📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout! 🛒

Copyright

Cathy Leeney;

Published On

2025-04-07

Page Range

pp. 243–262

Language

  • English

Print Length

20 pages

11. Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche

Art, Culture, and Performance

  • Cathy Leeney (author)
Chapter of: Active Speech: Critical Perspectives on Teresa Deevy(pp. 243–262)
‘Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche: Art, Culture, and Performance’ explores Teresa Deevy’s 1936 play Katie Roche to argue for its status as a work that sustains contemporary revival. Elements in favour of this are the play’s complex and layered text that brings together a number of theatre genres (realism, expressionism, comedy), and places at its centre a character that contains multitudes. Beginning with Katie Roche as a valuable record of the conditions under which young women in Ireland in the 1930s lived, and the constraints they often experienced, the chapter looks briefly at the play’s historical significance and how this relates to its status as a text for contemporary performance. Katie Roche is evaluated in two ways, through Katie as a disturbing and dynamic figure, and through the dissonances of the genre and stylistic complexities of the text. Examples of the play in production in 1994 and 2017, both at the Abbey Theatre, but on different stages, evidence the work’s spaciousness in terms of aesthetic approach and interpretation. This argument points towards a larger one – in favour of the performance possibilities of plays from the past, dismissed due to the social values and theatrical assumptions of their first productions, to advocate for their revival before contemporary audiences, so that issues of social progress and theatrical histories are questioned and explored and the canon renewed. The chapter is relevant to those interested in Deevy’s dramaturgy and dramaturgical style, productions of Deevy’s work, revivals of twentieth century drama, those interested in Irish theatre history, feminist theatre practice and the Abbey Theatre.

Contributors

Cathy Leeney

(author)
Adjunct Assistant Professor in Drama Studies in the UCD School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin

Cathy Leeney is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in Drama Studies in the University College Dublin (UCD) School of English, Drama, and Film where she taught and supervised research for over twenty years and where, with Finola Cronin, she co-founded UCD’s MA in Theatre Practice. Cathy trained as a director with the British Theatre Association in London and has directed and assistant directed professional productions in Dublin (Project Arts Centre, Abbey Theatre, Tivoli Theatre, Peacock Theatre) and Belfast (Grand Opera House). Publications include Seen and Heard: Six Plays by Irish Women (ed., Carysfort Press, 2003); The Theatre of Marina Carr (co-edited with Anna McMullan, Carysfort Press, 2003); Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939 (Peter Lang, 2010); Analysing Gender in Performance (co-edited with Paul Halferty, Springer, 2023); The Plays of Maura Laverty (co-edited with Deirdre McFeely, Liverpool University Press, 2023). She has also published extensively on the subjects of performance analysis, theatre and nation, gender in performance, and women’s playwriting and acting in Ireland. Cathy initiated, and was Chair of, the Prague Quadrennial Board (2005–2008) which, through the support of the Irish Theatre Institute, Culture Ireland, Arts Council of Ireland, and Dublin Corporation, enabled Ireland’s first national entry to the Prague Quadrennial International Exhibition of Scenography and Architecture in 2008. She was founding Vice-chair of the Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR) (2007), and board member of Galloglass Theatre Company and of the Gaiety School of Acting. She works as a dramaturg and is currently developing an analysis for the first production of W.B. Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer.