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Masculinities and Manhood
in Contemporary Irish Drama
Acting the Man
Cormac O’Brien
Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish
Drama
Cormac O’Brien
Masculinities
and Manhood
in Contemporary Irish
Drama
Acting the Man
Cormac O’Brien
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-030-84074-7 ISBN 978-3-030-84075-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84075-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

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Cover credit: Fiona Morgan
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated—with love always and ever—to Scots Michael, who
taught me how to see the bigger picture, Mister.
Acknowledgements
While I am sure to accidentally omit some names, I endeavour here

to offer grateful thanks to the many people without whose generous
support—intellectual, practical, and emotional—this book would never
have made it to publication: First and foremost, heartfelt gratitude to
Emilie Pine whose unwavering belief in my ability to survey six decades
of Irish drama equals her erudite and insightful input into and guid-
ance of this project in its early years. Thanks also to Gerardine Meaney,
Anne Mulhall, Moynagh Sullivan, Emma Radley, Caroline Magennis,
Fintan Walsh, Noreen Giffney, Margot Backus, and Debbie Ging for their
mentorship and guidance through the unwieldy field of Irish gender and
sexuality studies. For their support, guidance, and generosity of time,
thanks are due to all of my colleagues in the School of English, Drama
and Film at University College Dublin, not least Danielle Clarke, Lucy
Collins, P. J. Mathews, John Brannigan, Margaret Kelleher, Michelle
O’Connell, Frank McGuinness, Catriona Clutterbuck, Niamh Pattwell,
and of course those unsung heroes who keep the wheels turning, Karen
Jackman and Pauline Slattery. Irish drama studies can be a challenging
field to navigate, thus grateful thanks are due to Eamonn Jordan, Melissa
Sihra, Brian Singleton, Steffi Lehner, Tony Roche, Christopher Collins,
Miriam Haughton, Ondrej Pilny, Claire Wallace, Maria Kurdi, Chris
Morash, David Clare, Alexandra Poulain, and Shaun Richards. Elaine
Aston deserves singular thanks not only for her input into this project
but also for her guidance and mentorship over the years. Deserving also
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
of stand-alone thanks is Marta Cook, who provided new insights into

Irish culture and post-colonialism. Several American scholars have been
generous with their time and mentorship; thus heartfelt transatlantic
thanks go to Ed Madden, Mary Trotter, Jennifer Slivka, Kate Costello-
Sullivan, Anne Teekell Hays, Barry Devine, and Jose Lanters. Irish theatre
practitioners have been more than generous with the provision of scripts,
soundtracks, videos, and interviews; special thanks therefore to: Phillip
McMahon and Jenny Jones at THISISPOPBABY, Feidlim Cannon and
Gary Keegan at Brokentalkers, Oisin McKenna, Neil Watkins, Derbhle
Crotty, Charlotte Bradley, Paul Mercier, Peter Sheridan, Shaun Dunne,
Shane Byrne, Gerry Stembridge, and Declan Hughes. Thanks also to my
editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, particularly Jack Heeney, for their
patience and support throughout what has proved to be a very turbu-
lent and trying year. My mother Nora, as well as my father Noel (who
we tragically lost last year) have been steadfast in their loving support, as
have been my sisters, Gemma, Geraldine, and Noreen. Every author has
their own private, trusted copy-editors and proof-readers who toil, thank-
lessly and without formal merit, outside the official publishing process;
thus I owe a deep dept of gratitude to Julie Ann Robson, Jess Kelly, and
Lillis O’Laoire for many hours of painstaking and meticulous work on my
chapters. And finally, for being the stage-manager who keeps this show on
the road, all the love in the world to my partner, Scots Michael, without
whom none of this would happen.
Cover image is from The Year of Magical Wanking (2010) written and
performed by Neil Watkins, directed by Phillip McMahon, produced by
THISISPOPBABY. The photographer is Fiona Morgan.
The author gratefully acknowledges UCD’s College of Arts and
Humanities Funding Scheme for Quality Publications, 2020/2021.
Contents
1 Introduction: Acting the Man 1

2 The Fantasy of Manhood 41
3 The Pathology of Patriarchy 85
4 Men of the North 127
5 Masculinity Without Men 171
6 Acting Queer 213
7 Conclusion: Acting This Man 267
Index 277
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Acting the Man
Frank: No, but the job. You know, it’s like a big tank. The whole
town is like a tank. At home is like a tank. A huge tank with
walls running up, straight up. And we’re at the bottom, splashing
around all week in their Friday night vomit, clawing at the sides
[…] and the big-shots – are up around the top, looking in, looking
down. […] Spitting. On top of us. And for fear we might climb
out someday – Do you know what they’re doing? – They smear
grease around the walls.
Joe: Come on out of here to hell.
From On the Outside by Tom Murphy & Noel O’Donoghue,
1959.
Joe: I want to say that I am absolutely outraged! […] A man has
a right to his own mind, Carmel. Just because I’m your husband
doesn’t mean you own my thoughts. You can’t know everything
about me. […] I love you Carmel, I really do but you can’t expect –
I’m a human being. I have a right to my own … you know […]
Would you give over now with the touchy-feely nonsense? You’re
making my chest hurt.
Carmel: The worry here is that I opened a letter addressed to you –
not that you ordered a pair of stockings for yourself from a girl
called Abbi? […] I need to believe that you are a better man than
I currently believe you to be, Joe.
From No Romance by Nancy Harris, 2011.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. O’Brien, Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84075-4_1
2 C. O’BRIEN
In Noel O’Donoghue’s and Tom Murphy’s 1959 play, On the Outside,

Joe and Frank are young single men, futilely trying to beg, borrow, or
steal the entrance fee to a rural dance because, although employed, they
have no disposable income whatsoever. Their performances thus resonate
with the social marginalization, cultural exclusion, and economic precarity
experienced by a vast majority of everyday workingmen in late 1950s
Ireland. And yet, while both are painfully aware of their lack of finan-
cial and social capital, they are more concerned that not gaining entrance
to the dance has dashed any hopes of having sex with women that night.
With their potential female partners already inside the dance—two women
whom they describe in language that belies both their sexual inexperience
and an objectified, misogynistic view of female sexuality—their chances
of displaying their manly virility and potency is very much left ‘on the
outside’. Joe’s final closing line, ‘Come on out of here to hell’, indi-
cates not only that they will give up on their efforts to gain entrance
to the dance, but also that they will, most likely, abandon Ireland itself
and emigrate to the ‘hell’ of England.
Fifty-two years later, Nancy Harris’ No Romance (2011) is set in a
funeral parlour, where Joe, a once-prosperous businessman who has gone
bust, rather than mourn his dead mother laid out before him, agonizes
and shouts because his daughter has posted a picture of herself in a
wet t-shirt competition on the Internet. His wife, Carmel, annoyed by
his sexual hypocrisy, produces a pair of women’s lingerie stockings that
Joe has ordered from an online sex worker and so exposes his growing
addiction to Internet pornography. While the economic precarity that
threatens Joe somewhat echoes that of the men in On the Outside, the
demise of his business is a direct result of the global financial crash of
2008, a fiscal disaster that, as many critics elaborate, was engendered by
unregulated neoliberal capitalism. Still, Joe’s performance is also under-
girded by several problems shared by his counterparts in On the Outside,
such as an inability to prioritize his anxieties, a misaligned and objectified
understanding of female sexuality, and a sense of the contemporary world
passing him by. Thus, although the settings and historical placement of
these plays are very different, and the individual performances are equally
contrasting, there is nevertheless a cluster of underlying anxieties shared
by Frank and Joe in 1959, and Joe in 2011, with regard to how they
should ‘act the man’. Both plays therefore suggest a landscape of shifting
and yet at times static performances of Irish manhood; a landscape that
this book maps across a time frame—the 1960s to the 2010s—during
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTING THE MAN 3
which Ireland underwent several periods of profound social, political,

economic, religious, and cultural change.
This book therefore charts the journey, in terms of both stases and
change, that male characters have made in Irish drama from the 1960s
to the present; a journey whose significant characteristics are alluded to
in the above quotations. Echoing the similarities and differences between
the masculine anxieties of Joe and Frank in 1959 and Joe in 2011, one of
the primary aims of Acting the Man is to critically elaborate a seismic shift
in the theatrical performance of Irish masculinities and, by extension then,
in the broader society and culture. Responding to the world around them
as it revolves on an ever-changing socio-political axis, male characters in
Irish drama, this book argues, have shifted from embodying and enacting
post-colonial concerns of Irishness, nationalism, and national identity, to
performing paradigms of masculinity that are driven and moulded by
the political and cultural praxes of neoliberal capitalism. Throughout the
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Irish drama, as this book shall demonstrate,
was underwritten by performances of a nationalist resonance, whereby
male characters embodied concerns about overdetermined manhood and
Irish identity. More recent performances of masculinity have, since the
mid-1980s and even more explicitly since the 1990s, shifted into manifes-
tations of market-driven masculinity whereby hyper-consumers purchase,
subsume, and subsequently perform mediated tropes and narratives of
homogenously globalized manhood.
Still, this shift is neither as all encompassing nor as liberating from the
old ways as it initially appears. Since the 1980s, the increasing entrench-
ment of neoliberal socio-economic policies and cultural practices means
that Irish gender roles subscribe to consumerist tropes of identity that are
as class-anxious as they are rigidly gendered—as rigid, albeit in different
ways, as the social models of gender that came before. Joe and Frank
in On the Outside are trapped in heavily gendered socio-cultural schemas
and display a hunger for sexual experiences that are intrinsic to their being
men from late 1950s Ireland. Not only does their economic precarity and
willingness to emigrate from that ‘vomit-filled tank’ speak to the autarky
of Eamonn DeValera’sIreland, but their lack of access to and knowledge
of women and female sexuality also resonates with Catholic Nationalist
teachings and ideologies of the time. Furthermore, as the emigration
narratives of thousands of Irishmen like Joe and Frank demonstrate,
life as an Irish navvy building English motorways and council estates,
while quite different to the unemployment or low-paid farming such men
4 C. O’BRIEN
had left behind, was nonetheless another form of ‘hell’ (McEinri 2000).
Half a century later, Joe in No Romance has easy access to market- and
digitally mediated versions of his sexual fantasies, courtesy of high-tech
infrastructures and credit cards, and via that most globalized and commer-
cialized of entities, the Internet. Yet, when those fantasizes are disrupted
harshly because an online photograph of his daughter forces him to see
the anonymous living dolls of internet pornography as real women with
lives and personalities, his misaligned notions of women and female sexu-
ality replicate those of the men in On the Outside. Crucially, Joe in No
Romance could be any contemporary Western man. His performance of
angst-ridden masculinity, indeed Harris’ entire drama, could easily be set
in many developed nations across the Global North in the 2010s and still
play out in the same ways with the same consequences. Thus, while Joe
and Frank in 1959 do what Irishmen must do, Joe in 2011 does what
globalized Western men must do.
However, and characterizing one of the key sites of inertia in this shift
from nationalism to neoliberalism, the concerns and vicissitudes of hetero-
sexual men still remain the primary driving forces behind Irish theatre
(both artistically and as an industry) and Irish social, political, and cultural
life. To explore why this might be; to discover why, in so many cases,
change in Ireland has meant different ways of staying the same, Acting
the Man also elaborates parallel shifts and stasis in regressive systems of
gender and sexuality in Irish culture, politics, and society, whereby patri-
archy, misogyny, and homophobia have morphed from being explicit and
easily identified, into implicit, often invisible structures of control. Hiding
themselves in market-mediated tropes of polarized gender and sexual
identity, these regressive systems are promulgated under the allegedly
liberal gloss of ‘consumer choice’ and ‘individualism’, thus effacing their
workings so as to be invisible by their very ubiquity. Joe in No Romance,
as an individual in the globalized economy of the twenty-first century,
understands purchasing internet pornography as a ‘right’, and when
his wife points out the misogyny and lack of responsibility inherent in
his choices, she is chastised for interfering in his privacy and even his
thoughts. Moreover, as No Romance aptly exemplifies, quite frequently
when male dominance is challenged, such challenges are responded to
with dire warnings about men becoming disenfranchised, or somehow
emasculated, thus heralding doom-laden portents of social breakdown,
and, most frequently, of men being thrown ‘into crisis’. Therefore,
alongside considerations of the shift from nationalism to neoliberalism,
Acting the Man also interrogates the contemporary notion of ‘masculinity

