2010s review: Writing about the art of terrible men

#MeToo is transforming theatre, and it is transforming criticism. Illustration: Don Conroy

I wanted to write an essay focusing on a major thing that happened this decade. So I ended up writing about #MeToo, the art I have unhealthy attachments to, and how that art might be useful again.


What does a male artist look like to a teenage boy? Hemingway sat at a typewriter and bled. Chekhov took medicine as his unlawful wife, and literature his mistress (when he tired of one, he spent the night with the other). Personally, I looked up to men wearing fustian fabrics, under the thrall of seductive women, and bearing their souls. I think I wanted to be W.B. Yeats. 

I used to recite He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven a lot. Around the garden I went, saying it out loud, its verse slotting into satisfying rhymes. It has electric imagery of the aurora against the atmosphere, the folding of the cosmos into bright woven fabrics. “I would spread the cloths under your feet,” says Yeats, with warm generosity. Such was the alchemy of magic and emotion I chose as my inspiration whenever I wrote my own poems and songs. (All awful).

Why was this my first writing voice? It may have been the airing of male sensitivity and emotion that attracted me. I had grown up in a patriarchal household on a family farm, living happily but looking for self-expression. Also, if you’re a teenager, and you take a risk on telling a girl you like her, your male peers usually accept you. 

It wasn’t lost on Yeats’s reading public that He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven was addressed to the suffragette and actor Maud Gonne. “I, being poor, have only my dreams,” he says. Unable to materialise the cloths of heaven, he spreads his dreams under her feet instead. It’s a humble and dazzling advance at her, while exposing the vulnerability and courage of such a move. But Maud didn’t thread softly. She married someone else. 

That rejection caused Yeats’s legend to grow, the so-called “great troubling” of his life. Meanwhile, Maud Gonne is remembered for missing her chance with a male genius. Was there something in that story I got a buzz from? Had I wanted to be brilliant, but was mostly feeling wrongly mistreated and misunderstood? I was a prudish, judgemental 16-year-old. And I was choosing sides.

In He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, Yeats presents Maud as a Belle Dame sans Merci, a seductive woman character from Romantic poetry. This character is ethereal, beautiful, absorbing, but also vampiric. So powerful is her beauty, she compels Yeats to sacrifice his dreams, to expose his heart. That makes her out to be some extortionist, taking advantage of a helpless man. But also, how flattering for him to go under that spell, to praise her. Either way, the male poet comes out a winner.

In the 2000s, W.B. Yeats was reincarnated in the form of my other favourite artist: Damien Rice. Rice was a Kildare native, and he bared his soul in ways that felt artful and raw. I even bought a brown corduroy jacket to try embody some of his nihilism. 

Rice played the part of another lovelorn poet familiar to rejection, which he forged into calamitous metaphors. He floats like a cannonball, volcanoes melt him down. At the centre of his music were plenty of Belle Dames san Merci. (Interestingly, Rice's old bandmates, Bell X1, made a conscious decision to address a lover: "You're not Maud Gonne / But then again neither was she").

During live performances of The Blower’s Daughter, Rice told a story about developing an intimate relationship with a woman over the phone. He tracked down her home address and visited her, but realised she was actually a teenage girl, using him for entertainment. “I can’t take my mind off you / ‘Till I find someone new,” he sings, with heartache, but not without scorn. 

The problem with La Belle Dame sans Merci is that it reduces women characters to objects of beauty, with a hint of dangerous exploitation. Comparatively, Fiona Apple once reflected on a relationship that crashed into heartache: “The sign said stop / But we went on wholehearted / It ended bad but I love what we started”. Lovers can conspire together, make something together, explode together. But the male pathos of La Belle Dame sans Merci has been one of the most popular emotional responses to art. We love seeing male geniuses expose the conditions of their debasement, including those created by a two-dimensionally-drawn woman.

At the beginning of the 2010s, one art form was so contained it could offer some kind of consensus, and that was television. The universal word was that the antihero was king. The Sopranos and The Wire had given way to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. There was a clear explanation of what was considered great art: the deep, dark exploration of male debasement. These shows all used novelistic realism to show their men warped by ego and vanity, reinvented and ultimately corrupted. I loved them and championed them, when I got my first professional job as a stage manager, and added a new favourite to the list: David Mamet. 

I was a latent screwball comedy fan, and a sucker for fast-paced and reference-filled dialogue (Aaron Sorkin comes from this gene pool). The play I worked on was Oleanna, which is set in a university professor’s office. John, on the verge of tenure, meets his student Carol, and they have a debate about sociology and education. I sat at the side of the rehearsal room, watching the actors’ game of verbal tennis. The wordy dialogue insists on a profound connection between characters. “We both agree to converse. In effect, we agree we are both human,” says John. 

