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Copyright

Chris Morash;

Published On

2025-04-07

Page Range

pp. 117–130

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

5. ‘Very Seldom Are Messages Properly Given’

Teresa Deevy’s Dark Matter

Chapter of: Active Speech: Critical Perspectives on Teresa Deevy(pp. 117–130)
‘‘Very Seldom are Messages Properly Given’: Teresa Deevy’s Dark Matter’ explores the unsayable in Teresa Deevy’s theatre, focusing on a late play, In the Cellar of My Friend, a play that a play that, apart from a two-day run in 1957, only had a full professional run first in 2017 (Mint Theatre, New York) was only first performed professionally in 2017 (Mint Theatre, New York). It is argued that the apparently deceptively simple realist theatrical texture of Deevy’s theatre constitutes the frame for the exploration of forms of experience that cannot be adequately contained by language, and which thereby elude any analysis predicated on concepts of representation or communication. In particular, a close analysis of In the Cellar of My Friend demonstrates that woven into its ostensibly realist dialogue and conventional plot and character elements are images and phrases drawn from a particular tradition of Catholic mysticism, with the play’s title drawn from the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross. This recognition of the play’s imbrication in a tradition of thought predicated on the existence of the unknowable provides a way of reading back through all of Deevy’s work, and thereby situating the frequent ellipses, gaps, and moments of aporia that characterise her plays. Drawing on Andrew Sofer’s concept of ‘dark matter’ as a means of characterising theatre that is predicated on elements that are intrinsically unsayable and invisible, it is thus argued that in spite of their ostensibly realist surfaces, we can thus situate Deevy’s work in the context of those forms of modernist theatre that are predicated on the failures of communication and the inadequacy of language.

Contributors

Chris Morash

(author)
Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6810-7881

Chris Morash, FTCD, MRIA, is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College, Dublin. Among his publications in the field of Irish studies are Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford University Press, 1996), A History of the Irish Theatre: 1601–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Mapping Irish Theatre (with Shaun Richards) (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Yeats on Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His 2023 book, Dublin: A Writer’s City (2023), is the first in the Imagining Cities series he is editing for Cambridge University Press. He has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre with Nicholas Grene (Oxford University Press, 2016) and is currently editing The Cambridge History of the Irish Novel. In 2021, he curated the Unseen Plays series of audio dramas for the Abbey Theatre, which included a production of Teresa Deevy’s Light Falling. He has been involved with the Mint Theater’s Deevy Project since 2009, as part of which he co-edited (with Jonathan Bank and John Harrington) two volumes of Deevy’s plays Teresa Deevy Reclaimed (2011 and 2017); these editions draw on manuscript and published sources. While previously working in Maynooth University (1990–2013), he was instrumental with Jonathan Bank, Hugh Murphy, and Jacqui Deevy in establishing the Teresa Deevy Archive in Maynooth University Library. He has served as Vice-Provost of Trinity College, Dublin (2016–2019), is on the Board of the Irish Theatre Institute, and has been a member of the Royal Irish Academy since 2008.