in crisis’ whereby traditional modes of masculinity—in particular patri-
archy—are perceived as being under threat due to socio-political gains
made by feminism and LGBTQ rights movements.
Up until quite recently the landscape of Irish theatre scholarship
has been inflected primarily by post-colonial criticism, although it is
now starting to move towards identity politics and biopolitical criticism.
Certainly, over the last thirty years, there has been a growth in crit-
ical examinations of gender and sexuality, albeit predominantly in terms
of femininity and feminism. It is only in the last decade, with land-
mark publications such as Brian Singleton’s Masculinities and the Irish
Theatre (2011) and Fintan Walsh’s Male Trouble: Masculinity and the
Performance of Crisis (2010), along with several journal articles and book
chapters responding to a new wave of male playwrights that rose in the
1990s, that Irish drama scholarship has begun to think about men and
masculinities in a critical framework. Of these works, this book acts most
in tandem with Singleton’s 2011 monograph, however several funda-
mental critical apparatus set his and my books apart; first, Singleton’s
work starts in the 1990s whereas this book takes 1959—both in terms
of politics and playwrighting—as its starting point. Furthermore, where
possible and in consultation with Singleton, we have avoided analyses of
the same dramas. Singleton’s work has a chapter dedicated to race and
ethnicities of colour (which focuses in the main on television drama)
whereas this book folds such analyses throughout its chapters with the
main focus on opposing ethnic identities being those of differing models
of white Irish manhood, particularly with Northern Irish masculinities
in Chapter 4, ‘Men of the North’. This book, unlike Singleton’s, has
a chapter dedicated to interrogating ‘Masculinity without Men’, which
is to say, analysing female-centric and -authored plays for the ‘pres-
ence by absence’ of patriarchal masculinity. And finally, while Singleton’s
book focuses on masculinities both onstage and within the Irish theatre
industry, this book is a critical survey of the shifts and changes in the
ways in which male characters in Irish drama have been represented since
the 1960s to 2020. Acting the Man hence aims to intersect several nodes
of thinking about Irish drama—postcolonial, gender, queer, and biopo-
litical—and thus develop a new critical framework; not only by drawing
from and building on the long tradition of post-colonial scholarship, but
more so by intervening into it, teasing out, and nuancing performances
6 C. O’BRIEN
of masculinities that have been, up until now, largely taken for granted by
critics as representing a monolithic ‘Irish manhood’.
Examining a diverse corpus of Irish drama and performance both main-
stream and on the margins, popular, and fringe, Acting the Man maps this
new critical landscape and thus creates a space for innovative and original
readings of canonical Irish plays while also giving several fringe and alter-
native theatre events their first intellectual consideration. Chapter 2: The
Fantasy of Manhood, examines the ways in which hegemonic or soci-
ety’s dominant form of manhood is constructed both subjectively and
in the socio-political and cultural arenas. Having examined how domi-
nant models of manhood are constructed in this chapter. Chapter 3: The
Pathology of Patriarchy, then scrutinizes the ways in which these forms of
manhood assume entitlement to a place at the top of the gender order and
then take that place, often to the detriment of women, trans people, and
other less dominant models of masculinity. Chapter 4: Men of the North,
examines how the construction of dominant masculinities and their oper-
ations in society function in different ways once they are situated in a
zone of conflict, in this case during the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and in
the post-conflict or peace process. Chapter 5: Masculinity Without Men
examines the ‘presence by absence’ in dramas that have all-female casts or
are female-centric and in plays that are written by and for women. The
book’s final main chapter, Acting Queer, posits queer dramaturgy as a way
forward for a more egalitarian Irish theatre, both in performance and as
an industry.
Crucially, the book’s critical landscape demonstrates the ways in which
theatrical performances of Irish masculinity and, by extension, the lives
of Irish men and the other lives they touch, have always been subject to
inflexible ideologies, driven at first by issues of national and post-colonial
identity, and more recently by neoliberal and homogenously Western
concerns. Both of these ideologies are universally impacting, as the book
demonstrates in chapters on performing masculinity in both the Republic
and Northern Ireland, and in chapters that focus on women’s and queer
drama. Acting the Man thus takes its readers on a journey: a journey that
begins with an overtly patriarchal, nationalist manhood that often made
direct comment on the state of the nation, and ultimately arrives at several
arguably regressive forms of globalized masculinity, which are couched in
misaligned notions of individualism and free choice and that frequently
perceive themselves as being in crisis.
1 Contexts and Concepts of Masculinities

The word ‘masculinity’ means many different things to many different
people. As it is popularly understood in everyday life, it is taken to mean
how men—the males of the human species—walk, talk, behave, and think
in ways that are specific to and caused by their being male. In other words,
masculinity is perceived as a distinct cluster of characteristics, movements,
gestures, attitudes, mindsets, and utterances, that are enacted by male
bodies and which thus differentiate them from females. Furthermore, that
this cluster of characteristics is traditionally bestowed with ideals of power,
strength, decision, reason, leadership, economic success, political acumen,
and national protection has been used frequently to justify the masculine
control and oppression of women and homosexual men. But even this
generalized understanding of masculinity has nuances that vary with the
march of history and from culture to culture. Consider, for example, the
term ‘machismo’ and its Anglophone counterpart, ‘macho’. In its original
Spanish and Portuguese contexts, both historically and in the present day,
‘macho’ functions as a compliment that pays homage to a man’s virility
and attractiveness to women while signalling his ability to provide for and
protect his family. Simultaneously, however, the term has been globalized,
at first through Spanish and Portuguese colonialism and later by economic
migration, and so its meanings have changed over time beyond its orig-
inal Iberian contexts. In European and North American nations, ‘macho’
now carries a negative valence, denoting a particular form of overdeter-
mined, arrogant sexism while also perpetuating racial stereotypes about
‘over-sexualized’ Latin men. Yet in gay cultures, ‘macho’ resonates with
the sexual fantasy of muscle-bound, domineering men (of any ethnicity)
who do ‘hard-man’ jobs like the cop or the fireman—indeed, much gay
pornography and nightclub marketing will have the term ‘macho’ figured
somewhere in its branding.
Geopolitically, the social enactment of masculinity will vary as different
governments, educators, religious entities, and sports associations posit
and sometimes enforce ideals—both legislative and cultural—about how
they expect men to act as men in their societies and communities. Even
within the everyday living of one nation state there are vast differences
in the ways men are expected to embody their masculinity. Consider, for
example, the type of masculinity portrayed by an unmarried farmer, living
and working in an isolated community in rural Ireland which is deeply
religious and conservative. And compare that to the ways in which an
8 C. O’BRIEN
atheist, married man with three children, who lives in an affluent Dublin
suburb and works as a senior executive at a global corporation, would
enact his masculine identity. Indeed, one would, with these two examples,
see differences in their expressions of masculinity depending on where
these men were at any given time of the day and with whom they were
interacting. Consider now the single gay man, employed and living in
the city-centre, with a busy social life. While his sense of masculinity
will contrast with the two above examples, it will also differ from that
of another gay man who is older in years and settled with a long-term
partner. And the ways in which all of these men convey a sense of
masculine identity would change should their sources of income become
reduced or stop altogether.
It becomes clear, then, that masculinity is not one ahistorical, fixed
state of being that applies to all men at all times, but rather a set of ever-
changing, geopolitically specific models of manhood that are shaped by
socio-political, cultural, religious, and economic contingencies outside of
the male subject. This notion of many different, culturally and tempo-
rally contingent paradigms of manhood led scholars in the mid-1980s to
posit the concept of ‘multiple masculinities’. This in turn has fostered
the critical study of ‘men and masculinities’; thereby not only plural-
izing masculine characteristics and mindsets, but further making a definite
separation between the bodies of men and the social configurations of
masculinities that map across those bodies. Men and masculinity, for
so long assumed to be one and the same thing, are now intellectually
conceptualized as separate but mutually dependent entities.
Furthermore, as a cluster of culturally constructed paradigms that
map themselves across male bodies, we can infer that masculinities are
acted out, or performed, as those bodies move through social and
theatrical time and space. Yet, while the word ‘performance’ denotes
something that is rehearsed, practised, and deliberately brought before
others, for quotidian male subjects this is rarely a conscious process.
It would be foolish to suggest that the majority of men awake in the
morning and decide to perform their masculinity in one particular way
or another. Indeed, as this book illustrates throughout, the performance
of masculinity and its effects on others is something to which many men
afford little or no thought. Therefore, although we can see how masculin-
ities are, in one sense, ‘performed’, our understanding of the psychic
machinations and cultural conditioning that drive these performances
needs further unpacking.
Drawing from the work of linguistics scholar, J. L. Austin, gender

philosopher Judith Butler argues that the enactment of gender paradigms
can be considered ‘performative’ rather than performance. Austin theo-
rized ‘performative speech acts’ whereby certain events are made to
happen, or brought into being, by merely uttering that they have
happened, with the most cited example being that of a wedding: the
minister or legal celebrant, through the performative speech act of ‘now
pronouncing you husband and wife’, changes the social, legal, and
cultural status of the couple in question. Butler applies this thinking across
gender, arguing that it too is brought into being, or made to happen,
through the subject enacting or doing a ‘stylized repetition of acts ’ which
have been embedded deep into the psyche since infancy (1988, 519).
The ‘regulatory fiction’ of gender, as Butler calls it (1990, 45), is there-
fore brought into being by doing it, rather than brought into doing by
being it—or by any essence of innate, pre-birth manliness.
While it is tempting, in the light of these formulations, to consider the
male body as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which culturally specific
scripts of masculinity are imposed, it is vital to consider the interwoven
effects of language, history, and, especially in the case of Ireland (or any
post-colonial state), the role of imperialism. At their most fundamental,
theories of gender differentiate between the biological sex of bodies as
they are born into this world (i.e. male or female), and the culturally
constructed codes of gender as they are socially mapped onto those bodies
(i.e. masculinity and femininity). However, the ‘natural’ biological body is
known to us, can only be known to us, through language, which itself is a
cultural construct—thus the language and taxonomies through which any
given culture understands ‘natural’ bodies will have their own historical
bias and, in the contemporary era, market-mediated meanings. To trouble
this cultural sex/gender binary even further, it leaves intersex and trans-
gender bodies—those either born with some degree of both male and
female biological characteristics or those who need to perform socially
a gender configuration different to their biological body—out of the
mix completely. Such bodies are, in many cases, perceived as ‘unnatural’
anomalies and are subject to violence, legal ambiguity, and easy incar-
ceration. Colonization too has had a massive impact on the sex/gender
binary with the imperialist formulation of the ideal subject as being a
white, heterosexual male still prevalent across the globe—thus ‘natural’
bodies of colour acquire different, often objectified and eroticized mean-
ings as do the cultural codes of gender that are mapped across them.
10 C. O’BRIEN
As several post-colonial scholars have elaborated, when former colonies

transition into independent States, their previous status as colonized,
‘feminized other’ morphs not only into overdetermined gender roles, but
also into violent misogyny and homophobia as the fledgling nation seeks
to assert its strength through the valorization of ‘natural’ strength and
prowess and thus ‘natural’ gender roles (Nandy 1988; Meaney 2010).
Vexatious bodies that do not conform to the new nation’s ideals of gender
(ideals, we must remember, that were inherited from the former colonial
oppressor), such as non-conforming women, transgender subjects, gays,
lesbians, and other queer-identified people, are ushered out of public
sight through exile, criminalization, incarceration, and in some cases,
elimination.
The sex/gender binary, then, is not as clear-cut as it may first seem.
What is clear, however, is that both our understandings of natural bodies
and the cultural codes of gender that are mapped across them are highly
regulatory, and those who cannot or will not conform to them are often
punished, both culturally and legislatively. And yet, the entrenched nature
of these gender performatives, as they are automatically, unconsciously,
and unquestioningly enacted by the subject, makes them seem natural,
pre-emptive, pre-cultural, part of the order of things. Although the male
subject performs his masculinity, by virtue of the performative nature of
gender, often he does not realize this to be the case.
2 Hegemonic Masculinity
and Performing the Nation
Although one can recognize that social and theatrical performances of
masculinities are multitudinous and varied, it is important also to interro-
gate how, in any given culture and historical era, one particular paradigm
of masculinity rises to a dominant position and is thus socially sanctioned
as the only acceptable way to be a man in that time and place. Originally
proposed in a field study of social inequality in Australian high-schools
by Martin Kessler in 1982, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is the label given
to this dominant construction of manhood (Connell and Messerschmidt
2005). Hegemonic masculinity can thus be understood as an overarching
paradigm of manhood that rises to social prominence and thus dominates
configurations of gender practice within any given society. On an indi-
viduated level, it becomes an exalted model of masculinity to which men
aspire while, on a societal level, it embeds itself into social structures and
cultural practices as a means of legitimizing and sanctioning heterosexual

male dominance.
Because hegemonic masculinity is popularly imagined, with idealized
men appearing in media, sports, drama, film and television, and public
discourses, its reification ensures that it is, in actuality, embodied by very
few, if indeed any men. As Raewyn Connell puts it, ‘Hegemony is a
question of relations of cultural domination, not of head-counts’ (1993,
610). Clearly then, while hegemonic masculinity cannot be considered
normal because it is rarely achieved, it is certainly normative and asymp-
totically aspirational; rather than being a suggestion of how men should
act and treat other people, it functions as a regulatory dictate. Hence,
hegemonic masculinity is competitive, and, being based on a reified ideal,
remains constantly unresolved, subject to eternal self-doubt and ques-
tioning by other men. This questioning happens most of all in all-male or
homosocial settings. Within homosocial groupings of men, the subject’s
masculinity must be validated by his peers through systems of surveillance.
Men find themselves under the perpetual scrutiny of other men; ranking
each other, evaluating their counterparts’ performances of manhood, and
thus permitting, should the performances be found up to par, entrance
into the dominion of hegemonic masculinity. Men in homosocial settings
constantly check themselves, and each other: ‘Am I manly enough? Is he?’
This social dynamic thus autologously feeds into hegemonic masculini-
ty’s schema of competition, suspicion, and self-doubt. The constant need
to keep up with and then outdo other men’s performances of manhood
means that masculine peer surveillance functions as one of hegemonic
masculinity’s most powerful social tools.
Irish drama, by virtue of the Abbey National Theatre’s role in the
early twentieth-century struggle for Irish independence, has been heavily
bound up in the project of nation building and promoting the national
imaginary. However, what much scholarship has elided is that the project
of theatrically building the nation is inextricably interwoven with the
project of promulgating Irish hegemonic masculinity. Performances of
hegemonic paradigms of manhood in Irish drama, despite shifting and
changing over time, so often essentialize Irishmen as ‘sons of the nation’
or as symbolic of the state of the nation. Writing in a specifically Irish
context, Debbie Ging asserts:
gender identity and national identity are remarkably similar [.…] Through
subtle processes of symbolic and cultural reinforcement, nationality and
12 C. O’BRIEN
masculinity tend to become viewed as essential qualities […] how

