Fiona Charlton:

Fiona Charleton completed her Masters in Drama and Performance Studies in University College Dublin in 2015. She worked as the theatre critic for the Sunday Times (Ire) from 2015 to 2022 and lectures occasionally at University College Dublin. She has also written a chapter for the forthcoming collection on working-class women edited by Clara Mallon and Salome Paul.

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Clara Mallon:

Clara Mallon submitted her PhD on working-class theatre in September 2024 at the University of Galway. She has published with the Irish University Review and has co-edited a forthcoming collection of essays with Routledge on the topic of working-class women in Irish theatre. She lectures occasionally with the drama department at University College Dublin.

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This paper addresses the legacy of cultural imperialism and the dominant ways in which the working class and the poor have been represented in Irish theatre. Through a brief tracing of theatre produced before, during and after the Celtic Revival, this paper argues that there is a consistent lineage in how the poor and the working class have been represented. In colonial representations, specifically on the English music hall and melodramatic stage, the Irish were represented as regressive “others” associated with poverty, crime, and represented as violent, drunken, feckless, unreliable, and ignorant. As part of their project of cultural decolonisation, W.B.Yeats and Lady Gregory aimed to create drama that would subvert “buffoonery” and “easy sentiment”. However, much theatre produced during the revival period drew on, rather than resisted, such tropes and essentialisms. The work of J.M Synge and Sean O’Casey are exemplary in this regard. Though Synes’s plays centralise the poor in rural contexts and O’Casey’s the urban proletariat, their work can be seen as a reformulation of stage irishness and as part of a coherent tradition in representing the poor and working class on stage. This trend can also be observed in more recent works. The theatre of Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Sean P Summers, and Mark O’Rowe among others, often speak to how stage Irish attributes have been reformulated in contemporary representations of the rural and urban poor. Such regressive classed stereotypes act as a counterpoint to superiority, whether it be that of the coloniser, the Anglo-Irish, or contemporary middle class audiences who are permitted to relish in their distance, distinction and difference from those represented on stage. Thus, by privileging cultural tropes that cast the poor as negative and inferior, Irish theatre arguably reinforces the hegemony of the status quo.