Introduction

Abstract

The origin of this book lies in the publication of Melissa Sihra’s edited collection Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation. ¹ At the launch in 2007 in the bar of the Abbey Theatre Dublin a copy of the book was presented to actress Phyllis Ryan whose image appears on the front cover in a photograph taken from a 1937 Abbey Theatre production of Sean O’Casey’s play The Shadow of a Gunman. Responding to the gift, Ryan noted how important this book was in its ‘recovery’ of women’s contribution to the Irish theatre in a century dominated in historical reconstructions of the ‘canon’ by male playwrights. Jokingly, she surmised how interesting it would be to read a book on ‘men and the Irish theatre’. Most people laughed at this in the knowledge that twentieth-century Irish theatre practice is remembered almost exclusively for its contributions and interventions by men. For me, though, it was not another book about Irish men that was needed, but one that asked new questions. What kind of men and their representations precisely have been canonized? And what have been the challenges to those hegemonic representations at the latter end of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first? And so, the premise of this book is to deconstruct both the representations and interventions of masculinities on the Irish stage, and to expose how particular masculinities also succumb to the oppressive drives of hegemonic forms of masculinity performed as patriarchy.