masculinity and femininity are defined in a given society is central to that
society’s collective concept of self, and vice versa. (2012, 21)
Indeed, it is possible to trace a through-line of hegemonic masculinity

in modern Irish theatre using a few prominent examples: It begins with
W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s 1902 drama Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in
which the male hero abandons his bride in order to die for Ireland, moves
via Tom Murphy’s and Brian Friel’sAngry Young Men in A Whistle in
the Dark (1961) and Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), to its most
recent manifestations in Conor McPherson’s disaffected, socially disorien-
tated men who question the supposedly egalitarian nature of Irish society
from the 1990s and beyond. Falling in line with several prominent Irish
cultural institutions such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the
state-sponsored broadcaster RTÉ, the Irish political establishment, and
the Catholic Church, Irish theatre has functioned as a primary site and
conduit of hegemonic masculinity. In many ways, then, the history of
modern Irish drama can also be read as a cultural history of modern Irish
manhood.
However, the hegemonic paradigms promoted by entrenched bastions
of Irish masculinity such as the GAA and RTÉ are shifting, a phenomenon
that has not gone unnoticed by several prominent scholars of Irish culture
(Cronin 2014; Mulhall 2013; Ging and Free 2016). The place of hege-
monic masculinity in Irish social life and the cultural associations that
support it have, since the exposition of Church and Institutional abuse
scandals in the early 1990s as well as generational shifts in attitudes
towards LGBTQ sexualities and women’s rights, made decisive moves
away from traditional strangleholds of identity such as Catholic Nation-
alism and its overt homophobia and misogyny. In 2009, Dónal Óg
Cusack, a high-profile and much admired GAA hurling player, came
out publicly as gay via his autobiography Come What May. Cusack
spoke subsequently on many national media platforms about Ireland’s
entrenched architecture of homophobia and the often life-long harm
caused by homophobic bullying of young LGBTQ people while simul-
taneously raising awareness about men’s mental health. Cusack thus
prompted a shift in attitudes towards gay masculinities in Irish sporting
traditions and by extension in the culture more broadly. Furthermore,
his public coming out, I would argue, had a positive influence on the
subsequent success of the Equal Marriage referendum in 2015. The
GAA has since spoken out in support of gay players and has mounted
several campaigns to dispel homophobia from Gaelic games while also
promoting women’s GAA sports. Simultaneously, the successful passage
of the Equal Marriage referendum was overwhelmingly supported by
many heterosexual men—both ordinary citizens and public figures—who
could be considered exemplars of hegemonic masculinity. Indeed, the
Abbey Theatre hosted several events in support of a Yes vote for the Equal
Marriage referendum.
It tempting to thus argue, particularly given the success of the marriage
referendum, that Irish hegemonic masculinity has evolved to encom-
pass queerness or at least gay-identified men. In this vein, scholars such
as Eric Anderson argue for ‘inclusive masculinities’ (2009), a hybrid
model of hegemonic masculinity in which gay men allegedly function
freely and without oppression. However, for other critics, this formu-
lation is too simplistic. Scholars to date have asserted that one of
hegemonic masculinity’s defining characteristics is heterosexuality; there-
fore any social enactment of male homosexuality was considered to sit
firmly outside the boundaries of the hegemonic project. Up until the
last decade or so, this claim certainly held weight, particularly when we
consider that hegemonic masculinity—because it is an unstable, idealistic
identity with ever-shifting boundaries—has always defined itself as that
which it is not, rather than state what it is. Homosexuality, therefore, has
functioned as a key counter-identity for hegemonic masculinity.
There exists, however, a narrow, limited performance of commodi-
fied and market-driven gay masculinity which, while it cannot exactly be
considered part of hegemonic masculinity, can operate in tandem with
it. I speak here of a mode of gay lifestyle and living that theorists such as
Michael Warner, Lisa Duggan, and Gavin Brown identify as ‘homonorma-
tivity’ (1999, 2003, 2012). I would also argue moreover, that within the
realm of queer-identified masculinities, homonormativity can be concep-
tualized as the gay equivalent of hegemonic masculinity (and this is an
argument I critically unpack in fuller terms in Chapter 5). This model of
gay manhood, apart from same-sex partner, looks and acts very much like
heteronormative masculinity and is inextricably bound up in neoliberal
consumerism. Indeed, contrary to Anderson’s claims that the apparently
reduced homophobia of hegemonic masculinity has facilitated the emer-
gence of more inclusive or non-homophobic forms of manhood, several
scholars argue that Anderson’s ‘inclusive masculinities’ may be little more
than a strategy for so-called ‘progressive’ straight, white, middle-class men
14 C. O’BRIEN
to increase their economic, social, and political power (O’Neill 2015; De

Boise 2015; Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Ging 2017).
Gay masculinities we cannot therefore assume will always already be
pro-feminist or anti-patriarchal merely by virtue of same-sex coupling
or because this was once an outlawed and oppressed sexuality. Indeed,
upon closer scrutiny, it appears that hegemonic masculinity will allow gay
masculinities to operate alongside it on the provision that the common
bond is misogyny. Ging demonstrates in a 2017 study of online self-
labelling masculinities—a toxic digital space known as ‘the manosphere’—
the ways in which both gay and straight men espouse virulent misogyny in
the name of ‘men’s rights’. Indeed, as Connell and Messerschmidt remind
us:
Men can dodge among multiple meanings according to their interactional

needs. Men can adopt hegemonic masculinity when it is desirable; but the
same men can distance themselves strategically from hegemonic masculinity
at other moments. Consequently, ‘masculinity’ represents not a certain type
of man but, rather, a way that men position themselves through discursive
practices. (2005, 840)
It follows, then, that the pro-gay yet anti-feminist discourses that Ging
identifies demonstrate the ways in which Anderson’s ‘inclusive masculini-
ties’ not only exclude women but can also be explicitly invested in uniting
men—regardless of sexual orientation—in a bid to secure social privilege
over women.
Certainly the ‘straight-acting’ homonormative paradigm of gay
manhood is easily digestible to the mainstream and, in keeping with
hetero-patriarchal hegemonic masculinity, will subscribe to normative
lifestyle choices such as proclaimed monogamy, the creation of a family
with children (either through adoption or a surrogate mother), home
ownership, and the right to join the military among other things. Here,
then, is a model of gay manhood that seeks assimilation into norma-
tive structures as opposed to radical queer masculinities which look for
liberation from capitalist systems of governance and their incumbent
market-driven lifestyle paradigms. And while the assimilatory aspects of
this gay manhood are no bad things in and of themselves, they become
problematic when they become normative; by which I mean when these
cultural codes and scripts are not only popularly understood but more so
politically promulgated as the only way in which gay masculinity can and
should operate in social and theatrical time and space.
Furthermore, because this model of gay manhood is now part of
normativity, brought into being primarily through consumership and in
online spaces, it slots neatly into the already patriarchal structures of the
State and shores up the neoliberal status quo.
Moreover, as this book demonstrates throughout, while many of
these shifts in Irish hegemonic masculinity, including its tolerance of
homonormative manhood, are inherently progressive, they are nonethe-
less underwritten by political and social practices of neoliberal capitalism.
By attending to all of these recent, ostensibly progressive shifts in Irish
manhood, Acting the Man, it is hoped, augments and furthers a nascent
body of Irish cultural and queer scholarship that is now interrogating not
just how hegemonic masculinity is performed by gendered subjects oper-
ating at the top of a social hierarchy, but also the ways in which that
hegemony plays out across the bodies and lives of others, including the
theatre spectator.
3 Patriarchy and Its Dividends

On 28th October 2015, the Abbey Theatre publicized its programme of
events for the following year’s centenary celebrations of the 1916 Rising
which it called ‘Waking the Nation’. That of the ten plays programmed
only one was female-authored and a mere three to be directed by women
was, paradoxically, both shocking and unsurprising. The misogynistic
structures of the Irish theatre industry were now fully and publicly laid
bare and what had, up until that point, remained a well-known but rarely
examined problem in Ireland’s theatrical culture could no longer remain
ignored. Clearly for the Abbey, as Carole Quigleyputs it, ‘women and
their artistic work do not belong on the national stage and they do
not represent a part of the nation worth “waking”’ (2018, 85). The
Abbey’s sexist programming gave rise to an international activist move-
ment protesting the patriarchal structures and secondary status of women
in creative industries. Kickstarted on social media by Irish set-designer,
Lian Bell, and named #WakingTheFeminists by director Maeve Stone, the
hashtag went viral within days; with the irony of its shortened tag, #WTF,
(an Internet acronym for ‘what the fuck?’) serving to hammer home the
outrage, exasperation, and injustice experienced by female theatre prac-
titioners in Ireland and abroad. And while #WakingTheFeminists proved
16 C. O’BRIEN
successful in terms of forcing change in the Abbey’s programme as well as

sparking a global movement with subsequent rallies and conferences and
publications, this work is not over. As I elaborate further below, the Irish
theatre industry—both artistically and managerially—remains patriarchal
in ideologies and personnel.
In terms of patriarchy in performance, the masculine body onstage
performs within a kaleidoscope of signifiers of hegemonic masculinity—
those culturally embedded symbols of power, strength, leadership,
national protection, and control. Coupled with male-peer surveillance
and the subjugation of women, these signifiers mean that several systems
of male dominance—explicit and implicit, visible and hidden—move and
shape the lives of characters in Irish drama. As such, both the charac-
ters’ and the spectators’ investment in and journey through the worlds in
which the drama operates are shaped—and to a great degree, controlled—
by several systems of entrenched male dominance or patriarchy. Patriarchy,
then, can be understood as a set of socio-political, cultural, economic,
and religious systems, that intersect and control configurations of gender,
class, race, and sexuality, by positioning the social and cultural perfor-
mance of hegemonic masculinity as the dominant central identity from
which all other subjectivities are deemed to have deviated and to which
they are thus considered inferior. These sometimes subtle and insidious
systems, in which both women and men (often complicitly) partici-
pate, privilege the interests of hegemonic men and boys over the bodily
integrity, autonomy, civil rights, and dignity of women and girls, as well
as queer-identified subjects and non-hegemonic males.
These entrenched systems engender what Connell identifies as ‘the
patriarchal dividend’ (2005, 79). Although only a small number of men
will identify entirely with or subscribe to male dominance in society
(and over the last decade, such men tend to congregate in digital online
spaces), and while many men will actively agree with the tenets of femi-
nism, the majority of men still stand to gain from patriarchal structures.
The history of patriarchy and its perpetuation in our contemporary world
thus gives rise to structures of male privilege that go largely unquestioned
by and are often invisible to the men who stand to gain from them. That
even men who perform an ostensibly egalitarian model of masculinity
can still reap patriarchal dividends illustrates the complexity of systems
of patriarchy while simultaneously foregrounding how such systems are
bound up in intricate relations of complicity and coercion. But beyond
that, what the patriarchal dividend really highlights is that as much as
individual men (and some women) may need to examine their behaviour
and beliefs when it comes to masculinist centrality and visibility, it is the
very structures of patriarchy that need to be challenged and reformed if
society and culture are to move towards an egalitarian gender order.
With social and theatrical systems and performances of patriarchy so
deeply entrenched at all levels of Irish culture and society, and their subse-
quent dividends providing ample rewards for just being born a man,
regardless of one’s level of active participation in hegemonic paradigms,
the internalization of such systems engenders a skewed form of base
knowledge, or axiomatic epistemology, that is masculinist to its core.
This patriarchal epistemology undergirds received truths and assump-
tions, operating at the very root of society’s core beliefs. In essence,
patriarchal epistemology functions as the baseline from which all other
forms of knowing and believing spring, and, as the baseline, it goes
unquestioned. Philosophers of systems of knowledge and epistemology
identify two fundamental forms of human knowing: a priori and a posteri.
The former is knowledge that is non-empirical, acquired independently
of experience, and is arrived at ‘before the event’, indeed, brought ‘to
the event’. While the latter is knowledge garnered from experience and
evidence, knowledge gained from ‘the event’ itself. What I argue here is
that while patriarchal epistemology is popularly understood to be a priori
knowledge, it is, in fact, an a posteri system of knowing. The collective
and individual internalization of patriarchal systems and their dividends,
coupled with the performativity of social gender roles skews understand-
ings of patriarchy so that, much like gender, it appears to be a natural,
pre-cultural force emanating from the beginning of time. Yet, it is clearly
not. Systems of patriarchy and their dividends are derived from an a
posteri knowing and set of experiences that have taught men, implicitly
and explicitly, and over a long period of time, that such systems are to
their advantage.
Irish theatre is a culturally prominent economic and socio-political
structure with a meta-structural existence outside of itself not only in
media commentary, reviews, and scholarship, but also in the hearts and
minds of its audiences. Thus the Irish theatre industry operates both
within and as a sub-system of the various patriarchal systems that consti-
tute Irish society. That Irish theatre is a patriarchal entity, not just as
an industry, but more so in its creative practices and policies, is well
documented. As Eamonn Jordan puts it:
18 C. O’BRIEN
the imaginations of Irish theatre practitioners, playwrights especially, have

