Pat Kinevane’s Forgotten and Silent: Universalizing the Abject

Abstract

The rise and sustained inventiveness of performance-based theatre on the Irish stage in the early twenty-first century are already the subject of several articles and at least two books. In The Dreaming Body: Contemporary Irish Theatre (2009), Melissa Sihra and Paul Murphy collect essays, excerpts and interviews, many of which document recent manifestations of physical theatre by Irish theatre practitioners. Similarly, in her 2008 study, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre, Bernadette Sweeney suggests that in contemporary Irish theatre ‘the body of the actor [&] is the site, indeed the agent, rather than a mere vehicle of signification’ (Sweeney 195). Although Sweeney focuses on Irish productions from the 1980s and 1990s, such as the 1988 landmark collaboration between director Patrick Mason, playwright Tom Mac Intyre and actor Tom Hickey to adapt Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 poem The Great Hunger for the stage, her argument is borne out by two one-man shows written and performed by Pat Kinevane: Forgotten (2008) and Silent (2011). Kinevane’s extraordinary performance pieces range freely, eclectically through diverse theatrical styles to represent characters marginalized by their Irish communities not least through the physical abjection that is old age in Forgotten and through the mental and physical abjection of a homeless man in Silent.