8. Finding Money in the Walls

‘Finding Money in the Walls: Uncovering the Feminist Power of Teresa Deevy’s Dramaturgy through an Embodied, Practice-based Approach’ considers Teresa Deevy’s plays through the lens of the author’s feminist directing approaches, which draw on her lived experiences. She argues that Deevy’s dramaturgy is a complex, layered materialism, based in Deevy’s lived experience. Using the metaphor of money in the broken-down walls of a ruin in Temporal Powers, the author explores how Deevy places material objects in the liminal spaces of her settings as a key feature of her dramaturgical project, throughout her career. These material objects figure significantly in the conflicts of the plays, and their resolutions. Identification with the material of these objects engage audiences’ bodies sensually, both in dramas for stage and radio. Further, Deevy inserts actual bodies as meta-audiences in the plays, which stand as representatives of audiences’ bodies at key moments of recognition and resolution in the dramas. The latter section of the chapter applies this analysis to Strange Birth (1946) and Light Falling (1947), written both for radio and stage. The chapter concludes by arguing that a practice-based approach is uniquely valuable in illuminating Deevy’s feminist dramaturgy, and larger project designed to evoke connective, embodied experiences for audiences both inside and outside her dramas. The chapter is relevant to feminist theatremakers and academics, Deevy scholars, those interested in Irish theatre practice and history.