To me, Oleanna was an idea-filled script, an artful expression of scholarly thought, the work of a man of letters. It pushed all my buttons. I was too blinded to see how its plot condescends and redirects the gender wars of the 1990s. Carol, a student struggling with her course, is written to be so sensitive, at one point John tries to reassure her by putting his hand on her shoulder. She files a complaint against him, describing the unconsented touch as sexual harassment, an accusation that the script absurdly escalates into attempted rape. 

At the end of the play, John loses his tenure and his marriage due to the accusation against him. He savagely beats Carol, and only stops when he realises the consequence of his actions. “Yes … that’s right,” says Carol with triumph, like a siren luring an innocent man to danger.

No one on the production seemed aware that Oleanna was Mamet’s response to the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, when Anita Hill accused the U.S. judge of sexual harassment. Mamet’s take on the case seemed to be the ruinous power of accusation: how a claim can be extrapolated, intensified to new extremes, and, when disguised as truth, tear a good innocent man down. But Mamet’s interpretation portrays the accuser as another extortionist, not someone struggling with trauma. I remember the actor played Carol as cagey and oblique, as if these were the only deliveries available. Her backstory is not nearly as detailed as her adversary’s. One rare insight into her personal life comes near the end, when she tells John she’s supported by “her group,” as if alluding to some dangerous feminist mob.

The production of Oleanna had to be cancelled due to a cast member’s illness. But something else came out of the experience. At the same time, the Gate Theatre was producing another Mamet play, Boston Marriage. Interested in the playwright’s other work, I boarded a bus from Galway to Dublin, and stepped inside the Gate for the first time. 

Boston Marriage was as textbook an introduction to Michael Colgan’s Gate aesthetics as you could find. The Victorian-era drawing room was designed by Eileen Diss, the theatre’s set specialist for period plays. Joan O’Clery’s costuming was an attractive gallery of robes and headpieces. It had Fiona Bell, one of the management’s favourite actors, giving the funniest performance I’ve seen her give. The only out-of-place detail was that it was given to Aoife Spillane-Hinks to direct. Between 2010 and the end of Colgan’s administration in 2017, only one other production would be directed by women, Annabelle Comyn’s terrific The Vortex.

The plot of Boston Marriage is inspired by Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. In James’s story, a man and a woman find themselves attracted to a feminist campaigner, and compete for her affections. But the love triangle in Mamet’s play is different. Instead, it is two adult women conspiring to seduce Catherine, a maid. The feminist campaigner is replaced by a servant. That move is even more conspicuous when you consider the cynicism of the project. Mamet wrote this comedy after getting pushback about the lack of female representation in his plays. 

Mamet’s plot here also seems to repress something darker. The object of desire is Catherine, underage and still a child, in a play rife with innuendo, where she says things like: “I was admiring your muff earlier, when your parts came”. Yet, it’s easy to watch Boston Marriage and not perceive any kind of darkness or threat. It’s as if Mamet uses a type of femininity - which is lesbian, eccentric and spiritual - to broach a taboo and play around with it. But I gave the production a positive review. 

When I was nodding along to the orotund dialogue in Oleanna, I wonder why I missed a depiction of harassment that I would now abhor. I considered myself a feminist, but the homework I was given wasn’t up to scratch. The most contemporary text in my college feminism class was The Second Sex, and I was still in the second wave. Simone de Beauvoir’s suggestion of women transforming society through their careers and intellectual pursuits seemed, to me, the most useful feminism. It was an attractive, white, middle-class, Marxist vision, with no comprehension of sexual violence as an epidemic. But I was also 21, and patriarchal society had its claws in my mind in ways that I couldn’t yet imagine. I was gay, and I couldn’t come out yet. 

When Mark O’Halloran introduced his film Viva at a screening in the Irish Film Institute, he talked about homophobia and misogyny, saying that what both have in common is “a contempt for the feminine”. When I see this behaviour now, I know it is the enemy. It had subtly shaped my life and shut me down for years. So why had I chosen theatre as my art form when so many plays are fuelled by the stuff? 

Since the Michael Colgan accusations, I have been reflecting on my own taste. Earlier this year, David Mamet’s new play Bitter Wheat opened in London. It follows a Harvey Weinstein-type harasser who, in a surprise twist, becomes a pro-immigrant ally, in other words a baiting picture of American liberalism. It was time for me to jump ship.

In the weeks after #MeToo, the feminist critic Laurie Stone wrote on her Facebook page: “Until five minutes ago, everyone thought women were debasing themselves when they exposed the conditions of their debasement”. Great art had seemed to be the distance by which the conditions of men’s debasement is exposed. Women’s debasement in art has a universe of voices. (Back in 1991, Joni Mitchell released a song about a friend hiding in a tunnel from her sexually abusive father). But I didn’t register this art in the same way. 

Stone’s comment sent me flicking back through several plays, including one from 2011, a docudrama by two women from Wicklow, Sinéad O’Loughlin and Katie Holmes. Their play, a rebuttal to that ludicrous term “soft feminism,” was titled Amy, I Want to Make You Hard. 