been seriously ideologically loaded, not only in the specific prioritization
of primarily male values, references and aspirations, and in their general
scrutiny of, and obsession with, masculinity, but also in their consistent
subjugation, marginalization and objectification of the feminine. (2007,
143)
Where female characters are given prominence in Irish theatre they have,
until very recently, generally fallen on either side of the madonna/whore
binary—either sexualized objects, or asexual maternal figures. Ubiquitous
throughout the Irish theatrical canon is the trope of Mother Ireland,
whereby women are figured as nation, as an imagined, objectified space
that might perhaps be fought and died for, but above all is romanticized
and de-humanized.
As illustrated not just by #WakingTheFeminsts but by vicious criti-
cism of the appointment of Garry Hynes as the Abbey Theatre’s most
recent female artistic director in 1991,1 the performance of patriarchy in
Irish theatre is not restricted to its stages. Patriarchy is embedded within
the industry itself, in media events, and, importantly, in the board rooms
where programming and funding decisions are made. Moreover, that
unproblematic representations of gay men did not come to prominence in
Irish playwriting largely until after the decriminalization of homosexuality
in 1993 further illustrates the national theatrical imaginary’s propensity
towards propping up the patriarchal status quo.
As my analyses of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy throughout
this book illustrate, entrenched forms of patriarchal manhood are limiting,
narrow, harmful—even dangerous—and, above all, exclusionary; not only
to women but also to men who do not meet hegemonic criteria. This is
the case whether theatre is created within the 1960s–1970s model of man
and nation, or the more recent market-driven paradigms of masculinity.
This exclusion is present not only in Irish playwriting, but also, in subtle
ways, in Irish theatre scholarship. Much drama scholarship to date (with
notable exceptions of course), has largely been uncritical of Irish male
characters as gendered subjects, and the ways in which such subjects
1 The first official female artistic director of the Abbey was Lelia Doolan, who held the
post from January 1972 to December 1973. Furthermore, it should be noted that from
1937 to 1941 the actress and director Ria Mooney held a similar post at the Abbey which
was, however, not labelled as ‘Artistic Director’.
move through theatrical and social space and time. Such criticism, while
sometimes giving passing mention to a monolithic notion of singular
‘masculinity’, parses Irishmen as being symbolic of their struggles against
Englishmen. Or Irishmen are analysed in terms of their efforts to gain
autonomy within oppressive state and religious apparatus, but seldom
discussed in terms of being hegemonic men who function at the top of
a gendered social hierarchy. Such uncritical figuring of Irishmen not only
fails to uncover or foreground challenges to hegemonic masculinity and
patriarchy in both Irish drama and society, but also renders masculinity as
unproblematic, as somehow unmarked by ideology and history.
Certainly, Acting the Man draws from and is indebted to the large
body of post-colonial criticism in Irish theatre studies. But simultane-
ously this book aims to intervene into that scholarly conversation by
interrogating not only how Irish hegemonic masculinity and systems of
patriarchy mould dramatic characterizations and theatrical performances,
but more so by asking questions about how men perceive themselves as
men and the ways in which these perceptions are performed.
4 Irish Manhood and the Market

In September 2008 global financial markets crashed—quite spectacularly.
This market meltdown brought to a sudden and unexpected halt a fifteen-
year period of unprecedented economic growth and wealth creation in
Ireland known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. The harsh effects of the crash’s
subsequent long-recession were particularly debilitating with two succes-
sive governments implementing breath-taking programmes of austerity
while seeking financial bailouts (in reality, loans with stringent condi-
tions attached) from the ‘troika’ of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Union
(EU). Recovering from the crash in typical neoliberal boom-and-bust
cycle, Ireland’s finances rebounded so well that by 2017 the economy
was again thriving with a mere 4% unemployment and an ever-rising
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which saw the nation cited as one of
the fastest growing economies in the EU (Whelan et al. 2017). However,
because the Tiger Era boom relied heavily on a construction industry
bubble, a key strategy of economic recovery undertaken by the govern-
ment was to sell distressed property at knock-down cost (Kitchin et al.
2015). These unoccupied buildings, mainly apartment complexes and
hotels, were scooped up by American venture capitalists (aka, vulture
20 C. O’BRIEN
funds), thus giving their new owners a near-monopoly over the rental
housing market. This meant, in turn, that the supply of rented accommo-
dation dwindled with many small-business landlords departing the market
due to their inability to compete with the venture capitalists. Unsurpris-
ingly, the cost of renting a home, especially in the nation’s cities, has
soared to unaffordable levels (Byrne 2020).
Both employment and the provision of home are key components
of masculine identity. Therefore, while the long-recession disrupted
the former, the rental crisis threw the latter into disarray. Unemploy-
ment, since the foundation of the State in 1922, has played a major
role in the Irish economy and has long been, therefore, a key factor
in the construction of Irish masculinities both hegemonic and other.
The housing crisis, however, has engendered a previously unexperienced
disruption to this other crucial tenet of male identity—the ability to
provide shelter for oneself and one’s family. A new model of homeless-
ness has emerged whereby ordinary families with both adults working
stable jobs on industrial-average wages cannot afford to house themselves.
Compounding this further, I write this Introduction during the current
Coronavirus pandemic which has stalled national economies on a global
scale with unemployment sharply on the rise again. Currently the world,
not just Ireland, faces an uncertain economic future.
Masculinities and money are inextricably bound together in many ways
and on many levels, not least the typical hegemonic role of male as
breadwinner and provider. Discussing Irish masculinities and the long-
recession, Diane Negra foregrounds the ‘seldom elaborated or explored
point that cultures of male entitlement and risk had much to do with
the global financial collapse’ (2014, 223). Quoting Michael Lewis’s
prescient observation that ‘Ireland’s financial collapse […] was created
by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestion that maybe they
should stop and ask for directions’ (2011), Negra notes that while other
recession-torn nations such as Iceland were quick to interrogate correla-
tions between patriarchal systems and the economic crash, ‘Ireland almost
uniquely clings to its status quo’ (223). What Negra and Lewis make
clear, then, are the complex relationships between masculinities—partic-
ularly patriarchy—and both national and global systems of capital. It
becomes apparent not only how any given economic culture and climate
shapes and shifts masculinities as they play out in many different arenas,
including drama; but also how masculinities have an overdetermined
bearing on those same economic cultures and climates.
Indeed, social and theatrical performances of Irish masculinities have

always taken their cue from the nation’s financial vicissitudes while simul-
taneously feeding back into them. Joe and Frank in On the Outside are
not only excluded from the dancehall by virtue of lacking the entrance fee,
their economic and class precarity directly caused by and dramaturgically
symbolising decades-long government policies of economic protectionism
and cultural autarky. More so, they are also positioned on the outside of,
or just before, what is known as ‘the Lemass Era’; a period of political,
economic, and theatrical upheaval that this book takes as its historical
starting point. Sean Lemass, succeeding as the fourth Taoiseach (Prime
Minister) of Ireland in 1959, implemented T. K. Whittaker’s ‘Programme
for Economic Expansion’, thus opening Ireland to global markets and
heralding a fifteen-year period of economic growth and quotidian pros-
perity. Wind forward fifty-two years to Joe in No Romance, and we are
presented with a performance of patriarchy in crisis—his crisis engendered
not only by the boom-and-bust cycles of neoliberal capitalism that put
pay to the Celtic Tiger, but more so by his own participation in it. Joe,
given his age (mid-fifties), performs a paradigm of patriarchy that histor-
ically encompasses and is inflected by the prosperity of both the Lemass
Moment and the Celtic Tiger, as well as two long-recessions that engulfed
Ireland, first from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, and again after the
global financial crash of 2008.
Joe in No Romance thus performs not just a crisis of patriarchy, but
also a crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Throughout this book I interro-
gate the complex nexus forged by social and theatrical performances of
masculinities, patriarchal structures and governance, and the cultural and
biopolitical practices of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism as it plays
out in contemporary culture is best understood as a series of economic
political practices that conceptualize unfettered and deregulated markets
as the optimum method of progressing human well-being. Thus, free
markets, free trade, and unregulated entrepreneurial freedom are not only
promoted but also shored up by structures of governance that simul-
taneously provide strong property rights. These economic institutional
frameworks should, in theory, provide the much-lauded ‘trickle down
economics’ (Harvey, 2005, 20); the assumption being that through state-
engineered mechanisms which make the wealthy even wealthier, they will
in turn become ‘job creators’. Simultaneously, citizenship morphs into
consumership as ordinary working people bolster their local economies
22 C. O’BRIEN
by spending the money they earn from the job creators. ‘Neoliberalism’,
then, as Colin Crouch states:
has many branches and brands. But behind them stands one dominant
theme: that free markets in which individuals maximise their material inter-
ests provide the best means for satisfying human aspirations, and that
markets are in particular to be preferred over states and politics, which
are at best inefficient and at worst threats to freedom. (2011, 11)
However, neoliberalism’s supposed conservative ethos is paradoxical.

At surface level it claims to provide economic liberty to corporations
and businesses which then engenders both jobs and consumer choice.
However, this is an economic practice that relies heavily—albeit quite
underhandedly—on government intervention. First, the wealth of the so-
called job creators does not trickle down because, without heavy-handed
State involvement the like of which we have yet to see, the wealthy are
free to create jobs on their own terms. Nefarious employment practices
such as zero-hours contracts, banning trade unions, denial of health and
other insurance benefits, and hiring workers as freelancers who must pay
their own taxes, are now so ordinary that they pass without comment.
Further iterating the paradoxical relationship between freedom and
government control within neoliberalism, the State must ensure a
viable currency and underwrite any failures in the banking system. The
State should also shore up the integrity and functioning of financial
markets, especially (as we saw with the 2008 financial crisis) when the
actors of those markets overextend their remit and crash the market.
Furthermore, where markets did not before exist they must be created.
Therefore, public services which were previously financed through wage-
earners’ taxes—social housing, water, education, health care, environ-
mental protection—are now brought to market. However, and herein
lies the crux of neoliberalism’s shill of ‘freedom’, beyond creating these
markets, the State should have no say in their operations.
As my elaborations above highlight, the underlying principles of
neoliberalism—entrepreneurial freedom, economic liberty, social policing,
property rights, and harsh individualism—are particularly patriarchal char-
acteristics. These characteristics, when coupled with neoliberalism’s cham-
pioning of markets and creation of hyper-consumers mean that, in its
cultural manifestations such as media events and the products stocked in
retail outlets, only the most profitable representations of gender prevail.
Masculinity and femininity have thus become narrowly commodified and

sold to the consumer under the aegis of ‘free choice’.
However, and much more insidiously, given neoliberalism’s fundamen-
tally conservative ethos coupled with its push to create markets where
none had before existed, the commodification of gender is regressive,
polarized, and relies increasingly on an overtly sexualized iconography
that objectifies femininity while glorifying overdetermined masculinity.
Furthermore, by virtue of its essentialized commodification of gender,
neoliberalism is inextricably bound up in the cultural phenomenon of
‘post-feminism’—the conservative, media-driven ‘received knowledge’
that feminism is over, its work done. Women, according to this discourse,
having now somehow and contrary to all evidence achieved equality,
should feel free to ‘empower’ themselves by embracing and purchasing
traditional modes of feminine submission.
Perhaps one of post-feminism’s most sinister cultural conduits is the
misaligned conflation of individual sexual freedom with women’s polit-
ical and social empowerment whereby women are encouraged to believe
that by making themselves sexually available to men they have somehow
improved their socio-political status. Hence, within neoliberal cultural
practices, sexism and misogyny are marketed as ‘hip’ and ‘ironic’, pushing
the idea that if feminism has indeed achieved its goals, then it is accept-
able to be sexist and misogynistic as long as it is cloaked as a jokey
guise designed to sell more gendered products. The darker side of this,
of course, is the promulgation of some very skewed notions of what
sexual consent means, with some men choosing to believe that a woman’s
refusal to participate in sex is merely a coy augmentation of her seduc-
tion. This has engendered a heightened awareness of what is commonly
known as ‘rape culture’ whereby certain factions of patriarchal men, most
commonly in the dark underbelly of the online ‘Manosphere’, promul-
gate the ‘right of men to rape women’ (Ging 2017). Galvanizing this
horrifying misogynistic culture are regressive notions of male superiority
operating alongside a skewed discourse of reified female sexuality that
‘had it coming’ or ‘was begging for it’, a discourse which is echoed in the
lenient sentencing of rapists in Ireland (Quigley 2019).
Irish theatre has responded to the political and cultural entrench-
ment of neoliberalism in several ways. In terms of dramaturgy, the
classical, three-act, realist play has been abandoned in favour of what
Patrick Lonergan identifies as the ‘reduction of the importance of spoken
language in favour of visual spectacle, the compression of action into
24 C. O’BRIEN
shorter scenes, the homogenization of setting and dialogue, and the

increasing use of monologue’ (2010, 4). Mainstream women playwrights
such as Marina Carr and Deirdre Kinahan have intervened into the
neoliberal commodification of gender with realist ‘critique-by-depiction’
narrative dramas. Queer and feminist theatre makers working primarily on
the Fringe scene have created challenges to neoliberalism, in particular
its narrow paradigms of manhood, both gay and straight, via a radi-
cally reimagined dramaturgy that questions the fixity of both masculinity
and realist theatrical form. Throughout, this book aims to unpack the
correlations and dissonances inherent in the ever-changing and yet symbi-
otic relationships between the performance of masculinities in drama
and society, and socio-economics, politics, neoliberal capitalism, and Irish
theatrical culture and history.
5 The ‘Crisis Ordinariness’

