Troubled Relations of Gender and Generation in Celtic Tiger Drama: Stella Feehily’s Duck and O Go My Man

Abstract

In ‘The Foundation of the Modern Irish Theatre: A Centenary Assessment’ Christopher Murray examines the gendered aspect of writing for the stage in Ireland and states that ‘the fate of women playwrights in the new Free State was deplorable’. Later he claims that the situation did not change much during the later decades either, and ‘[i]t was not until the 1980s that Irish women playwrights were encouraged to come forward to articulate their experience in a totally honest way’ (50–1). Among others, Murray probes into the world of Paula Meehan’s Mrs Sweeney (1997), discussing the technique by which it gives visibility and voice to working-class women who frequently have to face material deprivation and early death in their families. Meehan treats the issue of gender in relation to social inequality by the energizing and also subversive deployment of the myth Buile Suibhne. Moreover, she includes intertextual elements which critically resonate with the characterization and conflict-building strategies of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924). Murray emphasizes that Mrs Sweeney is ‘reflective of a changing consciousness in Irish society. That change is not to be sentimentalized. It comes to Ireland at a great price, as the incidence of broken marriages and increasing violence done to women testifies [&] in the end her response to the tragic situation is to put centre stage a feminized community’ (52–3).