At the beginning of the decade, “Feminist” had yet to become a self-descriptor on millions of Twitter accounts, and, in my experience, it was still a difficult thing to say out loud. To be a feminist was to be perceived as an overly serious moralist policing people’s behaviour. In the 2000s, newspapers and magazines had ran stories on WAGs (Wives and Girlfriends of high-profile sportspeople) and how they had killed feminism. When I interviewed O’Loughlin before the opening of Amy, I Want to Make You Hard, she said this kind of journalism inspired her and Holmes to write their play. 

Amy, I Want to Make You Hard began with a shot of vodka, handed to each of us as we entered the Back Loft studio. It burningly when down my throat, and I braced for some difficult truths. Surprisingly, it was a sweet and, for the most part, uplifting play. I watched O’Loughlin and Holmes wittily trace the sexist evils of body image and bad boyfriends and fold these experiences within the story of their close friendship. 

But the play had one scene that was tonally different. It was stylised and dark, like a inner trauma finding visual expression. O’Loughlin sat in front of a basin of water, made sparkling blue by the stage lighting, and told the story of being cornered by a guest in her family home. Details of the violent experience came in a stream-of-consciousness rush until she dunked her face into the water. Holmes sympathetically handed her a towel. The memory couldn’t be washed away fast enough. 

I had no idea in 2011 how toxic the culture was, how desperate it needed to be cleansed. It occurred to me only recently that Amy, I Want to Make You Hard was trying to put shape on the abusive behaviours, normalised and widespread, that we’re currently trying to address. But the play was coincidental for another reason. I think it was around that time that Holmes started working at the Gate Theatre. In 2017 she was one of seven women who told the Irish Times about being harassed and bullied by Colgan.

***

In March 2018, an independent report by the Workplace Relations Commission found that Michael Colgan has “a case to answer”. The report, contributed to by 56 people, stated that Colgan’s behaviour as artistic director of the Gate Theatre included creating excuses for physical contact with staff, making comments of a sexual nature, using profane language and calling women c**ts. Colgan denied this summary of his behaviour. 

#MeToo had been exposing chunks of art industries built up on abuse and harassment. Grace Dyas published her blog post accusing Colgan of using inappropriate language against her on the launch night of the Dublin Theatre Festival, and I was astonished. I had convinced myself he had ridden into the sunset of retirement, unbothered and untroubled. 

But the stories continued to flow in, a new horror scene each day. Ciara Elizabeth Smyth said Colgan hit her when she worked as company manager on the U.S. tour of The Importance of Being Earnest in 2016. Ella Clarke said he groped her when working as choreographer on Sweeney Todd in 2007. According to Annette Clancy he was abusive as far back as the early 1990s, when, during a job interview, Colgan asked her to give him a massage. There are more stories.

It seemed indulgent to talk about art then. People were risking job security and libel to talk about their suffering. It was more appropriate to listen. But two years later, a question for art criticism hasn’t gone away, one that can’t be answered purely on aesthetic terms, but also requires some ethical thinking: what do we do with the art of terrible men?

Until now, it seemed healthy - to some extent - to separate the art from the artist. In 1964, the literary critic Roland Barthes was attacked by the French press. His new book On Racine had used Jean Racine, one of France’s most important 17th century playwrights, to demonstrate a new theory: a work of art is anachronistic, and floats free of the age it was created in.

It was an idea that disrupted the dominant practice in art criticism of tying the art to the artist’s life. Macbeth, for instance, was often put into context by critics drawing on Shakespeare’s relationship with his patron King James I. Barthes was suggesting a kind of criticism that wasn’t historically reconstructing the artist’s intentions: “Let us test on Racine, by virtue of his very silence, all the languages our century suggests”. 

The idea wasn’t well received by theatre historians. Raymond Picard, a Racine scholar at the Sorbonne, wrote a few popular articles responding to On Racine. He argued that Barthes’s theory reduces characters and events to psychological analysis, and ignores the literal meaning and historical events of Racine’s plays. Several newspapers allied themselves with the Sorbonne professor, describing Barthes’s argument as “intellectual swindle” and “verbal delirium”. 

Barthes was no showman. Public confrontation caused him immense anxiety. But the attacks against his theory emboldened him to write several essays in the following years that created a new criticism, principles which have been adapted by much contemporary criticism. The feud with Picard spread Barthes’s name outside France, just in time for him to publish his most influential work, “Death of the Author”. 

This famous essay - still prescribed to theatre studies students - separated the art from the artist. It argued that the meaning of a work is not determined by the artist’s intentions, but by the impressions that the audience create for themselves. “A text consists of multiple writings […] there is one place where that multiplicity is collected, united, and that place is not the author but the reader,” he wrote. 

The idea of separating the art and the artist transformed criticism in the 1960s. In film, the New Wave had led to the “auteur theory,” which judged films on the basis of whether or not directors succeeded in making their personality known through their distinctive visual style and treatment of themes. Among those unconvinced was the film critic Pauline Kael, who saw the opportunity to write a broadside against the theory. In her essay “Circles and Squares,” she urged critics to dismiss famous directors’ personalities, and judge their films fairly against newer directors’ films. (“The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?”). 