of Masculinity in Crisis
The notion of ‘masculinity in crisis’ has taken centre stage in popular
culture since the early 1990s. However, the idea that men are in crisis
is not confined to turn-of-the-millennium angst. Since the advent of
second-wave feminism in the 1960s, both popular media and gender
studies have discussed the concept of the socially displaced heterosexual
man, discursively positioned as redundant by virtue of the social, legisla-
tive, and cultural gains made by feminism and LGBTQ rights movements
as well as the incumbent changes in labour practices and family structures
engendered by these movements. As exemplified by doom-laden news-
paper articles asking if men are now ‘the second sex’, or if gender equality
signals ‘the end of men’ (Rosin 2010), this media-driven discourse exists
in a binary whereby if equality is gained by one biological sex, it must
be lost by the other. Or, as Imelda Whelehan puts it, ‘The struggle for
gender equality, rather than being pictured as a pair of scales, is more
like a see-saw: if women go up, men must hit rock bottom’ (2000, 113).
Significantly, this discourse promulgates the idea that masculinity (always
in the singular, never pluralized) is ‘in’ crisis. By these discursive terms
masculinity is not ‘having’ nor ‘going through’ a crisis, which would imply
a temporary state that will pass; nor does it ever ‘cause’ a crisis, because
that would, as I discuss below, negate the very reasons for the crisis in
the first place. Instead, the generalized and essentialized signifier of ‘mas-
culinity’, and thereby, one is to assume, every man currently alive, is ‘in’
crisis, thus denoting an urgent need to repair something that, unless fixed,
will remain in a permanent state of disarray.
Yet masculinity in crisis as a concept is rather vague, somewhat
ambiguous, and means different things to different people: critics, jour-
nalists, playwrights, online content producers, and everyday working
men alike. Importantly, it is not restricted to contemporary times or
without historical precedent. Scholars cite advances in combat technology,
originally mobilized during the First World War (1914–18), as the cata-
lyst for our modern century-long discourse of crisis-ridden manhood
(Braudy 2005). The Great War saw a seismic shift from ‘chivalrous’
modes of scheduled bayonet and shotgun combat, to the machine-driven,
perpetual stalemate of industrialized trench warfare from which hand-
to-hand fighting was significantly absent. Coupled with the increasingly
active roles on the home- and battle-fronts that women played in the
Great War, as well as the parallel rise and success of the Suffragette move-
ment, several bastions of manliness—combat, national protection, and
franchise—were challenged and disrupted, thus triggering modernity’s
crisis of masculinity.
Historically in Ireland, colonization is understood to have thrown Irish
manhood into crisis; as Gerardine Meaney puts it, ‘a history of colo-
nization is a history of feminisation’ (1991, 6). Colonial empires cast
traditionally feminine characteristics on those nations they rule: colonized
populations are discursively promulgated as helpless, meek, in need of
leadership and direction, overly romantic, and ruled by their passions. In
modern Irish drama one can identify overdetermined tropes of resistance
to such feminization of Irish manhood; from the revival dramas of Yeats
in which he drew his male characters from ancient heroes of Celtic myth
such as Cuchulainn, through Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan’s early
and mid-twentieth-century freedom fighters and rebel heroes, onto Tom
Murphy and Brian Friel’s 1960s and 1970s anti-heroes who railed against
the feminization inherent in the dual-control of an authoritarian fledgling
State and the Catholic Church.
Since the 1990s, however, the discourse of Irish masculinity in crisis is
media-driven, ubiquitous on chat shows, reality TV, and an overtly sexual-
ized advertising culture. Furthermore, as discussed above, since the early
2010s, this discourse has moved online to social media and digital plat-
forms where self-labelling men lament the loss of their privilege while
blaming this loss on women and feminism. Most prominently before
the upsurge of social media, Irish masculinity in crisis was performed via
26 C. O’BRIEN
the conduit of the opinion columns of national newspapers. Columnists

such as Kevin Myers, David Quinn, Breda O’Brien, Patricia Casey, and
John Waters lamented the erosion of heterosexual male privilege. This
they attributed to increasing gains made by feminism and LGBTQ rights
and the subsequent dissolution of Catholic morals, while simultaneously
displaying an anti-intellectual bias by decrying any rigorous criticism as
university-bred ‘political correctness’. Waters and Myers have in recent
years stopped writing for their respective newspapers, The Irish Times and
The Irish Independent with Myers retiring his public profile. Waters, on
the other hand, has a prominent digital presence and, having aligned
himself with various far-right movements, has been vocal in his objections
to Equal Marriage rights while taking an anti-feminist position particu-
larly with regard to the repeal of the 8th amendment in 2017 which saw
abortion legalized in Ireland.
Such volatile and skewed media pieces and online discourses promote
and entrench increasingly polarized gender roles, the roots and reasoning
of which are to be found in notions of biological determinism and class
essentialism. Waters in particular authorizes much of his output with refer-
ences to the genetic destiny of ‘the deep masculine’ as promulgated by
Robert Bly’s book Iron John (1990). Bly’s premise, which draws from
Jungian ‘warrior’ archetypes, is avowedly essentialist and unashamedly
patriarchal. Criticising the ‘soft men’ who have renounced their inner
warrior by succumbing to the lure of gender equality, Bly posits that
the righting of social wrongs will occur naturally once men reclaim the
lost power that indulgence in feminine traits such as sensitivity, emotion-
ality, or indecision has usurped. Yet, Bly’s writing and the mythopoetic
men’s movement it amplified (Shiffman, 1987), indeed, the whole media
frenzy regarding crisis-ridden, middle class, heterosexual men, wilfully
avoids any critical interrogations of the social and subjective effects of
socio-economic status, poverty, ethnicity, education (or lack thereof),
and sexuality—both compulsory and counter-normative—on entrenched
paradigms of hegemonic masculinity and the men who try to live by them.
Furthermore, and highlighting not only the discursive nature of this
media-driven crisis but also its misplaced anxieties, while well-positioned
journalists and online content producers lament their perceived disso-
lution of privilege, male suicide rates in Ireland are alarmingly high,
indicating that some ordinary everyday men are experiencing crisis of
the worst sort. The National Suicide Research Foundation reports 439
male deaths by suicide in 2011, a disturbingly high prevalence rate of
19.3% per capita of 100,000 which, thankfully, had dropped to 12.1%

per capita by 2018 (the most recent available dataset). According to a
2013 government report on suicide in Irish men, ‘gender has also been
implicated […] highlight[ing] that although gender roles have shifted,
male gender roles remain more toxic and more limiting in terms of
health potential’ (Richardson et al. 2013, 37). The report further critiques
entrenched paradigms of hegemonic masculinity and concomitant male-
peer surveillance, particularly in socially deprived and rurally isolated
areas, as detrimental to young men’s emotional well-being:
it was also found that the impact of more dominant or hegemonic

masculinity constructs encouraged these men to deny their emotions, and
to feel shame if they could not live up to such ideals. In addition, it
was found that this form of masculine identification maintained a local
importance, and was upheld by other men in the area. (49)
What I want to argue, therefore, is that masculinity in crisis in Ireland

plays out on two opposing platforms or social schemas. On one hand,
there is the media- and online-driven discourse that promotes and
encourages paradigms of victimized, emotionally thwarted, misogynistic
masculinity. Counter to this, on the other hand, there is an actual lived
crisis, an epidemic of suicide, happening among primarily young working-
and under-class men and those who live in rural isolation. Finding them-
selves unable to embody the very models of hetero-patriarchal masculinity
that proponents of the discursive crisis promote, these men take their own
lives. Thus the discursive crisis of masculinity, combined with hegemonic
patriarchy, exacerbates the lived crisis.
The historical prevalence of continual masculinity in crisis, discussed
here since the early twentieth century,2 coupled with both the discur-
sive crisis and ongoing epidemic of suicide, resonates with what Lauren
Berlant calls ‘systemic crisis’ or ‘crisis ordinariness’. For Berlant, ‘crisis is
not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in
the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelm-
ing’ (2012, 10). Essentially, under the terms of crisis ordinariness, if media
and governance tell someone, or a group of people, that they are in crisis,
while concurrently shoring up both the discourse and social conditions
2 Scholars such as Claire Colebrook trace masculinity in crisis back as far as the
Enlightenment.
28 C. O’BRIEN
of crisis, then those groups and individuals will find ways of accepting,
of living through, or dying within, that crisis. Simultaneously, the elon-
gated time frame of crisis ordinariness means that those living or dying
in crisis accept it as a permanent state of being and so abandon ideas of
looking to government for assistance, and become reticent in questioning
any government actions to manage their crisis. ‘We have’, Berlant argues,
‘allowed the traumatic event to be self-evident both in its autopoesis (we
know it when we know it) and in its denial of self-mastery (we know that
we cannot possess a trauma, but are possessed by it)’ (80). The perpetual
discursive crisis coupled with high male suicide rates means, therefore,
that masculinity in crisis becomes normalized, accepted, and, crucially,
is ongoing. Yet, while Berlant finds that most individuals formulate a
‘logic of adjustment’ to crisis—‘In the impasse induced by crisis, being
treads water; mainly it does not drown’ (10)—clearly this ‘logic of adjust-
ment’ fails to manifest for those men who see suicide as their only way to
navigate that which overwhelms them.
It becomes clear, then, that several currents of power underwrite
masculinity in crisis as it plays out in cultural discourses (including the
creative industries), while media events simultaneously elide the lived
crises of marginalized men. When the creators of the discursive crisis pay
attention to the epidemic of suicide, they mobilize it to further demo-
nize feminism and gay men, and, significantly, to promulgate notions
of class essentialism. Conservative columnists, social media pundits, and
politicians call crisis on behalf of marginalized men, thus claiming to
give voice to the voiceless. And yet the register of their commentary,
citing the causes of the suicide epidemic as ‘a collapse of old authority
structures’, a lack of ‘strong father figures’, and a ‘natural’ abundance
of testosterone-fuelled aggression left unchecked, while suggesting solu-
tions such as incarceration or psychotropic medications (Gaffney 2004),
fundamentally enforces their class hegemony.
This raises questions about the patriarchal roots of any crisis that oper-
ates through discourse, as opposed to lived crises rooted in immediate
reality. Fintan Walsh interrogates the power structures at the roots of
masculinity in crisis discourses by deconstructing the very nature of crisis
itself. ‘We might infer’, Walsh asserts, ‘that there are active agents of crisis,
and agents in whose interest crisis acts. We might even deduce that crisis
somehow distributes agency’ (2010, 1). Walsh further maintains ‘that the
discourse of masculinity in crisis is itself highly performative, in a manner
that both shapes and illuminates a wide spectrum of cultural activity’ (2).
Walsh thus argues that a discursive crisis in masculinity can be understood

as a cultural performative rather than an epistemological state. Which is to
say, the crisis is brought into being by performing or doing it, or stating
that it is happening, rather than by any ontological essence of monolithic
manliness that can never—rather than does not want to—comprehend
female, LGBTQ, working-class, or ethnic demands for rights and support.
Throughout this book I map Walsh’s and Berlant’s thinking across
theatrical performances of masculinity in crisis, and thus uncover a
primary problematic of hegemonic patriarchy as it plays out in Irish
drama: Namely, the agents of masculinity in crisis (or those who call
crisis), and those who the resolution of crisis should benefit (or those
to whom the crisis should distribute agency), are one and the same;
they are, in fact, the very patriarchs who claim to be in crisis. Thus it
becomes apparent that patriarchy, as many of my analyses in the book
will illustrate, shifts from an epistemology of power into a performance of
crisis and victimhood when that power is challenged. It is not, therefore,
masculinity that is in crisis, but patriarchy. As Anthony Clare puts it, ‘It
is true that patriarchy has not been overthrown, but its justification is in
array’ (2000, 8).
Performances of masculinities in crisis are writ large across contem-
porary Irish drama. Both Joe and Frank in On the Outside, and Joe
in No Romance have reached moments of crisis primarily by virtue of
political and economic conditions beyond their control. Yet their crises
are also existential, caught up in the search for a fulfilling sense of
masculine selfhood that, by virtue of reified hegemonic models, remains
asymptotic. Importantly, as their anxieties about women, both real and
fantastical, illustrate, these are crises of stultified sexual expression, exac-
erbated by culturally constructed notions of objectified feminine sexuality.
Most crucially, all aspects of their crises are undergirded by a lack of
emotional maturity and an inability to articulate, and thus comprehend
and move beyond, the affects of their anxieties. That these performances
span the time frame of Acting the Man situates the majority of patriarchal
performances in Irish drama in crisis ordinariness. Coming from a discur-
sive site of crisis in order to call crisis and thus gain the benefits of any
resolution to the crisis, one might indeed argue that hetero-patriarchy is
always already and can only ever be in crisis.
30 C. O’BRIEN
6 Irish Masculinities Onstage

Although the majority of analyses presented in this project are of drama as
a literary genre, the book discusses, wherever possible and within context,
the onstage performance of masculinities in Irish drama and thereby
gives relevant consideration to the spectator’s reception of performed
paradigms of manhood. The spectator’s decoding of masculinities in
performance is always, to a great degree, determined by the context of the
performance. Of course, the context of any given performance is multi-
faceted, reliant on many different onstage sign systems, metatheatrical
elements, the theatre space in question, and will vary from spectator to
spectator even when they are sitting beside each other watching the same
show.
For the spectator, theatre is a ritual: tickets must be booked, paid for,
collected, friends are rallied as companions, many go for dinner before or
after a show. Interval and post-show drinks, buying a programme, even
finding a numbered, financially categorized seat in a darkened space, are
all ritualized practices. These ritualistic aspects of the theatre event mean
that spectators will invest and garner much more meaning in and from
engaging with theatrical performance than they would from, say, televi-
sion drama, or a novel that they read at home. Indeed, one can infer from
these preparatory rituals that certain degrees of meaning have already
been generated before the performance begins. Operating in tandem with
these meanings of ritual is the Irish spectator’s special relationship with
theatre. The National Theatre—the Abbey—was founded as part of and
played an instrumental role in the struggle for Irish independence from
the British Empire; hence live performance culture in Ireland has, for over
a century, been associated with metatheatrical, socially didactic purposes.
More so than in many other countries, people in Ireland pay attention
to and talk about what happens in theatre, recognising its symbolic,
metatheatrical functions.
In examining how Irish spectators decode masculinities in perfor-
mance, I bring together Laura Mulvey’s work on the masculinization
of spectatorship, and Martin Esslin’s widely acknowledged articulation
of onstage semiotics, or sign systems, as working on a tripartite level of
‘icon’, ‘index’, and ‘symbol’ (1987, 43–51). For Mulvey, within patri-
archal cultures the spectator has been traditionally conditioned to look
to male performers in order to explicate the narrative drama’s meaning
and message. Therefore, it is men in performance who produce meaning,
women are merely the ‘bearer[s] of meaning, not maker[s] of meaning’,

and thus perform within the spectatorial frame of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’
(1975, 8). For Esslin, following Charles Sanders Peirce’s late Victo-
rian work on semiotics, everything onstage, including actors, operates
at any or all of his three levels of meaning of icon, index, or symbol.
An ‘icon’—from the Greek word for picture—stands for exactly what
it is. Joe in No Romance, at an iconic level of signification, represents
Joe, a fifty-something, gone-out-of-businessman, undergoing some sort
of crisis while fighting with his wife over his mothers’ dead body in a
funeral home. An index—like an index finger—points to something else.
Thus Joe, as an indexical sign, points to broader cultural discourses of,
say, masculinity in crisis, the long-recession during which the play was
produced and how older couples dealt with it, online pornography, the
sex industry, and the disconnect between children and their parents. On a
symbolic level, however, Joe’s relationship of signification with the spec-
tator is much more abstracted, arbitrary, sophisticated, and subjective. Joe
could be symbolic, for one spectator, of their father, while for another,
he is a symbol of the ‘Fatherland’ of Ireland, and yet, for another, by
virtue of his objectification of women, he might symbolize either femi-
nism or those who mobilize against it. He could even, depending again
on any individual spectator’s experience, symbolize rape, rapists, and the
discourse of rape culture.
In decoding this polysemic kaleidoscope of meanings happening
onstage before them, the spectator will create a hierarchy of signs, the top
level of which is occupied by the actor. Discussing how the actor is the
meeting point for both spoken dialogue (haupttext ) and stage directions
(nebentext ) Elaine Aston and George Savona articulate the performer as
a ‘density of signs’ (1991, 104–105). Within this density are the meta-
textual meanings that Irish spectators bring to the theatre event, the icons,
indexes, and symbols they read from the actor in performance, and any
didactic social message they take away from the event. Thus, as Aston
and Savona put it, ‘we can refer to the performer as a locus of multiple
interconnecting sign-systems’ (105).
Bringing Mulvey and Esslin’s thinking to the notion of the actor as
a locus of interconnecting sign systems I therefore conceptualize the
performer in Irish theatre as a masculine sign system. Crucially this
happens regardless of their biological sex or the gender of the character
they are portraying. This system of masculine signification operates not
only at all three levels of Esslin’s formulation, but also in light of Mulvey’s
32 C. O’BRIEN
thinking this occurs within the dialectic of spectatorship. In terms of male

actors portraying male characters, by virtue of the performative nature
of gender no matter how much a male actor attempts to start with a
blank slate and build a character from scratch, he will always imbue the
role with some of his own psychically entrenched aspects of masculine
performativity. And as social performances of Irish masculinities shift and
evolve (or remain in stasis), this is reflected in what a male actor brings to
his performance as well as in the meanings of masculinity that the spec-
tator decodes. Moreover, as outlined above, Irish theatre is a patriarchal
system—not only in playwriting and practice, but also as an industry that
functions as part of a larger web of the many systems of patriarchy that
constitute Ireland, both North and South. What I argue here, then, is that
the internalization of multitudinous patriarchal systems—State, nation,
family, media, institutional—incites the spectator into decoding the actor
as a masculine sign system, as a bearer of masculine meaning and narra-
tive. For female actors, (and this explored in Chapter 4) by virtue of
performing onstage in a patriarchal theatre system—itself a sub-system
of patriarchal socio-political structures—signs and symbols of hegemonic
patriarchy will operate on and through their performing bodies, while
simultaneously the spectator will decode them as the bearers of mascu-
line meaning and narrative. Thus the female actor operates as a masculine
sign system on the level of icon, index, and symbol: at once an icon of a
character who must interact with and be controlled by men, as an index
of a female actress working within a patriarchal theatre system, and as a
symbol of women in Ireland dominated by men in the everyday, and at
institutional and State levels.
My above conceptualizations of the semiotics of masculinities in
performance need further unpacking in terms of genre and dramaturgy,
particularly when, as has been the case over the last two decades in
Ireland, theatre makers break away from the dramatic form of narra-
tive realism. Narrative dramatic realism that tells a complete story with a
cathartic ending is not only deeply entrenched in Irish theatrical culture,
it is also the genre for which Irish drama is globally renowned. This
millennia-old tradition and love of storytelling imbricates across all of
Irish culture and society, not just in drama, but also in song, folklore,
literature, and painting; it is, indeed, part of everyday life and is often
mobilized to political aims. For example, storytelling was employed to
great effect during the campaign for marriage equality whereby many pro-
marriage campaigners—both ordinary citizens and public figures, with
some coming out as gay or lesbian for the first time—disclosed their life-
narratives, performing testimonials of lives marked, sometimes ruined by
homophobic attitudes and violence. And while two of these coming out
narratives, that of then-Minister for Health, Leo Varadker and prominent
political journalist, Ursula Halligan, received huge media coverage; it was
the life stories of ordinary LGBTQ citizens, performed on social media
and, importantly, on strangers’ doorsteps on the campaign trail, that
moved many hearts and minds towards voting Yes for Equal Marriage.
Likewise, it was the stories of women who spoke out about their lonely
journeys overseas to obtain abortions—particularly in cases of fatal foetal
abnormality—that swayed many Irish people who previously identified as
‘pro-life’ towards voting Yes to repeal the 8th Amendment.
And yet narrative dramatic realism is not without its constraints. The
‘critique-by-depiction’ model of dramatic realism can only ever tell a story
from the point of view of the characters on stage, while the need for
cathartic resolution can create binaries of characterizations with good
versus bad sometimes so sharply delineated that there is little room for
psychological nuance or development. More importantly, in terms of
theatrical representation of those whose lives have been marginalized or
silenced by hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy, particularly women and
queer subjects, narrative realism carries an overarching assumption that
such lives are easily represented and can fit neatly into the categoriza-
tions and compartments demanded by both the genre and patriarchal
culture. We can infer then, that narrative dramatic realism is, at its essence,
a masculinist theatrical genre. Given, as I argue above, that the actor
is decoded as a masculine sign system, and that Ireland is a patriarchal
society, then we can surmise that as a socio-normative theatrical genre,
narrative dramatic realism will, to a large degree, shore up the patriar-
chal status quo. Unless as we see with female dramatists such as Marina
Carr, and with Nancy Harris’ characterization of Joe in No Romance, the
playwright in question is making deliberate interventions into patriarchy.
Above all, what narrative dramatic realism does not always reveal with any
great ease are the social and cultural structures that subtend and support
patriarchal systems—both socially and in the theatre industry. Little
surprise, then, that Irish feminist and queer theatre makers have sought
out new modes of dramaturgical representation that expose those very
structures by veering towards postmodern or ‘postdramatic’ theatrical
forms. However, when performed and written in an Irish context, these
34 C. O’BRIEN
new dramaturgical structures and forms do not fall in line fully with post-
dramatic paradigms, which leads me to postulate them as being ‘queer
dramaturgy’, which I explicate below.
Postdramatic theatre, as Hans-Thies Lehmann intellectualizes it in his
eponymous landmark book, is both a term that signals a fundamental
shift in the ways in which contemporary theatre is structured and staged,
and also a genre of radical, postmodern theatrical performance. Postdra-
matic theatre, the origins of which Lehmann locates in the 1960s with
other critics (myself included) understanding the genre as stemming from
Bertolt Brecht’s Epic theatre, signals a move away from the narrative
dramatic text as the most central and important element of the theatre
event. Thus the play text, and with it the central premises of Aristotelian
narrative drama—those unities of time, place, and action—are no longer
prioritized but rather understood ‘only as one element, one layer, or as a
“material” of the scenic creation, not as its master’ (2006, 17). Postdra-
matic theatre is a theatre makers’ theatre (rather than a writer’s theatre),
one that disavows the rules of naturalism and social realism, and mobi-
lizes strategies above and beyond narrative: theatre no longer has to tell
a story with fictional characters moving through what Lehmann calls the
‘fictive cosmos’ of linear time and narrative from beginning to middle to
end. The age-old elements of drama—situation, conflict, exposition, and
resolution—are eschewed in favour of a non-linear, fragmented, polysemic
performative experience that amplifies other, previously less-noticed, more
sensory elements of theatre, such as lighting and sound, even smell and
touch. At its heart, postdramatic theatre is anti-narrative, or, at least, anti-
linear narrative; and it follows then that if narrative is de-centralized, so
too is characterization. An actor can move fluidly from being a central
protagonist to being a face in a crowd, with actors-as-commentators
being a common strategy, as is the tactic of actors embodying popular
media personality tropes such as the television presenter or the public
intellectual.
Certainly, while it cannot be said that Irish theatre has any strong
tradition of postdramatic performance, several theatre companies, such
as Dead Centre, Broken Horse, and Anú Productions, encompass certain
aspects or elements of the genre. And yet, much of the work of these
new century Irish theatre artists—including, Broken Talkers, THISIS-
POPBABY, as well as spoken word artists like Oisin McKenna, Veronica
Dyas, and Neil Watkins—certainly relies on a central narrative, usually
an aspect of marginalized identity politics or the State of the Nation.
What I move towards in this book, then, is a new and specifically Irish
cultural contextualization of postdramatic theatre, whereby my analyses
of radical dramaturgical strategies in Irish theatre (and this is particu-
larly evident in Chapters 5 and 6) take into account the ways in which
recent theatre makers embrace elements of the postdramatic while still
remaining cognizant of, even paying homage to, the Irish cultural tradi-
tions of narrative storytelling. This brings me to conceptualize such
radical dramaturgical strategies in an Irish context not as postdramatic
theatre, but rather as ‘queer dramaturgy’. In this sense we can under-
stand queer dramaturgical strategies in Irish theatre as not only disrupting
tropes and stereotypes of gendered identity, but also as challenging the
national narratives of patriarchy.
Whether in the context of traditional dramatic narrative or queer
dramaturgical strategies, throughout this book I interrogate the ways in
which masculinities in Irish drama do not always and solely reside in the
male body, but are woven into the performances of all the actors onstage,
thereby mapping masculinity across the dialectic of spectatorship and thus
inflecting the spectators’ reception and understanding of manhood in the
broader culture. The performances of actors, and the spectators’ reac-
tions to and decoding of masculinities, are important components of my
arguments as they chart the dominance of patriarchal hegemony and the
reification of hegemonic masculinity’s ideals. Spectatorship offers oppor-
tunities to critique the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity via peer
surveillance and violence, which means that spectators can bear critical
witness to the frustrations levelled at any character attempting to break
out of these systems by bucking hegemonic trends. But finally, Acting the
Man considers the possibilities of change signified by the challenges and
reimagined dramaturgies of feminist and queer theatre, which stands in
opposition to so many of the pillars of patriarchy, and therefore discover
new ways to act the man.
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name of it, but a traveller figured in it, who took his servant with him
to the heart of Africa. The latter, who was passionately fond of
travelling, and took an eager interest in all the doings and
adventures of explorers, made but one request, and that was to be
allowed to change his name of Joseph to that of Mohammed Ben
Abdullah. “It was more euphonious,” he said, and the audience
roared with laughter.
Well, Joseph was quite right, and if Barth had not done as he did,
the negroes and Tuaregs would never have remembered his
European name, it would never have become engraved on their
memories, it would never have been transmitted to their
descendants, and I should not have been able to solve all difficulties,
however great, and emerge safely from every situation, however
embarrassing, by the simple words “I am the son, or rather the
nephew of Abdul Kerim.”
It is impossible to admire too much the lofty, upright character of
Barth, which so impressed all with whom he came in contact on his
journey, that nearly half a century after his death the mere fact of his
having traversed a district—poor as he was, and exposed to all
manner of dangers, the friendship of Beckay his only safeguard—
should be enough to open the way for a pretended relation of his.
How few travellers could boast of having done as much, even in
modern times. Too many explorers have indeed, after forcing their
way through a country against the will of the natives, left behind
them a legacy of increased difficulty and danger to their successors.
I was very anxious to secure the services of a political agent with
a thorough knowledge of the country, and the language of the
Tuaregs. I wished to send him, if I could find him, in advance of our
party to take letters to the chiefs, or to plead our cause with them.
Acting on the advice of Hamadi, I chose a certain Sidi Hamet,
distantly connected with the Kuntas, and then employed in the
Custom House at Timbuktu, under one Said, the interpreter of the
Post-Office.
I must do this justice to Said, he yielded with anything but a good
grace to the employment of his subordinate on our service, and did
more to dissuade him than to further our wishes. We had to invoke
the aid of Commandant Rejou, and later, at Tosaye, Sidi Hamet
piteously entreated me to let him go back, and I expect Said’s
objection to his joining us had something to do with his faltering.
However, I forgive him with all my heart. Sidi Hamet was the
interpreter’s right hand, his chief source of information on every
subject, and he found it hard work to fulfil his own duties, even those
of an interpreter, without him.
On the 16th I went back to spend a day at Kabara, where I had
invited all the notables of Timbuktu to come and listen to the
wonders of the phonograph. It was an exhibition which long dwelt in
the memory of those present. Amongst the most attentive listeners
were the two sons of the chief of the Eastern Kuntas, who lives at
Mabrok. I felt sure that the rumour of the extraordinary things I had
done would precede me.
Commandant Rejou had already warned Sakhaui, or Sarrawi,
chief of the Igwadaren Aussa, the first Tuareg tribe we should meet
on our way down the river, of our approach. In the evening two
envoys from this chief arrived with a missive, which it was almost
impossible to decipher, but from which, in spite of its ludicrous
phraseology, we managed to make out two things, one being that
Sakhaui had no desire to see us, the other that he was very much
afraid of us.
We did our best to reassure and impress the messengers, and
finally succeeded in convincing them that we had no evil intentions
with regard to the Igwadaren, and armed with a fresh document from
us they set off to return to their chief.
Meanwhile Sidi Hamet, who had been well coached in what he
was to say and do, had started on his way to Aluatta, to ask him to
meet us at Kagha, a little village on the right bank about thirty-one
miles from Timbuktu. For the first time I now announced my
pretended relationship with Abdul Kerim, taking myself the Arab
name of Abd el Kader, or the servant of the Most High.
This mission with the Kuntas accomplished, Sidi Hamet was to go
to the Igwadaren of Sakhaui and wait for us.
Having settled everything to the best of our ability, visited the
boats, and repaired any little damage which had been done by the
way, we had now only to give ourselves up to the current of the river
and to the will of God.
It was not without a certain emotion that, on Wednesday, January
22, we started from Kabara, seen off by all our brother officers of the
garrison of Timbuktu, and escorted to our boats by a great crowd of
natives, who, with more or less enthusiasm, invoked the protection of
Allah on our behalf.
WE LEAVE KABARA.
As long as our boats were in sight of the station we could see

