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Copyright

Jonathan Bank; Caroline Byrne; Amanda Coogan; Lianne Quigley;

Published On

2025-04-07

Page Range

pp. 263–288

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

12. Teresa Deevy and Contemporary Performance Practice

Edited Transcript of Teresa Deevy Practitioner Panel Discussion

Chapter of: Active Speech: Critical Perspectives on Teresa Deevy(pp. 263–288)
‘Teresa Deevy and Contemporary Performance Practice’ constitutes a chapter that records a discussion between Jonathan Bank, Caroline Byrne, Amanda Coogan, and Lianne Quigley recounting how they first encountered Deevy’s work and their unique approaches to working with her texts from their perspectives as directors, performance artists, and performers. Having worked with several of Deevy’s texts and co-edited Teresa Deevy Reclaimed, volumes one and two, Bank discusses his directorial choices, which allowed the Mint Theater team (New York) to explore the contradictions within Deevy’s characters. With reference to Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady at The Peacock Theatre in 2017, Quigley and Coogan consider the ensemble’s embodied response to The King of Spain’s Daughter. Caroline Byrne discusses her approach to directing Katie Roche at the Abbey Theatre in 2017, a production that illuminated the expressionist qualities of that text. The chapter contributes significantly to published material relating to practitioners’ experiences of directing and performing Deevy’s work and is relevant to theatre practitioners and theatre researchers interested in Deevy’s work, to researchers of Irish theatre in America, Deaf theatre practice, Irish Sign Language theatre, and the Abbey Theatre.

Contributors

Jonathan Bank

(author)

Jonathan Bank has been the Artistic Director of the Mint Theater Company in New York City since 1995. Focused on lost and forgotten plays and playwrights, Bank has unearthed and produced over sixty plays, but he is most proud of Mint’s Teresa Deevy Project, a committed effort to create new life for this exceptional writer’s work. The project began in 2010 with a plan to produce two of Deevy’s plays and, eventually, grew to include four full productions: Wife to James Whelan (2010), Temporal Powers (2011), Katie Roche (2013), and The Suitcase under the Bed (2017), which featured four of Deevy’s one-act plays. In addition to the productions, the project also involved numerous readings of Deevy’s one-act plays and the publication of two books: Teresa Deevy Reclaimed: Volume One (2011) and Teresa Deevy Reclaimed: Volume Two (2017). Fintan O’Toole praised the Mint in the Irish Times in 2013, writing: ‘There has been no coherent exploration of Deevy’s work as a whole by any Irish company. Instead, the Mint Theater in New York, which specialises in rediscovering lost work, has engaged in what it calls the Teresa Deevy Project […] There are good reasons, both social and artistic, why Irish theatre should pay attention to this project’. In 2017, the Irish Times wrote about the Mint under the headline: ‘The New York theatre that’s kept Teresa Deevy’s flame alive’.

Caroline Byrne

(author)

Caroline Byrne is a theatre director. Previously, she was an Associate Director at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill; she is an ongoing Education Associate at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is, currently, Associate Director at the Abbey Theatre. Recent directing credits include: Dancing at Lughnasa (Gate Theatre); Portia Coughlan (Abbey Theatre); Spring Awakening (Young Vic Theatre); Faustus: That Damned Woman (Headlong, Lyric Hammersmith); Woman and Scarecrow (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); All’s Well That Ends Well (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse); Katie Roche (the Abbey Theatre, National Theatre of Ireland); Oliver Twist (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre); The Wheel (Milton Court Theatre); The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare’s Globe); Parallel Macbeth (Clare Theatre, Young Vic); Eclipsed (Gate Theatre, London); and, Shakespeare in a Suitcase (co-directed with Tim Crouch for the Royal Shakespeare Company). She has also directed productions at the Bush Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Birmingham Rep.

Amanda Coogan

(author)

Amanda Coogan has been described by the Irish Times as the leading practitioner of performance art in Ireland. Her extraordinary work is challenging, provocative, and always visually stimulating. Her artworks encompass a multitude of media—objects, text, moving and still images, all circulating around her live performances. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its essence and communicate it through her body. Her 2015 live exhibition, I’ll Sing You a Song from around the Town, was described by Artforum as ‘performance art at its best’. Amanda has collaborated with Deaf artists to realise two of Deevy’s works: Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady, an interpretation of The King of Spain’s Daughter, which was staged in the Abbey Theatre (2017), and the premiere of Possession, staged in Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and in The Granary Theatre, Cork, both in 2024.

Lianne Quigley

(author)
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0729-3656

Lianne Quigley is an Artistic Director of Dublin Theatre of the Deaf (DTD). She is a Deaf activist and co-led the campaign for the legal recognition of Irish Sign Language (ISL). Lianne is Chairperson of the Irish Deaf Society, a Deaf-led civil rights organisation. She performed in and co-directed the Coogan/DTD collaborative project You Told Me to Wash and Clean My Ears (2014), directing the forty-strong, Deaf community cast. She wrote and directed I Have Spread My Dreams Under Your Feet: The Story of W.B. Yeats (2015), performed at the Deaf Village Ireland, and led the choreographic research in the Coogan/DTD collaboration, Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady (2017). Lianne has written, directed, and performed in DTD productions 1916 (2016) and Suffragette (2018), both performed at the Deaf Village Ireland. In 2020, with Alvean Jones, Lianne co-wrote and performed Letter 8, which was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dear Ireland series. In 2022, she worked with Amanda Coogan, Alvean Jones, DTD, Cork Deaf Community Choir, and staff and students of South East Technological University to devise a production of Teresa Deevy’s ballet Possession, which was performed in February in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin and in The Granary Theatre, Cork in June as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival, both in 2024.