Anthony Roche

Staging the Liminal in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Dún na mBan Trí Thine (The Fort of the Fairy Women is On Fire)

Critical discussion on the place of women in Irish drama has increasingly found value in the concept of the liminal as an in-between space, as neither here nor there. The most obvious reason is that the accepted canon of Irish theatre in the past century has been virtually an all-male preserve. Even when a woman is an active (and produced) playwright, as was Lady Gregory, critics often sideline this activity in favour of her social functions — in Gregory’s case, representing her as facilitator of men’s creativity in the role of chatelaine of Coole Park and/or of producer at the Abbey Theatre. Ironically, many of those male-authored plays at the Abbey, by Synge and Yeats in particular, dramatically fore-grounded a socially marginalized woman — such as Nora Burke in Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1902). Plays like Shadow and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) pointed beyond the confines of the country cottage for a young woman oppressed by marriage to a zone of potential freedom. That space of possibility was frequently imbued with the trappings of folklore.