handkerchiefs and helmets waving to us in token of adieu, and when
the flag of the fort disappeared from view our hearts felt somewhat
oppressed, for we were leaving all that in our exile from France
represented our native country. Henceforth we five white men, with
our twenty-eight black followers, were thrown on our own resources,
and had to depend upon ourselves alone. How many of us would
return? How many of us were destined to sleep our last sleep
beneath the soil of Africa?
AT TIMBUKTU.
DROVE OF OXEN.
CHAPTER III
FROM TIMBUKTU TO TOSAYE
On January 22 we made a very short stage, and moored about

mid-day at Geïgelia, a little village picturesquely perched on rising
ground of a reddish hue, a little below the mouth of the stream,
which, as I have said, gives access to Day and Kabara.
We determined to spend the afternoon in making things snug.
Hitherto we had put off from day to day the task of arranging our
cabins. Now our three little craft are all the world to us, the floating
castles which must drift down with us to the sea, Inch Allah! (God
willing), as the Mussulmans say. We must shake down in them as
comfortably as possible.
I occupy the fore-cabin of the Davoust. On one side is my plank
bed, with, for mattress, the wrappings of the presents which we take
out one by one as required, replenishing them from the bales in the
hold.
On the other side is a big table, with packing cases serving as
legs. Everywhere books and instruments, an iron chest containing
the more valuable presents: caftans, velvet burnous, gold-
embroidered turbans, etc.
On the mats which cover the partitions, I have fixed the
photographs of a famous singer, purchased in the Rue de Rivoli, in a
moment of musical enthusiasm. I found them by chance at the
bottom of a trunk, into which they must have slipped when I was
leaving France. These portraits, as will be seen, played a part in the
politics of the Niger. Opposite them, an engraving of the President of
the Republic, or rather, Sultan of France, as they call him here. Nor
must the phonograph in its ingenious case be forgotten, with the
voltaic piles, Geissler’s tubes, little electric lamps, forming a fairy
crown, which is lighted on pressing a button. Such articles as have
hitherto figured in the baggage of none but the passengers of Jules
Verne.
The after-cabin is Père Hacquart’s sanctum, and also the arsenal.
The Father rests peacefully on a couch of rice and biscuit tins, with
the conventional bedding of package wrappings; on the partitions,
the ceiling, everywhere, I have fixed guns for presentation, revolvers,
etc., for exchange; a goodly number of cases of cartridges,
moreover, give this retreat the appearance of an armoury. On the
bridge, all round the machine-gun, are more cases, which serve as
benches for the oarsmen.
Our hold is a masterpiece of packing, due to Baudry’s ingenuity. I
defy the most skilful to insert as much as a needle more. On board
the Aube, the fore-cabin protects Baudry and Bluzet; there is not
much elbow-room for two, in such a confined space. The hinder one
is reserved for Taburet and his medicine chests.
The little barge Dantec, also provided with a shelter, will carry all
surplus articles. At present, until it is used as an infirmary, which I
trust may be as seldom as possible, it is the refuge of the destitute,
where Suleyman, the interpreter, and the Arab translator, Tierno
Abdulaye Dem, are quartered.
I may now describe more minutely our dusky auxiliaries. At first
there were twenty coolies, reduced to nineteen by the defection of
Matar Samba. Their head-man Digui, of whom I have spoken, will be
judged by his deeds; there is no need now to mention all the
blessings he deserves.
THE ‘AUBE’ AND HER CREW.
Suleyman Gundiamu and Tierno are the scholars of the party.