Though not all critics prescribed to “Death of the Author,” they may have enjoyed the freedom of having it as an option. But as #MeToo transforms art, it’s also presenting art criticism with its most significant transformation since the 1960s - the fusing back together of the art and the artist in ways that are impossible to look away from. Many critics have voiced this for years - in discussions of Woody Allen, for instance, and how Dylan Farrow’s accusation against him informs readings of his films. This once seemed like a fringe idea, but now it’s the mainstream.

I was still trying to hold onto “Death of the Author” as reports came in of the Gate Theatre’s bleak work culture. I compartmentalised those stories of harassment and held the theatre’s plays somewhere else in my mind. But the landscape I spent so many years working to survey, to learn its history of productions and companies, was crumbling. As one of only two full-time production houses in the country, the Gate occupied such a huge part of it. And now the Taoiseach was on the news, encouraging people who were abused there to come forward. 

Separating the art and the artist is now a form of hubris for critics. Even if I were to keep my focus on the art, and try to look at the Gate’s plays on their own, it’s impossible to ignore the collaboration involved in the medium. Though Colgan almost never directed plays, he authored productions in a way by agreeing to programme them, and in hiring personnel that shaped them. He also had a house policy, which Ella Clarke describes in her story, of leading the company in a notes session after every preview performance. This makes it impossible to know who authored what decision. 

Was it Colgan who decided on the crackle of the camera flashes in The Vortex, or to have Romeo excitedly join us in the stalls to watch the balcony scene, or the moments to play up Blanche’s repulsion of Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire? The entire back catalogue seems corrupted by him.

What should critics do with art that is potentially fuelled by misogyny? The television critic Emily Nussbaum asks this question in her magnificent essay “Confessions of a Human Shield.” Starving the system by refusing to give your money to those artists could be one response. But it’s possible that even in the most technically insightful criticism of a bad man’s art, there is a danger of complicity. There is a risk that criticism could elevate his legend to a height where it overshadows his victims. 

“Giving someone attention is also a type of currency,” says Nussbaum. Writing an analysis of a harasser’s art could burnish their reputation, turning the critic into their human shield. 

But Nussbaum also points out that the idea of critics acting like they’ve never seen the art of terrible men is absurd. To erase the 34 years of the Colgan administration at the Gate Theatre would erase its importance in being the country’s centre for mid-century American drama, drawing room comedies, the final works of Brian Friel, adaptations of novels and screenplays, and significant productions of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. That history is also central to understanding how the Gate makes theatre today. Recent productions like Beckett’s Room and A Christmas Carol are informed by past programmes, and update established franchises for the theatre’s contemporary audience.

We appreciate art for its emotional power, but art is more mysterious and complex than the people who make it. To turn away from the art of a terrible man might be a means to punish him, but that’s not to say that their art isn’t still useful. In her terrific essay “Listen Up: Was it Good For You?”, the writer Laurie Stone writes: “If you continue to engage with the work of an artist who has done bad things, what you have learned will produce a new reading of their work. It has to”. Maybe this isn’t art to ignore, but to confront head on. 

“Death of the Author” only ever existed in theory. Who tells what story, and what their background is, does matter to audiences. Audience interactions with artists are influential in the reading of texts. In her enjoyable video essay “Death of the Author,” Lindsay Ellis gives the example of when JK Rowling told a roomful of people that she imagined Dumbledore to be gay. This isn’t explicit in the Harry Potter books, yet the post-scriptural footnote likely influences many readings. 

I went looking for details about Barthes’s life that might explain why he created a theory that was democratic in its intention, and placed more meaning in the audience’s experience of art. Tiphaine Samoyault’s 2015 biography sheds light on his life as a gay man, closeted to his mother, the most important person in his life. It shows his growing friendship with the feminist scholar Julia Kristeva. The biography is also a depiction of bitter isolation. 

At the age of 27, Barthes was torn from his life in Paris, where he was working as a teacher, and had to be admitted to a sanatorium for tuberculosis treatment. He spent five years, through multiple painful relapses, shunted between different sanatoriums in France and Switzerland, often in remote mountainous locations. He spent one entire year on doctor’s instruction not to speak at all.

Barthes knew what it was like to live on the precipice, to look out onto a world where his sexuality and his sickness made him different. When he became active as a theatre critic in the 1950s, it’s telling that he gave most praise to Bertolt Brecht’s plays, and their steeply angled critiques of society. Essays in the 1960s like “Death of the Author” bear a fascination with the potential of criticism, of its change and renewal. I think Barthes wanted to escape the history of art because it wasn’t a history written for someone like him. He wanted to make the art he loved feel like it belonged to him. 

