Features

Five great plays … by Irish women playwrights writing in the 1920s and 1930s

Each issue of D&T, we bring you five suggested plays for studying or mounting with your students. This issue Lisa Fitzpatrick looks at female Irish playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s. All are published in her anthology by Methuen Drama
 Bluebeard
Bluebeard - Nuig archives

Cast: 8F, 4M

Synopsis: Based on the legend of Baron Bluebeard, who murdered his wives for the sin of curiosity, this dance-poem stages the story of the last wife Ilina, and her escape from her dreadful fate.

Why it's great for exploring women's rights: The story is well known, but this piece of modernist experimental dance-theatre articulates the experience of oppression and patriarchal violence from the perspective of the woman. It also incorporates a final dance by a chorus of dead wives, who enact their revenge on Bluebeard, though they are ‘scattered’ at the end. The play expresses women's struggles to defy the steady erosion of their rights in the period after the Civil War.

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