Suleyman almost speaks French, although he says la noce for un
os, cherchicane for certificat, and always translates keffir (Infidel) by
Christian. As for Tierno, he is a sly, cunning dog, of whose fidelity I
have often had my doubts: evidence is against me, however, and I
must do him the justice to say, that on all occasions he has sided
with us against his co-religionists, his compatriots, and even his
relations. Idle as a dormouse in everything but writing Arabic, but
isn’t that just what he is for? Altogether he is not a bad boy, and we
should scarcely find a better fellow amongst his people.
Our carpenter, Abdulaye, is a big Wolof, strong as Hercules,
intelligent, only idle by fits, and not very serious ones either.
“Abdulaye, something has gone wrong with your working hand!”
This is how we call him to order; if the appeal is not attended to, a
good blow follows as punishment; Abdulaye is aware of his guilt,
sets to work again, and does the tasks of four.
Abdulaye is certainly not a marabout. He is even addicted to
spirituous liquors, but he has not had many opportunities on the
journey of indulging this taste; he was, however, overcome on our
arrival at Dahomey. For six days we never set eyes on him, for he
was never sober.
My first acquaintance with Abdulaye arose from his love of the
bottle. In May 1894, when I took command of the flotilla, Abdulaye
having found the door of the store-room open, gave way to his
propensity, and I found him dead drunk beside a very respectable
number of empty bottles. The awakening was anything but pleasant,
and Abdulaye never forgets the capers he cut on that occasion.
Such is our staff, or I should rather say, these are the native officers
of our expedition. Besides this, each of us has his own servant. Mine
is Mamé, an intelligent Saracolais, who speaks Songhay, the
language of the blacks on the banks of the Niger from Jenné to
below Say. He is a very faithful and devoted lad; the point about him
is the excessive deliberation of every motion, which gives him
something of the appearance of a chameleon. Lucky fault, or rather
precious gift, which all who have been served by Sudanese will
appreciate. Thanks to it, Mamé has never broken anything of mine.
Baudry’s servant’s name is Mussa; his father is head-man of
Diamu, a village on the banks of the Senegal. He is the philosopher,
the learned man of our military establishment. He reads and writes
French pretty correctly, but his studies occupy some of the attention
due to his master. If Baudry has employed his talents as a teacher to
the full on a most willing pupil, in return his boots have seldom been
blacked—or rather greased—in the course of the voyage.
Fate decreed that Bluzet should have as servant a son of the
blacksmith of Mussa’s father. Fily is his name, and by reason of his
parentage he is the confidant and devoted slave of Mussa.
Provided he is treated firmly, Fily is an excellent servant, and a
cook of the first order (for that country, be it understood), and the
cakes we used to call his nougats aux arachides, have often been
fully appreciated at our table.
Lastly, Father Hacquart and Taburet have two boys at their
disposal, both answering to the name of Mamadu; to distinguish
them one is called Father Mamadu, the other Doctor Mamadu.
Add to these a yellow dog, Meyer by name, why so called I cannot
say, and the menagerie is complete.
We did possess two cats, one an excellent swimmer, in spite of all
preconceived notions; but these little animals, who behaved
themselves anything but decently on board, disappeared in the
course of a very few days.
In spite of his denials, I have always suspected Bluzet, a sworn
enemy of the feline race, of aiding and abetting their desertion, for
they seemed to have a special grudge against him.
I have forgotten old Abdul Dori, but he did not make a long stay
on board. I have already mentioned that I suspected him of evil
designs in taking service with us. He got me to advance him a pretty
round sum on the voyage to Massina, which he said he owed to one
of his countrymen, and desired to repay before he entered upon a
venture so full of danger. As soon as the sly rogue had gained his
end, he changed his tactics. From Sego, according to him, the
voyage would be comparatively easy. His debt paid, he attempted to
terrify my coolies, telling them the most ridiculous tales about the
ferocity of the Tuaregs, and giving the most discouraging account of
the rapids, which in the end we unfortunately found partly true.
He soon discovered he was wasting his time. My men came of
their own accord, and reported that Abdul was trying to dishearten
them. I soon made him understand I would not stand that kind of
thing. Seeing the failure of these manœuvres, and in no way anxious
to remain with us, he shammed sickness, pretending to be attacked
with dysentery. The doctor soon discovered the trick, and I told him
that, ill or well, he would have to follow me.
His plan having miscarried, he set about making himself really ill,
and lay down to sleep without any covering on the chilliest nights. At
this game, if he did not procure the dysentery of his dreams, he at
least contracted inflammation of both lungs, which developed the
very day of our departure. He remained two days longer with us;
then really seriously ill, he became delirious. Moved with pity, I
decided to send him back to Timbuktu in a canoe hired at the village
of Burrem. I don’t know what became of him, but I advise those who
may come across him hereafter, and are deceived by his honeyed
words and ways, to beware of him. As far as we are concerned, I
consider it a blessing that his cowardice overcame the desire for
doing evil. He might have proved a great source of danger,
especially at Say, his native place, where he would have aided and
abetted our enemies.
The first and most important object of the expedition was to trace
as correctly as possible the course of the river which we had to
follow. For this purpose I had observing instruments of very accurate
construction made for each barge, which would afford us the means
of making a triangulation of the river en route. Two barges were to
coast along the banks, while the third kept in the deep channel.
We tried this plan on January 23, the first day on which we
navigated an almost unknown region. It was soon found
impracticable. By evening we had gone less than four and a half
miles. At this rate, counting necessary stoppages, it would take a
year to reach the mouth of the river. We therefore adopted the
following plan: the Davoust followed the left bank; the Aube the right
one while on surveying duty, the two barges frequently taking their
places.
At the same time, Baudry on the Dantec tacked about in search of
the deep channel, taking frequent soundings. Any inaccuracies were
guarded against by taking the mean draught of the two larger
vessels, and constantly determining the position by astronomical
observations.
This system was invariably followed down to Ansongo, that is, for
the whole navigable course of the Niger. Though we did not secure
the accuracy of a regular survey, still to me it appeared quite
enough; for the first vessels that might come after us, will possess an
indication of the position of the deep channel relatively to the banks
and their configuration, the distances from one point to another, the
position of the villages, and the peculiarities of the soil, etc.
Below Ansongo, in the region of the rapids, Baudry and I had to
abandon all survey work, and devote our attention exclusively to the
boats. Bluzet completed the map, which is of no practical value, as it
is impossible to determine any navigable channel, especially for
steamers, in those dangerous rapids. The only object of its existence
is to prove that a navigable channel does not exist. So that all that
can be done is to choose the least undesirable means of access to
the Western Sudan from among the many that have been proposed.
After passing the villages of Koa, Burrem and Bori, where the
people came out in canoes with presents of goats, sheep, eggs and
poultry, we arrived abreast of Kagha, about one o’clock on the 25th.
The moment we reached the mouth of the creek which leads to it—
for the village is not on the main stream, but a little inland—we were
hailed from a canoe by a great giant with an intelligent face and
woolly hair, forming a halo round his head, which was more
picturesque than clean. He was a Kunta, knew French, had been in
the villages of Mediné and Nioro, in the French Sudan, and even
spoke a little Soninké, the maternal language of most of our coolies.
He acted as pilot for us, but, in spite of all his efforts, we could not
get up to Kagha, for there was not sufficient depth of water; so we
had to pitch our camp at the foot of a little hill covered with dwarf
palms rather more than a mile from the nearest huts.
A deputation of the Kuntas of the village soon joined us, who told
us that Sidi Hamet had arrived two days before with my letter for
Aluatta; but the latter was from home, and no one knew exactly
where to find him, nor if my missive had reached him.
In fact, fifteen days before, a band of Kel Gossi, a Tuareg tribe
whose territory is about the centre of the bend of the Niger, had
carried off a hundred head of cattle belonging to the chief of the
southern Kuntas; Aluatta had set off to overtake the raiders, and
induce them in the name of Allah and Mahomet to restore their ill-
gotten gains.
However extraordinary the following custom may appear, it is
actually prevalent in the Tuareg districts. One tribe steals from a
neighbour all or part of his herds; if the latter is not strong enough to
recover by force that which he has been deprived of, he tries
conciliation, and generally regains, if not all, at least a portion of his
chattels. This invariably occurs when the injured party is a marabout,
and be it remembered these raids do not involve war: the same Kel
Gossi will be quite prepared to come the next day to ask Aluatta to
implore for them the protection of Heaven, and to purchase
talismans from him.
Whatever the result, this troublesome episode made me fear I
should not see Aluatta. Unable to confer with him, I betook myself to
his relations and endeavoured to secure their friendship, telling them
the story of my connection with Barth, or Abdul Kerim.
This produced a marvellous change in their demeanour; reserved
before, they became most cordial. To strengthen the effect still
further I brought the phonograph into play. One of the head Kuntas
sang an Arab song in his tent. It was really the battle hymn of Hamet
Beckay, the friend of my “uncle,” and it was really something to see
the amazement of all when the instrument repeated the song. From
that time we were the best of friends. All expressed their regret that I
could not have a palaver with their chief. “Not wishing to deceive
you,” said they, “we will not promise a visit from Aluatta, but, if you
like to wait, you shall see his brother, Abiddin, who at this moment is
at Arhlal, about twelve miles away. We will send and fetch him at
once.”
The proposal pleased me too much to be refused, and the
messengers departed.
Along with our friends the Kuntas, there came a little band of
Tuareg Kel Temulai, who lived further down stream in the direction of
Ganto, who were evidently sent to give information.
They were tall, strong fellows, spare and active. As this tribe has
no camp on the banks of the river, I told them I should ascend the
creek which leads to Ganto for the purpose of seeing them. In fact, I
wished to ascertain their intentions. The Kel Temulai were one of the
two tribes which divided the dominion of the region around Timbuktu;
Kabara and the southern portion of the plain which surrounds the city
belong to them. The French drove them from it, and they fell back
towards the east, gathering round their chief Madunia, who lived
near Ganto and was more than a hundred years old.
On the next day, the 26th, a despatch actually arrived, which the
Commandant of Timbuktu had managed to send on to us by canoe.
A fortnight later we were to receive yet another at Rhergo, and our
delight may be imagined, for we had had no news from home for ten
months.
In the afternoon Abiddin arrived. Tall, strong, and well-made, he
looked anything but amiable, and was far from communicative. I
confess his first appearance struck me as anything but pleasing. He
was by no means anxious to get into our good graces, and replied
very dryly to my protestations of friendship. We talked together for
about an hour, but I failed altogether to mollify him, and I began to
despair of bringing him round.
In the evening I found out something more about him, and the
position he occupies in the country. He is older than Aluatta, but from
his very boyhood he showed such a warlike disposition, and one so
very unlike the gentle nature which is naturally expected of a
marabout, that his father named Aluatta his successor instead of
him, refusing him the baraka or paternal blessing usually bestowed
on the first-born. Does not this remind one of the story of Jacob and
Esau?
However, Abiddin did not seem to mind the elevation of his
brother to what should have been his own position as religious chief
of the Kuntas, but devoted himself gladly to the direction of the
warlike expeditions of his tribe.
He seems to excel as a leader, and the Kel Antassar, the tribe
which longest resisted French influence in the districts round
Timbuktu, knew something of his valour. At the head of a little body
of men he surprised their camp at least a hundred times, and I now
began to understand the real reason why Abiddin had treated me so
coldly; he would have liked to have been allowed to take his part in
the play now that, after what he thought our culpable inactivity of
more than a year, we had again made up our minds to act. This
would have given him a fine chance of revenging himself on his old
enemy N’Guna, the chief of the Kel Antassar. It really was a pity that
the authorities at Timbuktu had ignored the existence and the
character of such a man. If only as guides, he and his Kuntas would
have been admirable auxiliaries for us.
We concocted a diplomatic plan to win the confidence of Abiddin.
When he came to see us the next morning I dwelt much upon my
relation to Abdul Kerim, and I roused his curiosity by showing off the
phonograph. Then when his manner became a little less churlish, I
held my peace and let Father Hacquart have his turn. The father
began by taking him roundly to task in Arabic for his want of
politeness and amiability. He actually brought Abiddin to
acknowledge himself in the wrong, and ended by getting him to
promise not only to help us himself, but to give us recommendations
to his friends. In the evening he actually returned bringing us three
letters, one for Salla Uld Kara, another for a certain sheriff named
Hameit, whom we should meet beyond Al Walidj, and the third and
most important for Madidu, chief of the Awellimiden Tuaregs.
This letter for Madidu simply delighted me. I was to some extent
already acquainted with the various tribes we should have to deal
with on our way down the river. The first were the Igwadaren, divided
into two sections hostile to each other, under two chiefs, brothers,
though enemies, named Sakhaui and Sakhib. Beyond them we
should come to the Kel Es Suk, marabouts of the great Tuareg
family, a small tribe of the Tademeket Kel Burrum, to whose chief,
Yunes by name, Abiddin also gave us a letter; and beyond them, that
is to say, after passing Tosaye, we should enter the territory of the
great Awellimiden Confederation, but how far it extends I did not as
yet know.
Abiddin, who had passed a month with the chief of the
Awellimiden a year ago, could not say enough in his praise, whilst,
on the other hand, he warned us very earnestly against the small
tribes addicted to pilfering through whose districts we should have to
pass to begin with. “Madidu,” he said, “is a lion, the other chiefs are
mere jackals!”
“Madidu,” he added, “makes war, and of course the plunder he
takes in war is a lawful prize, but he would scorn to pillage peaceful
folk, such as the negro cultivators of the soil, or inoffensive
merchants with no one to fight for them, in the reckless manner of
the Kel Temulai or the Igwadaren. There is no one higher than
Madidu unless it be God.”
Of course I knew that Abiddin exaggerated, as all Orientals do,
and that much of his enthusiasm for Madidu was only cupboard love,
the result of the good cheer he had enjoyed in his camp. Still I
gathered from what he said that his chief really was somebody worth
reckoning with. Writing to the Lieutenant-Governor of the French
Sudan by the returning canoe which had brought our despatches I
said, “I am now pretty well convinced that if Madidu really wishes it
we shall pass without hindrance, but that if he opposes us we shall
have the greatest difficulty in going down the river.” This was,
however, but a façon de parler, for I was mentally resolved that, with
or without Madidu’s help and permission, we would go down the
Niger, though if he did try to prevent us, we should most likely leave
our bones in the river.
It will readily be understood how much this passage through the
Awellimiden district occupied our thoughts. It was the chief subject of
all our talks with Abiddin, and we had every reason to congratulate
ourselves on having so far won him over. But we meant to do far
more than that. He was altogether our friend now, and never left the
boat except to eat. I reminded him of the former grandeur of his race,
of Sidi Moktar and his brothers, who had acted as mediators
between the tribes of the neighbourhood, and pointed out to him that
it was the outburst of fanaticism, against which his grand-uncle had
struggled so hard, which had led to the decrease of the influence of
the Kuntas. We too, I told him, had to contend against those who
propagated the doctrines declared by Hamet Beckay to be false and
contrary to the true morality of Islam, and we had succeeded in what
that great man wished to accomplish, for we had driven back the
invading Toucouleurs.
If, I urged, we whites, who had considerable forces at our
disposal, made a firm alliance with the Kuntas, who would in their
turn place at our service all their religious influence, their ancient
power would be restored, they would be our trustworthy agents,
working loyally for the pacification of the country, which would owe to
them all the benefits of peace, for which they would never cease to
be grateful.
On the other hand, I pointed out, that if we made an alliance with
the Awellimidens, whose lands we did not in the least covet, all the
small pilfering tribes, such as the Igwadaren and the Kel Temulai,
would be compelled to cease their depredations, because all the
merchants on the river would be under the protection of the French,
or of their new friends. Placed as they would necessarily be between
us and the Awellimiden, they could not without risk of destruction, or
at least of severe reprisals, insult either of the two contracting
parties.
Abiddin seemed much taken by my arguments, which appealed
forcibly to his sympathies and intelligence. He was a decidedly
clever fellow, and I struck whilst the iron was hot, by adding that it
seemed to me that this proposal, if made to the Kunta chief, would
solve the problem of the pacification, and add immensely to the
value of the districts surrounding Timbuktu.
We should very soon relieve those under our protection from all
fear of molestation by the Tuaregs, we should promote the creation
of centres of commerce and outlets for trade, and moreover, we
should greatly reduce our expenses at Timbuktu, for our gains would
help us to pay and support the troops quartered in that town.
“It is evident,” answered Abiddin, “that if you could come to terms
with Madidu, and be really friends with him, it would be a very good
thing for us all. We shall, however, want somebody to act as go-
between, but the question is, whom could we choose.”
“Houa!” (thou), said Father Hacquart, suddenly striking into the
conversation. Abiddin started; the idea that he might go himself had
evidently not occurred to him. The father now put out all his
eloquence to persuade him, and finally won his consent.
Abiddin spent the whole of the next day with us, and asked the
doctor to give him some medical advice, for he suffered greatly from
rheumatism and cystitis. I arranged with him that we should go to
Rhergo, and there wait for news from him. If he should send us word
to go on we should know that he had already passed us, and was en
route for Madidu’s camp.
On the 29th, despairing of seeing Aluatta, who was still
negotiating with the Kel Gossi, we decided to leave Kagha, but we
had scarcely left our moorings when we were met by such a violent
wind that it was absolutely impossible to proceed, and we went to
take refuge in an opening on the left bank. It was not until after a
delay of two hours that we were at last able to go on and anchor
opposite Milali. We were asleep, when our watch aroused us with
the news that a canoe was approaching, the man in which was
shouting out something at the top of his voice. It turned out to be a
courier from Aluatta, who had at last received our despatch, and
would come the next day to Kagha, where he begged us if possible
to return.
Only too glad to hear from him at last, we went back the next day,
and about four o’clock in the afternoon Aluatta came to see us with
his retinue of followers. He was a handsome young fellow, with a
very dark skin and a most intelligent face, a gentle but rather proud
expression. He is supposed to have the gift of prophecy, and to be
able to perform miracles. It is said that he predicted the death of
Tidiani, a former chief of the Massina, a year before it took place.
Everything having already been settled with Abiddin, Aluatta had
only to ratify our agreement with his brother, and this he did readily.
Of course we showed off our phonograph and bicycle to our visitor,
and a telescope greatly aroused his admiration, because he was
able to see and recognize the people of Kagha through it. We spent
the whole January 30 with Aluatta, and then, this time in earnest, we
resumed our voyage.
INTERVIEW WITH ALUATTA.
We were dreadfully hindered by a strong contrary wind from the

east, and it was not until February 3 that we arrived at Kunta, where
we were to see the Kel Temulai.
At our approach the negroes of the village (the Tuaregs have their
encampment on the opposite side of the river some little distance
inland) at once begun carefully to sweep the bank where we should
disembark, and very soon our tent was up, our camp-stools were
beneath its shelter, and our visitors the Kel Temulai arrived, including
R’alif, the brother of R’abbas, chief of the tribe, with the two sons of
the latter and a small retinue.
The palaver was carried on under difficulties for want of some one
understanding the Ta-Masheg or the Tuareg language, and we had
to converse in Songhay, our servant Mamé acting as interpreter. This
was the first time we had seen the Tuaregs in their own land, and we
were all deeply interested in them. They are many of them very finely
built fellows, and their features, all you can see of them, for the lower
part of their faces is always obstinately hidden by the tagelmust or
veil, are of a purer Kel Temulai type than I have ever seen
elsewhere. They all wear breeches coming down to the instep, and
mantles, or as they call them bubus, of dark blue material. The more
important members of the tribe have a kind of pocket of red flannel
on their breasts. In the right hand they hold an iron spear some six
feet long, and on the left arm a dagger is kept in place by a bracelet
without causing its owner the slightest inconvenience, so that it is
always within easy reach of the hand, and can be used at a
moment’s notice. Lastly, a few of them also have a straight sword
with a cross for a hilt, reminding us of those in use in the Middle
Ages, and which is hung on the left side by a rope.
A LITTLE SLAVE GIRL OF RHERGO.

Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama Acting The Man Cormac Obrien Full Chapter

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Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama Acting The Man Cormac Obrien Full Chapter

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Masculinities and Manhood in

Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the

ISBN 978-3-030-84074-7 ISBN 978-3-030-84075-4 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

Cover credit: Fiona Morgan

While I am sure to accidentally omit some names, I endeavour here

of stand-alone thanks is Marta Cook, who provided new insights into

1 Introduction: Acting the Man 1

Introduction: Acting the Man

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

In Noel O’Donoghue’s and Tom Murphy’s 1959 play, On the Outside,

which Ireland underwent several periods of profound social, political,

Acting the Man also interrogates the contemporary notion of ‘masculinity

1 Contexts and Concepts of Masculinities

Drawing from the work of linguistics scholar, J. L. Austin, gender

As several post-colonial scholars have elaborated, when former colonies

cultural practices as a means of legitimizing and sanctioning heterosexual

masculinity tend to become viewed as essential qualities […] how

Indeed, it is possible to trace a through-line of hegemonic masculinity

to increase their economic, social, and political power (O’Neill 2015; De

Men can dodge among multiple meanings according to their interactional

3 Patriarchy and Its Dividends

successful in terms of forcing change in the Abbey’s programme as well as

the imaginations of Irish theatre practitioners, playwrights especially, have

4 Irish Manhood and the Market

Indeed, social and theatrical performances of Irish masculinities have

However, neoliberalism’s supposed conservative ethos is paradoxical.

Masculinity and femininity have thus become narrowly commodified and

shorter scenes, the homogenization of setting and dialogue, and the

5 The ‘Crisis Ordinariness’

the conduit of the opinion columns of national newspapers. Columnists

19.3% per capita of 100,000 which, thankfully, had dropped to 12.1%

it was also found that the impact of more dominant or hegemonic

What I want to argue, therefore, is that masculinity in crisis in Ireland

Walsh thus argues that a discursive crisis in masculinity can be understood

6 Irish Masculinities Onstage

women are merely the ‘bearer[s] of meaning, not maker[s] of meaning’,

thinking this occurs within the dialectic of spectatorship. In terms of male

Austin, J. L. 2010. “Performative Utterances.” In The Norton Anthology of

Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics,

As long as our boats were in sight of the station we could see

FROM TIMBUKTU TO TOSAYE

On January 22 we made a very short stage, and moored about

Suleyman Gundiamu and Tierno are the scholars of the party.

We were dreadfully hindered by a strong contrary wind from the

A LITTLE SLAVE GIRL OF RHERGO.

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