***

In 1982, the new theatre publication Theatre Ireland published an interview with Michael Colgan, who was Programme Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival.  The interview is a portrait of corporate success. Colgan opens a box of cigars and “smoothly” lights one, before speaking openly and acerbically about the festival’s negotiations with the Arts Council. The illustrator Don Conroy (who I watched on TV in the 1990s, teaching children how to draw wild animals) interpreted the interview in a cartoon, depicting Colgan as Atlas, straining to shoulder a globe with “IRISH THEATRE” labelled on it. 

Atlas was condemned to hold up the heavens, and Colgan’s self-image in interviews often had themes of burnout and sacrifice, filling a vacuum in Irish theatre that only he could fill. This narrative was enacted again the following year, when he attended a party hosted by the broadcaster Mike Murphy. There, Colgan met the architect Michael Scott, who was head of the Gate Theatre’s board. Hilton Edwards had recently died, and the Gate agreed a plan with the Arts Council to appoint four directors (Garry Hynes, Patrick Mason, Sean McCarthy and Pat Laffan) to programme three months each a year. 

Colgan convinced Scott that the plan was nonsensical, and that the job of programming will eventually fall on just one coordinator. That night, Scott offered Colgan just that, a role as “coordinator” of the Gate. Colgan counter-offered with a royal flush: artistic director, managing director, company secretary and a member of the board. The men made deals behind closed doors. A theatre’s fate was decided. 

Patriarchal society has long undermined, trivialised and even muted art. According to Waking The Feminists’ path-finding report Gender Counts, Colgan programmed only three plays authored by women between 2005-2015: Anna Karenina, God of Carnage, and Wuthering Heights. Stories written by women, exposing the conditions of their debasement, were shut out. 

But all the programmed plays written by men weren’t entirely populated by male characters, nor where they solely preoccupied with men’s lives. I counted 51 plays programmed by Colgan between 2010 and 2017, and 23 of these had women protagonists, from the scholars of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia to Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney, Blanche Dubois to Juno, Shakespeare’s Juliet to Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Something close to a kind of parity forms (keeping in mind these were women characters written by men, roles for female actors directed by men): 45% of the programming was made up of plays about women’s lives, struggles and concerns. 

From the outside looking in, that doesn’t look like a misogynistic theatre. Something like Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies revues from the early 20th century, with licentious scenes undressing showgirl after showgirl, would be a more obvious offender. But any Gate play I saw rarely stripped women to their skin. They costumed women from the ground up to their necks.

Colgan once said in an Irish Independent interview: "What attracts me is women who are smart. There is nothing more sexy than an attractive woman concentrating on something." Could this emphasis on intelligence, sharp-wittedness and sophistication - as opposed to physical appearance, seductiveness and sensuality - be something more than benign? 

A chunk of those plays with women protagonists were adaptations of novels: Jane Eyre, Little Women, My Cousin Rachel, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and The Heiress. All of these productions covered women’s bodies in attractive voluminous frocks, accentuating not their bodies but their speech, their cunning, and, seemingly, their independence.

These are old battles. They can be traced to A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft’s 18th century piece of proto-feminist philosophy. Wuthering Heights dramatized Cathy’s agonised choice of values in a husband, and her choice of values in a sovereign state. Pride and Prejudice followed Elizabeth Bennett, literate and educated, learning from her mistakes and improving by them. In The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James’s novella Washington Square, a young woman with a good fortune exposes a deceitful suitor and avoids a disastrous marriage. They all display independence, but they also accept the conditions of their dependence.

These are nostalgic and classic struggles. But if treated as the extent of women’s debasement, they’re stagnating, and eventually corrosive. The glossy packaging of 18th century proto-feminist ideas into adaptations of 19th and 20th century novels may resemble a kind of service, but it’s also a dangerous symbol of effort. The good work of feminism is being done, but it’s a feminism frozen in stasis. It’s an old reassuring feminism that blots out the unsettling concerns of contemporary feminism. One feminism pitted against another.

Colgan’s programming belied a kind of nervousness about women and their modernity. It’s interesting to look back at Daphne de Maurier’s mystery-romance My Cousin Rachel, seen at the Gate in 2012. In de Maurier’s story, the heir of a country estate suspects his cousin Rachel (Hannah Yelland) of annihilating her previous lover. He suspects that she spent all his money, cheated on him, and poisoned him to death. In short, Rachel becomes an uncanny embodiment of male fear and anxiety. 

Looking back, My Cousin Rachel made the mask slip a little. Yelland’s performance hovered between reality and somewhere otherworldly, exposing a male nervousness that not only defined the plot’s male characters, but, in retrospect, the theatre’s management. 

These plays attracted good houses, and some of them returned for second runs. But there was a sense that the spell was broken with a revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1926 play The Constant Wife, which the Gate chose as its first costume drama after Waking The Feminists. At the centre of Maugham’s comedy is Constance, a formidable woman who surprisingly decides to help conceal her husband’s affair. The ambition of the Gate’s production seemed to be to pass it off as another proto-feminist play. 

