New Labour, 20
Misogyny, 73, 122 New Playhouse Theatre of Witness
Modern trauma theory, 13 Production, see Sanctuary (2013)
Modernity, 34–35, 96, 111 NHS (National Health Service), 95,
Monks, Aoife, 32 105
Monto Cycle, 127, 132–133, 135 Ni Ghráda, Máiréad, 128
Morality, 213–214 Nixon, Rob, 92, 101–103
See also Death; Terminal disease No Escape, 128, 148
Mother and Baby Homes, 21, 121, North Inner City Folklore Project, 136
128, 151 Northern Ireland, 36n9
Mother Ireland, 21 political history, 164, 165
Motherhood, 21, 188, 215, 217 See also Good Friday Agreement;
Mouffe, Chantal, 219 IRA (Irish Republican Army);
Mourning, 10–12, 169, 170 Troubles, The
Mourning and Melancholia, 7 Northern Irish Amnesty Report, 128
Mullan, Peter, 129
Multiracialism, 99
Murphy Report (2009), 49, 69, O
77n16, 151 O’Brien, Carl, 156n32
My Neighborhood is a Cemetery, 177 O’Donnell, Ian, 121, 147, 162, 201n2
O’Sullivan, Eoin, 121, 147, 162,
201n2
N O’Toole, Emer, 219
Nachträglich, see Latency Objects in performance, 64–66
Naming, 139, 143 Olivier Awards, 87
National Women’s Council of Ireland On Raftery’s Hill (2000), 5, 10,
(NWCI), 154n17 17–18, 41–74, 171, 210–211,
Nationalism, Irish, 108, 130, 164, 218 215–216
INDEX
239
action, 44–51 Pearson Playwright Best Play Award,

animal kingdom, 41–44 87
captivity and the body, 60–70 Penitents, 121, 124–125, 131–132,
context, 44–51 137, 139–142, 144, 154n18,
dramaturgy, 44–51 155n20, 156n33
Druid/Royal Court Co-production, Pensions, 105
41–44 Performance Affects, 198
nation state, 55–60 Performance and the Blockades of
politics of reception, 70–74 Neoliberalism, 16
scenography, 60–70 Performance art, 13, 210
sexual abuse, 55–60 Performance Art in Ireland, 210
shame, 70–74 Performance environment, 61
staging trauma, 51–55 Performance space, 183–184
Ong, Aihwa, 16 Performance studies, 25
Ontological truth, 108 Performance Theory, 197
Oral history of women, 158n49 Performance, Feminism and Affect in
Oresteia, The, 72 Neoliberal Times, 209
Originary trauma, 6 Performance, Space, Utopia, 208
Orphanages, 21, 191–192 Performing Exile, Performing Self,
Orwell, George, 58 168, 216
Osborne, George, 88 Performing Site-Specific Theatre, 123
Osbourne, John, 90 Persecution, 29
Other Hands, 87 Pharmaceuticals, 111
Otherness, 166, 167, 172–173, 184, Phelan, Mark, 182
197, 199–200 Phelan, Peggy, 136, 146–147
See also Self, concept of the Phillips, Áine, 210
Our Lives Without You, 177 Philomena, 128, 148
‘Outsider’ status, 178 Philosophy, 12
Photography, 218
Pine, Emilie, 18–19, 124
P Political economic practices, 16
Pain/suffering, 1–2, 27–28 Political theatre, 197–199
Participatory theatre, 196 Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher
Pathography, 180 Britain, 20
Patriarchy, 7, 14, 24–25, 30, 42, Politics of Irish Memory, The, 18
44–45, 48, 56, 60–61, 69, 74, Poor houses, 137
217–219 Pope, Jeff, 129
Peace and reconciliation, 161, 182, Portai Coughlan, 45
183 Posh, 87–89
Peace process, 186 Postcolonialism, 3, 45, 70, 122, 133,
See also Good Friday Agreement; 166, 215
Troubles, The Postdramatic theatre, 11, 157n36
240 INDEX
Postdramatic Theatre, 11, 157n36 Real, the, see Theatre of the real
Postfeminism, 209, 221n17 Reception theory, 106–107, 113
See also Feminism Reciprocal gaze, 13
Postindustrialism, 172, 176, 196 See also Gaze
Postmemory, 3–4 Recovered memory techniques, 180
See also Memory Redressive action, 102–103
Postmodernism, 3, 32, 70, 91, 166, Refugees, 167, 176, 185, 187–188
172, 176, 180, 196 Regarding the Pain of Others, 2
Poststructuralism, 3, 125 Relationality, 24, 205–220
Poverty, 16, 121, 125, 162 Release, 161, 177
‘Poverty porn’, 133 Religious etymology, 164
Power, 130–131, 144, 217–218 Religious faith, 94, 174, 177, 194
representation and, 146–147 Remembering 1916, Recording 2016
Prayer life, 174 digital archive, 221n10
See also Religious faith Remembrance culture, 18, 124–125,
Prince, Kathryn, 2, 25 152
Principle of consent, 165 See also Memory
Prisoners, 176–177 Renaissance era, 198
prison populations, 162, 201n2 Repetition, 10, 18
Probyn, Elspeth, 73 compulsion, 3–4, 33–34, 165, 169,
Production contexts, 14–17 171, 181
Professing Performance, 2, 206 Residential Institutions Redress Act
Prostitution, 125, 134–135 (2002), 78n26, 127
Psychiatric asylums, 21 Rice, Condoleezza, 102
Psychiatric discourse, 13 Riot Club, The, 87–88
Psycho-medical theory, 13 Rites de passage, 83
Psychoanalysis, 6–13 Ritual and performance, 94, 109,
Psychological trauma, 195 201n5
PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Roman Catholic Church
Disorder), 3, 5–7, 15, 19, 26, 33, 19th Century France, 56
51, 53, 58, 91–93, 166, 171, 181 in Ireland, 17–18, 59, 67, 69–70,
119, 146, 150–151, 212
sexual and physical abuse, 191–192
R See also Catholicism
Racism, 111 Roscommon Incest Case (2009), 69,
Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), 120, 77n16
127, 153n10 Royal Court Theatre, 41–74
Raftery, Mary, 123, 129, 147, 155n20 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC),
Railways Regulation Act (1871), 111 128
Rape, 15, 17–18, 29, 41–74, 75n8, Rule of Silence, 124, 147, 155n21,
110, 161, 200 158n49
Ravenhill, Mark, 107 Ryan Report (2009), 49, 69, 77n16,
Reagan, Ronald, 16 129
INDEX
241
S Singleton, Brian, 127, 133, 135, 205

