Teresa Deevy is having quite a moment. Eighty years after the peak of her theatrical career, during which time she had six plays staged in the Abbey in as many years, her work is undergoing a thorough re-examination at home and abroad. In addition to the return of her dramatic masterpiece Katie Roche to the Abbey, Dublin Theatre for the Deaf and Amanda Coogan are presenting an adaptation of The King of Spain’s Daughter for the Dublin Fringe Festival. Her contentious Wife to James Whelan is being staged by Garter Lane in Waterford, and Mint Theater Company, a group dedicated to unearthing long-forgotten works, have revived four of Deevy’s short plays (under the title The Suitcase Under the Bed) in New York which have received warm reviews from the New York Times. A busy year for a writer whose work, until recently, was considered forgotten.
This revival of interest in Deevy’s life and work is heavily influenced by the recent Waking the Feminists movement. Initially formed in reaction to the Abbey’s 1916 centenary programme, which was intended to be a retrospective of Irish theatre but failed to stage a single work by a female playwright, the group became a platform to discuss the erasure of women’s contributions, particularly in the field of writing, from Irish theatre. Teresa Deevy, a well-regarded playwright in her time whose work has been frequently overlooked, was held up as the shining example of this erasure. However, Deevy has not been entirely, nor unfairly, unproduced. This is actually the sixth production of Katie Roche at the Abbey, and Deevy’s contemporaries, Irish playwrights of the 30s, 40s and early 50s such as MJ Molloy, St John Ervine and Lennox Robinson, are also infrequently revived, the period being generally regarded as a creatively fallow time in theatre’s history. That said, it is the names of Deevy’s male contemporaries that are cried more often in appraisals of the period.
So, who is Teresa Deevy? Born in Waterford, she became one of the first female arts students to study at University College Dublin, although her time at the college was cut short when she developed Meniere’s disease, a condition which left her deaf for the the rest of her life. This did not stop the beginnings of a celebrated and prolific playwriting career, commencing with The Reapers on the Abbey stage in 1930. Between 1930 and 1936, she premiered six plays at the Abbey, winning the theatre’s new play competition in 1932 for Temporal Powers. Well-regarded in her own time for her gently subversive plays, which were often considered proto-feminist in their examination of the suffocating position of women in Irish society, her work was deemed significant enough to accompany O’Casey’s and Synge’s during an Abbey tour to the US in the 30s. However, her blooming success was cut short after Lennox Robinson, the Abbey manager who had championed her work, was replaced by the more conservative Ernest Blythe in 1937. Her next offering, Wife to James Whelan, was rejected and another play, Holiday House, was accepted but never staged, effectively ending her relationship with the theatre. Deevy continued to have impressive success writing for radio, in spite of being deaf when the media form developed.
So, does Katie Roche live up to the hype? The hopes of Waking the Feminists are certainly pinned on it doing so. Largely, it does. The perceived pitfalls of the theatrical tradition in which Deevy wrote, characterised by stultifying, kitchen-sink realism and a poverty of aesthetic innovation (the old joke goes that for 20 years the set on the Abbey stage remained the same, they merely repainted it) have been avoided in Caroline Byrne’s production, which is stripped of these traditional accoutrements, allowing Deevy’s words to take centre stage. The production opens with an image of a toy house, immediately nodding towards the play’s indebtedness to A Doll’s House, one of two Ibsen plays which have a clear influence on Katie Roche, the other being Hedda Gabler. The toy house ascends revealing the cavernous, bare wood-paneling of the stage as its interior. What seemed quaint and cutesy on the outside is demonstrated as dwarfing and oppressive from within. The dirt stage, from which the titular character emerges like a vengeful member of the undead, is completely bare apart from a hydraulic altar which serves as a dining table, with such symbolism arguably being heavy-handed, and as a platform on which Katie is exposed during transitions between acts.
It is inside this apparently benign structure of the house that Katie Roche is trapped. As a young girl born out of wedlock in 1930s Ireland, her only apparent options are to marry Stanislaus Grieg, an older architect who has taken an interest in her, or to enter into the convent. The titular character is given life, perhaps too much of it at times, by Caoilfhionn Dunne, whose highly expressive performance, while consistently engaging, paints Katie in every shade from willful to petulant, with the result that she comes across as an inconsistent teenager, and a childish one at that. When she toys with Stanislaus it seems like the random hurtfulness of a child, rather than the calculated manipulation of an intelligent woman. This central relationship, between Katie and her husband, which the play’s text insists upon as being genuinely loving, is the greatest stumbling block for this production. One almost feels that Byrne’s interpretation of the text would rather ignore this more conservative aspect of the play, as Sean Campion’s performance as Stanislaus comes across as stilted and close to caricature. This choice is presumably intended to counterpoint Katie’s wildness, but it reduces Stanislaus to an old fusspot. This similarly leaves his sister, Amelia, with whom Katie is living, caught indecisively between a comedic cut-out of an old maid and a woman whose range of choices is, tragically, just as narrow as Katie’s.
The incredulity of Katie’s marriage is exacerbated by the genuine chemistry shared by Dunne and Kevin Creedon, who plays Michael Maguire, Katie’s younger love interest. Creedon gives a sincere and considered performance, with his every expression comprehensible and sympathetic. The highlight of the production is the scene shared by Dunne and Creedon in the play’s penultimate act in which Katie and Michael’s frustration at being separated is manifested. Unfortunately, the emotional climax of this scene is followed by an overly long and undramatic final scene which, having let much of the play’s dramatic tension dissipate, ultimately falls flat. Nevertheless, this cannot detract from the achievements of the production which run at a pacy, intermission-less hour and three-quarters, and which make a definitive case for Deevy’s inclusion in the Irish theatrical canon. Let’s hope that this time it sticks.