Peter Crawley panned it as “superficially attractive, insincere and passionless” in the Irish Times. Director Alan Stanford’s production seemed to treat its performers of lesser importance than their costumes, which floated through Eileen Diss’s tasteful but inert drawing room set. Crawley wrote insightfully about the production: “It’s hard to tell if [Constance] is now brought back to us as an icon of radical feminism or a smirking parody of it.” This too seemed to be the ambivalence of Colgan’s programming. 

That smirk soon widened into a laugh. Back in 1985, Colgan’s fabled visit to Samuel Beckett in Paris had forged a commitment to staging all his plays, a commitment that finally came full circle in 2016. The last instalment in the Gate’s Beckett franchise was an adaptation of the short story First Love, which actually debuted in 2007 - a starry production with Ralph Fiennes - and toured to Sydney and New York. It finally received a Dublin run in 2016, swapping out Fiennes for Barry McGovern.

First Love was a rare production directed by Colgan himself. The story follows a man who makes a daily pilgrimage to a canal bench, where he meets a woman and eventually marries her. It’s a Beckettian love story as you’d expect: inconvenient, scatological, and framed by the agonising routines of life. 

In one notable moment, McGovern’s man, irritated by the amount of room the woman takes up on the bench, wryly faced the audience: “The mistake one makes is to speak to people”. 

It was a funny line, one that established Colgan’s tone for the production as dryly comic, gossipy and brash. But Beckett’s prose is audacious to the point of being easily overbearing. On the bench, the woman invites the man to put his feet up on her knees. “Under my miserable calves I felt her fat thighs. She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the c**t,” he says. 

An absurdist staging might have delivered this from more oblique, questioning angles. But Colgan’s production was so deadpan, it didn’t readjust that vulgarity at a slant. It just mocked the woman in Beckett’s story over and over, as if the cruelty she suffers were fuel for comedy. When alone in a bedroom, the man character suggests that she’s desperate to have sex: “at their wit’s end [women] undress, no doubt the wisest course”. He observes her removing her clothes with the “slowness fit to enflame an elephant”. She later shows him her pregnant abdomen, and he suggests “perhaps it’s just wind,” before blurting out that she should get an abortion. 

It was unsettling to see Colgan’s production lean so harshly into these details, treating them like zingers from a stand-up comedy routine by a curmudgeon who's convinced he's likeable. The Gate’s Beckett franchise, once viewed as artful and philosophical, had cooled into something uncurbed and bitter. 

Long before #MeToo, Colgan hired Selina Cartmell to direct a production of another Beckett play, Catastrophe. It’s an absurdist drama about the power struggle between a theatre director and his female assistant. 

At the beginning, the assistant has positioned a performer on a raised platform agreeable to the audience’s sightlines. She has put him in costume that makes the performer comfortable. The director, sitting in an armchair with a cigar, then gives notes, and eventually wrests her vision from her. 

The director impatiently instructs the assistant to strip the actor’s costume to expose his legs and neck. The actor starts to shiver. “Could do with more nudity,” the director says. 

He tells the assistant to bow the actor’s face downwards so the audience can’t see his face. 

The director’s vision for the performance, unbuttoning the actor’s pyjamas and pushing his face downwards, begins to feel like something savage. “What if we were to show his face just an instant?” suggests the assistant. “Raise his head? For God’s sake!” says the director. 

According to an Irish Times interview, Cartmell approached Colgan to play the part of the director. (“He has the cigar,” she said). The idea had some logic: Colgan wasn’t an actor but he was a showman.  He definitely enjoyed an audience. But in the end, he turned down the suggestion, and Owen Roe played the role instead. 

I wonder if Cartmell was envisioning art that would imitate life. Last year, she reflected on her freelance work at the Gate: "I just felt uncomfortable. There was enough for me to feel that this isn’t a healthy creative environment to work in".

Did Colgan consider the idea of playing a theatre director who is autocratic, bullying and drawn to inhumanity as uncomfortable? “The play’s the thing to uncover the conscience of the king,” said Hamlet, who was similarly wary of theatre’s power to expose. 

Catastrophe ends with a stage direction showing the director's production. But it doesn't focus on the response of the director or the assistant to the actor's performance, but of an audience watching, looking into the face of something unsettling. 

"Distant storm of applause. PROTAGONIST raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies"

***

On the launch day of the Abbey Theatre’s Waking the Nation season in 2015, I sat in the auditorium, a few seats away from the director Sarah Jane Scaife. The programme irked me because I had hoped for a new history play set during the 1916 Rising, or the revival of less obvious plays than The Plough and the Stars and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. 

When the speeches were over, Scaife asked me: “Where are the women?”. I didn’t have a response for her. I hadn’t thought about it.

The blinkers started to loosen, as I watched the discussions unfold on Facebook and Twitter. Annie Ryan said she stopped taking meetings with management years ago. Sarah Durcan observed there was an attitude of experienced women directors not being “ready” for the Abbey stage. Abbie Spallen turned down a rehearsed reading, part of a tokenistic series of plays by women called “The Fairer Sex”. 