Safe haven, concept of, 164 Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of
Salpêtrière Hospital, 57, 77n22 Refuge, 118, 134, 147, 155n20
Sanctuary (2013), 5, 17, 21–22, Site of trauma, 126
161–200, 210–211, 215–216 Site-specific performance, 122–123
audiences, 181–185 Sixsmith, Martin, 129
belonging and escape, 185–195 16 Winters, 87
citizens, 181–185 Slavery, 124, 127, 129, 161, 193
communion, 195–200 ‘Slow violence’, 101–106, 113
home, performance of, 185–195 Smith, James M., 131, 145–146
hope, 161–169 Soans, Robin, 197
performance environment, 181–185 Social and Political Theatre in
performers, 181–185 21st-Century Britain, 207
perpetrators, 181–185 Social change, 168
politics of performance, 174–181 Social consensus, circuit of, 32
politics of reception, 195–200 Social conservatism, 131
production history, 174–181 Social inequality, 16, 24, 162, 174
sanctuary, definition of, 163–164 Social justice, 210
staging trauma, 169–174 Social networks, 16
Theatre of Witness, 174–181 Social turn, 22–23
victims, 181–185 Socialism, 20
Sarajevo, 208 socialist feminism, 221n17
Scenography, 26, 37n34, 135, 141, See also Feminism
143, 170, 183, 185, 197, 210 Sociological approaches, 190
Schechner, Richard, 197–198 Solga, Kim, 30
Sectarianism, 167 Somalia, 161, 163, 167, 193
See also Troubles, The Sontag, Susan, 2, 27–28, 72, 218–219
Seigworth, Gregory J., 200 Sopranos, The, 214
Self, concept of the, 3–4, 172–173, Speakouts (1970s), 37n35
180, 184, 197, 199–200, 216 Specialists, 180
See also Otherness ‘Spectator’, definition, 133
Semiotics, 107 Spencer, Earl, 88
Sepinuck, Teya, 5, 161–200, 202n11 Sporting events, 110
Sexual abuse, 7–8, 18, 26–28, 37n35, St. Louis Marie de Montfort, 157n38
41–74, 125, 158n46, 180, Stafford-Clarke, Max, 20
191–192, 200 Staging International Feminisms, 29
See also Incest; Rape Staging Place: The Geography of
Sexuality, 121–122 Modern Drama, 186
‘Shadowing’ of trauma, 5, 24–25 Staging trauma, intimacy, 205–207
Shame, 70–74 Standing at the Doorway, 177
Sierz, Aleks, 89–90 State terrorism, 20
Sihra, Melissa, 44–45, 51, 75n12, 130 States of Fear, 127, 129
Sincerity, performance of, 31–32 Steal the Stars and the Moon, 176
242 INDEX
Steed, Mari, 154n18 Tompkins, Joanne, 123