The Waking The Feminists meeting that took place in the Abbey had the air of a triumph, of a silence being broken. But it also had a weary sense of time lost, of missed opportunities. Pom Boyd introduced herself from the stalls, and I heard her name for the first time. Nancy Harris returned, after having vanished for some years. It was the impressive grit of Harris, of Ursula Rani Sarma, of Lynda Radley and others that had led to their success overseas. The Abbey couldn’t defend its exclusion of such playwrights any longer. Other playhouses were finding ways of producing their plays

Critics spend most of their time responding to the art that gets made. But the thought of lost art, of all the interesting art that could have been made if careers weren’t derailed, evoked a keen sadness in me. My ego was drawn to the idea of being a gatekeeper, and I had shut out these women artists to privilege art showing male debasement, the work of “male geniuses”. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was still reciting He Wishes For the Clothes of Heaven.

Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One’s Own that women have left so little trace over the centuries, to write a history of women’s writing is to cling onto the few forebears that are well remembered. When the Abbey’s new management produced a large-scale revival of Teresa Deevy’s 1936 play Katie Roche, some people anticipated it with the hope of uncovering something lost. 

Director Caroline Byrne poured into it the otherworldly alchemy of contemporary European theatre: the murky depths of an earth-covered stage, large architectural blades of glass that materialise out of thin air, references to Thomas Ostermeier and Ivo Van Hove. The production was determined to show Deevy’s contemporaneity, but would she avoid the same fate of Lady Gregory and Marina Carr. Would she be another pioneer bearing the weight of a trailblazer, and be left to stand alone? 

Instead, top-funded companies started to fill stages with the work of female visionaries, from The Effect to Tribes, The Red Shoes, The Unmanageable Sisters, On Rafferty’s Hill, Asking For It, Furniture, Shelter, The Lost O’Casey, The Patient Gloria, Shame, The Children, Peat, Dublin Will Show You How, It Was Easy (In the End), Redemption Falls, A Beautiful Village, The Beacon, Faultline, Hecuba, and more on the way. 

Comparably, the independent sector always produced more plays by women, but diverse voices like Felispeaks, Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng and Maïa Nunes are starting to give a new generation voice. 

Some of the observations in A Room of One’s Own still apply. A book about war will be judged more important than a book about women’s feelings in a drawing room. What has changed are the freedoms that feminism has fought and won, the choices it has claimed and the destinies it has thwarted. Rachel Cusk says in her fascinating essay “Shakespeare’s Sisters” that women have enjoyed the freedom to unsex themselves, of being able to disguise their writing as “men’s writing,” of being able write the book about war, and being congratulated for making good use of their room of their own.

For Cusk, that leaves women’s modern identity currently in a state of mystery. If women now choose to write about their femaleness and female values, it has the potential to be jolting, unfamiliar, violent to our patriarchal sensibilities. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex: “The woman watches her manners; she does not dare to irritate, explore, explode”. Women’s writing might now irritate, explore and explode art into new forms. The book about women’s feelings in the drawing room, or whatever room, seems to have radical possibilities.

Two months before Ciara Elizabeth Smyth told her story about Colgan, her play All Honey opened at the New Theatre. It’s a bright, breakneck comedy set at a house party, where two women try to piece together a boyfriend’s affair. What was interesting watching it was its apparent genealogy: the door-slamming farce gags and philandering partners seemed to descend from Noël Coward and Alan Ayckbourn. In other words, it had the sensibility of someone who liked going to the Gate Theatre. 

I didn’t know Smyth worked at the Gate, so this struck me as an uncommon interest in old school theatre. She was 30-years-old, and younger than the Gate’s majority demographic. And here she had written something that played to the rhythms and plots of Gate comedies, while at the same time updating them. All Honey has LGBTQ+ characters. It has 21st century naval gazers. (Smyth herself played a party guest who reinvented herself every scene, not unlike Kristin Wigg’s character Penelope on Saturday Night Live). 

All Honey ultimately didn’t stray too far from old conventions. But Smyth’s extraordinary follow-up, the dark surreal comedy We Can’t Have Monkeys in the House, was bold and unfamiliar. It sees a woman named John return to a family home filled with deranged art-projects, which, in Naomi Faughnan’s twisted set, resembled the damned souls of Gislebertus’s sculpture Last Judgement. 

John is welcomed home with suspicion by her sisters, who resent her for escaping the control of their abusive mother. The compassion of Smyth’s comedy is that it allows us to see the sisters’ reunion from all perspectives, to see how each woman is warped, isolated and stunted by their upbringing.

It’s not easy to resolve the cartoonish touches of farce with the sobering hardship of drama, but the actor Camille Lucy Ross - now one of Smyth’s key collaborators - can go up and down scales of exaggeration like a classical pianist. The sisters’ reunion, seen at severe angles, eventually levels off into a family portrait of pain, and in the centre is an absent mother who wanted sons instead of daughters. It’s a heart-breaking play about a sisterhood hollowed out by misogyny.

We Can’t Have Monkeys in the House is one of the post #MeToo plays I’ve seen that exploded my ideas of theatre, that bended form. But new stories feel needed too. Earlier this year, in an absorbing interview on Marc Maron’s podcast, the playwright Eve Ensler wondered, after 20 years of the V-Day movement, had she “ever seen a [harasser] grapple with this? Has a man come out publicly to say ‘this is what I’ve learned. This is the process I’ve gone through. This is the history I’ve re-evaluated’”. 

There is only one play I can think of that portrayed a man’s reckoning with his own perpetration. It’s surprising to think Una McKevitt’s excellent drama Alien Documentary was staged in 2016, before #MeToo, but McKevitt has always shown a prescient awareness of gender and sexuality. Both her debut play Victor and Gord - which funnily charted the lives of two childhood friends, one LGBTQ+ and the other straight - and The Big Deal - a docudrama about two trans women - were ahead of changes made in legislation.

McKevitt’s 2011 docudrama 565+ told the story of her cousin, a survivor of domestic abuse. But with Alien Documentary McKevitt abandoned her usual documentary approach, as if after something undocumented. (One character even says the line: “Fucking documentaries. Jesus Christ. Documentaries”). 

Alien Documentary follows three men working as stage crew, building the set for an artist’s performance. As they screw together rostra, rig lights and lay a marley floor, their conversation flows naturally from football to fishing to Dylan Thomas. However, whenever the woman artist enters, their banter noticeably grinds to a halt. The secret lives of men seem to be communicated in between mutual alerts and signals. 

The men discuss their school days, the bad people in their communities. During a discussion about child grooming, Peter (P.J. Gallagher) calmly shares the details of his own abuse at the hands of a teacher. In Gallagher’s knockout performance, Peter tells the story self-possessed, full of self- acceptance, and never breaking down. McKevitt prefers to show her victims not as sufferers but survivors.

But the scene was also something of a one-two, distracting us into thinking the play was solely about survivors of abuse. Another man, Jim (James Scales), opens up about being an abuser, having served time in prison for beating his ex-wife. “Fucking hell Jim - like this is not normal,” says Peter. 

In Scales’s solemn delivery, Jim reflects on his crimes. “The major issue is self-esteem … the person in front of you is actually the inner you, that you’re punishing,” he says, wracked with remorse. 

McKevitt’s script describes a kind of process that Eve Ensler suggests, a process of checking destructive behaviours, and ending the cycle of gender violence. Jim says he’s developed a traffic-light system in his head: “You’re sitting at green all the time and if it goes to amber, you need to be aware that you need to pull it back to green because you don’t want it to go to red”. 

Alien Documentary could serve as an example of this kind of story, and McKevitt’s blurring of conventional victim narratives doesn’t feel disempowering. In a Facebook post shortly after #MeToo, the writer Laurie Stone asked: “Is it possible to tell these stories without victims and heroes? They will be better stories, and more people will listen to them”. 

The dialectical nature of drama could easily give into the arguing, fighting, and championing that make stories with victims and heroes. That’s why I wonder if the visual arts might serve as an alternative inspiration. 

In her searching comedy show Nanette, Hannah Gadsby framed her own experiences of homophobic violence with the painting career of Picasso. Picasso had sex with an underage girl, yet he is still considered important as a founder of cubism. “I hate him, but you’re not allowed to,” says Gadsby. 

It occurred to me that I had built an important part of my own research on appreciating Picasso. I was writing a PhD thesis about forgotten stage designers. In 1917, Picasso designed the costumes of the Ballets Russes’ ballet Parade, where performers and animals at a country fair were dressed in enormous warped and geometric costumes. It started an international trend in the 1920s of adopting modern painting into stage design, which happened at the Abbey Theatre with the designs of Norah McGuinness. 

Norah’s set designs intrigued me, but I didn’t like her later cubist paintings, because I compared them to Picasso’s. Her planes weren’t as dramatically steep, and she had a preference for darker, heavier tones. Her New York Skyline is smoggy with greys and blurred lines. Her Frozen Lake at St. Stephen’s Green used moss green and charcoal for the trees. I didn’t like them because they don’t light up like Picasso’s paintings. 

“Picasso said ‘Run free! You can have all perspectives’ … But tell me, any of those perspectives a woman’s?” asks Gadsby. The attraction of Picasso’s paintings was broken for me, his fragmentary drawings of weeping women representing something darker, and I was left with the question: what criteria did I set myself to decide that was good art? 

Maybe some answers are to be found in the universe of McGuinness’s paintings, if I can find an entry point. Last year I went to see her painting Garden Green in the Hugh Lane Gallery, a still life of everyday objects slanting and veering off a kitchen table, while a woman is seen outside in the distance. 

I reminded myself of what critics said about her sets at the Abbey, puzzled by her abstract designs. “The planning of the backcloth would not convey to even the mind steeped in symbolism”. “Forlorn and irrelevant figures battle feebly against a sea of paint”. 

What do I not know yet, and when will I know it?