Stevens, John, 88 Tory government, 20
Steward, Dan, 179 See also Conservative Party (UK)
Storytelling, 23, 178, 184, 198 Totalitarianism, 121
Stress, 105–106 Trades Union Congress (TUC), 110
Subjectivity, 180, 186 Trauma and Recovery, 5–6, 53, 193
Sucking Water from Mud, 177 Trauma, Absence, Loss, 9
Suicide, attempted, 189, 213 Trauma
Survivors of institutional abuse, culture, 11–12
202n20 definitions of, 5–6
Suspension of disbelief, 129 performance and, 6–13
studies, 178–179, 194
theory, 111
T traumatic events, 6
Taelo, Everson, 166, 189 trust and performance, 30–35
Taylor, Diana, 3, 25 Trauma-Tragedy, 8
Taylor, Jane, 31 Trench, Rhona, 46
Television talk shows, 179 Triail, An, 128, 148
Temporality, 108–109 Troubles, The (1968–1998), 164,
Terminal disease, 19, 29, 81–114, 211 167, 177–178, 186, 188,
See also Death 192–194, 199, 201n5, 210
Terrorism, 86, 102, 110–111 See also Good Friday Agreement;
Testimonies, 173, 175, 190, 193–195 IRA (Irish Republican Army);
Thatcher, Margaret, 16, 107–108 Northern Ireland; Peace
Thatcherism, 20 process
Trauma Question, The, 121, 125 Truth-telling, 197
Theatre and Audience, 149 Tuam Babies scandal, 128, 144,
Theatre and Feminism, 30 156n29
Theatre and Therapy, 172, 198 Turner, Victor, 81–83, 93, 102
Theatre Audiences, 107 Twelfth of July celebrations, 201n5
‘Theatre of the real’, 17, 168
Theatre of the Real, 17
Theatre of Witness: Finding the U
Medicine in Stories of Suffering, Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival,
Transformation, and Peace, 174, 129–130, 151
202n11 Unclaimed Experience, 117
Theatres of the Troubles, 177 United Nations Committee Against
Therapy culture, 172, 214 Torture (UNCAT), 69, 119,
This is a Chair, 30 127–128, 152
Thompson, James, 198 United Nations Development Program
Threshold, 100 (UNDP), 16
Tipping the Velvet, 87 United Nations Human Rights
Tomlin, Liz, 11 Committee (UNHRC), 120
INDEX
243
United Nations Universal Declaration See also Terrorism

of Human Rights (UDHR), 140, We Carried Your Secrets, 161, 177,
157–158n45 182, 186
Unlawful imprisonment, 29 Welfare system, 89, 120, 154n10
Unmarked, 136 West of Ireland Farmer Case, 78n25
Unspoken Love, 177 Western cultural experience, 8–9
Upton, Carole Anne, 178–179 What is Scenography?, 135
Utopia, 29, 32, 35 Wickstrom, Maurya, 16, 22–23
utopian performatives, 208 Williams, Raymond, 8, 91
Utopia in Performance, 32 Wiltshire, John, 180
Womanhood in Ireland, 130, 216, 218
Women’s Aid, 27, 37n31, 38n36
V Women’s Resource Centre, 27
Van Gennep, Arthur, 83, 93 Women’s liberation movement
Vardo, 134 (1970s), 14, 29–30, 37n35, 74
Varney, Denise, 209, 217, 220 Workhouses, 21
Verbatim Theatre, 197 ‘Working through’ theory, 163,
Verbatim Verbatim, 179 165–167, 180–181, 188, 194
Veteran trauma, 53–54 World End’s Lane, 134
Victimhood, 11, 22, 37n35, 48, 72, World Health Organisation (WHO),
175, 193, 215 153n6
Victorian era in Ireland, 52, 123–124 World Trade Centre attacks (9/11), 102
Violation, 220 See also Terrorism
Violence against women, see Domestic World War II, 99, 158n45, 172
violence ‘Wound culture’, 206–207
Violence Performed, 15 Writing History, Writing Trauma, 84,
Visual culture, 2 169
Voice-over, 187 Writing Shame, 73
Voyeurism, 133
Vulnerability, 3, 4
X
‘X’ Case, 78n25
W
Wade, Laura, 5, 19, 23, 81–114, 215
Walby, Sylvia, 27 Y
Wald, Christina, 19, 91 Yeats, William Butler, 51
Wallace, Clare, 46 Young Emma, 87, 89
Wallis, Mick, 13, 19, 30 Yuusuf, Maryama, 167, 184, 193,
Walsh, Fintan, 172, 198 201n2
Walter, Tony, 96, 99
War, 27–28, 161, 164, 165, 177, 188,
200 Z
‘War on terror’, 102 Zimbabwe, 163, 167, 189

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Staging

Series editors: Elaine Aston

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Contemporary Performance InterActions

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960964

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: @ Laundry (c) ANU Productions

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This is a production shot from Laundry produced by ANU Productions in

This book is the culmination of years of support, guidance and inspira-

1 Introduction: Staging the Unknowable, the Unspeakable,

2 Violation: On Raftery’s Hill (2000) by Marina Carr 41

3 Loss: Colder Than Here (2005) by Laura Wade 81

3.3 Staging Trauma: The Big C 90

4 Containment: Laundry (2011), Directed by Louise Lowe 117

5 Exile: Sanctuary (2013), Directed by Teya Sepinuck 161

Introduction: Staging the Unknowable,

© The Author(s) 2018 1

The selected case studies in this volume, by staging trauma, confront

and social structures as well as historical contexts and experience. In The

production, performances that stage traumatic encounters tend to mani-

Trauma will be examined in greater detail in the next section,‘Trauma and

1.2 Trauma and Performance

Those confronted with an experience involving ‘actual or threatened death

To return approximately a century previous to this outline of PTSD,

model for libido interpretations that bypass possible psychic traumas’

As it was with the 14-year-old ‘Dora,’ whom a pedophile had sexually

Furthermore, the climate at the Salpêtrière led by Charcot was inherently

fundamental to motivations for this study. If we accept there is validity to

Perhaps Harpin’s questions cannot be answered comprehensively or satis-

[…] be seen not simply as individual or quasi-transcendental grieving but as

Thus, mourning, which speaks to this idea and process of ‘working

Thus, LaCapra summarises, ‘Paradise absent is different from paradise

traumatic past is presented in live performance as well as the audience who

1.3 Production Contexts

interculturalism and the complex and varying conditions of globalisa-

1.4 Selected Case Studies

law. The virginal body of youngest daughter Sorrel Raftery is spread-­

and narratives of Irish history, Ireland’s structures and institutions become

­ overnance and the rhythms of the social footprint continue to destroy

Ireland as well as globally, requires digging up, literally and metaphori-

sessed by theatre and performance. Sanctuary’s scenes tell of experiences

foreground the body, the community and humanitarian values in contem-

We need some ‘fellow feeling’, some social sympathy, to check unreserved

giving consequences for those who threaten the ongoing stability of

To study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events.

trauma. The ‘shadow’ refers to the conditions informing the contexts of

1.5 The Extraordinary Everyday Experience

Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars hap-

scholarship to make this history, and this reality, known. In Staging

My own manifesto is an exhortation to stave off the easy cynicism of con-

These performances may well have inspired social change as urged by

visibly fashionable. Aston speaks of ‘feminist residue’ and ‘patriarchal left-

[…] Churchill dis-illusions the spectator of a healthy feminine by gesturing

How are young women to cope, indeed? The problems—violation, con-

1.6 Performance, Trauma, Trust

trauma in social, political and cultural contexts in contemporary Ireland

The very idea of the ‘performance of sincerity’ seems a contradiction, in that

Anywhere that ‘sincerity’ names itself, it ceases to exist. It is a value that is

This ‘circuit of social consensus’ extends beyond the immediate event of

[…] potential of different kinds of performance to inspire moments in

In essence, the psyche constantly returned to scenes of unpleasure because,

Luckhurst expands that this ‘repetition compulsion’ has become increas-

1 Introduction: Staging the Unknowable, the Unspeakable,

2 Violation: On Raftery’s Hill (2000) by Marina Carr 41

3 Loss: Colder Than Here (2005) by Laura Wade 81

3.3 Staging Trauma: The Big C 90

4 Containment: Laundry (2011), Directed by Louise Lowe 117

5 Exile: Sanctuary (2013), Directed by Teya Sepinuck 161

law. The virginal body of youngest daughter Sorrel Raftery is spread-

overnance and the rhythms of the social footprint continue to destroy

theatre and performance studies, death studies, and trauma studies. It