• "Snatch a song from a stranger's mouth":The Stage Plays and Radio Dramas of Paula Meehan

Not to the colony for artistsnot to the walled universitybut to the demented asylumI'll go when the moon is upin the day sky, I'll go

and snatch a song from a stranger's mouth.

Paula Meehan, "Blessing" (Pillow Talk)

The undertone of politicized backtalk, overheard in poems such as "Literacy Class, South Inner City," "The Exact Moment I Became a Poet," or most famously "The Statue of the Virgin of Granard Speaks," becomes dramatic and explicit in the voices of the women in the stage plays and radio monologues of Paula Meehan. In Mrs. Sweeney (1997), Cell (1999), Janey Mack is Going to Die (2001), The Lover (2005), and Three hander (2005), Meehan interrogates the class and gender politics of one part of contemporary Ireland, a dispossessed urban world she has called "a community in crisis" (O'Halloran and Maloy 9), whose traumas, marginalization, and struggle she figures in images of imprisonment and isolation and through the chronic social disease of heroin addiction—an epidemic that hollows out the lives of Lil Sweeney, Janey, and the prisoners in Cell just as surely as thugs empty Lil's north Dublin household of electronic goods to buy their gear. Significantly, the notes emerging from these characters' mouths are defiant not pathetic, sounding an intensity of emotion with diction that spurns poetic euphony even as it reaches a powerful lyric concentration. Theirs is fierce language, [End Page 90] "as tough and tenacious as your indigenous Dub" (Meehan, "Buddleja," Dharmakaya 21). Key to its tenacity—and to the survival strategy of several of these women—is an insubordinate humor, dark, unruly, and as compelling as the act of speaking itself.

Each of the plays under consideration here occupies an inner-city Dublin landscape in an Ireland undergoing the economic transformations of the past two decades, a period of national transition which historian R.F. Foster claims is as monumental as the "culture and anarchy" of the 1890s (2).1 In a country often associated, at best, with frugality and simplicity and, at worst, with hardship and famine, the economic explosion of the decade during which Meehan's plays were written seems unimaginable. Foster notes that from 1995 to 2005 Irish "output [. . .] increased by 350%, [. . .] personal disposable income doubled, exports increased fivefold, trade surpluses accumulated into billions, employment boomed, emigrants poured into the country" (7), and Ireland became "the most globalized country that ever yet was seen" (4). However, like Paula Meehan, a number of critics of the boom recognize that a rising financial tide does not, as is claimed, float all boats. Even at the zenith of its prosperity, before plant closings and worldwide recession took some of the roar out of the Celtic Tiger,2 Ireland topped a list of ten European countries in "inequality" according to both the CIA World Fact book 2000 and the UN's 2003 Human Development Programme Report (cf Foster 12). Moreover, while "absolute poverty has clearly decreased over the last thirty years in Ireland, relative poverty has increased" (12). Ireland had the highest percentage of people living in "relative poverty" in the EU, one of the highest rates of people living "at persistent risk of poverty," and a greater disparity between the wealthiest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent of its population than any Western European country except the UK (15). As Peadar Kirby and others have argued, such inequities are further exacerbated by occupational polarization, a significant reduction in government support of social services (by 1997 government spending had fallen to 13 percent below the European average), and "a growing concentration of power in the hands of economic and political elites" ("Contested Pedigrees" 31–32). For some commentators, then, "the price of achieving prosperity has been paid by the poor, literally and figuratively [. . . .] [E]conomic 'success' (in neo-liberal terms) and social failure are linked" (Foster 12). Thus the trauma and disenfranchisement that preoccupy Meehan in her plays can be seen not simply as the struggles of certain Irish men and women whom the boom has yet to reach, but rather as part of the boom's damaging—if unintended—social consequences.3 [End Page 91]

The Celtic Tiger is just over the socio-economic horizon of Mrs. Sweeney, where a sense of chronic poverty and marginalization pervades the scene. Set in the "recent past" in the Maria Goretti mansions, a Dublin corporation tenement drawn after her "experience of living in Fatima Mansions during the 1980s" as Meehan observes in an "Author's Note" (464), the play ironically redeploys two canonic Irish texts—the Buile Suibhne, an early Irish narrative dating from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries with elements traced back to the ninth century and translated by Seamus Heaney as Sweeney Astray (1983), and Juno and the Paycock (1924), Sean O'Casey's anti-romantic, comic-tragic anthem to the endurance and faithfulness of women set during the Irish Civil War and forming part of his Dublin Trilogy. While the financial distress and personal loss that Lil Sweeney endures are far from the trials of the Civil War, the pandemic of heroin addiction that shatters her family and plagues her neighborhood places her struggle in a wider context. The play opens upon Lil cleaning up the broken windows of her vandalized flat after it has been ransacked for the fourth time in a month by junkies seeking leather jackets, tools, and blenders to fence; they have even take her husband Sweeney's "shaggin trophy with the golden pigeon on it, Leinster Champion 1989" (399). Bob Dylan's lyrics, playing on the radio in the background, sound the larger ideological critique: "Princes on the steeple and all the pretty people/They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made." Vulnerable to "princes" and "pretty people" at one end of a cannibalistic economic system and drug addicts on the other ("you'd think they'd go out to Howth or Rathgar [. . . instead of] [p]reying on their own people like animals [. . . ] vampires" [400]), Lil is "invisible now," as Dylan puts it, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose" (397–98). In a deft staging, Meehan withholds the song's chorus, leaving the questions that haunt Lil's life silently resounding in the audience's mind: "How does it feel to be own your own? With no direction home? A complete unknown?"

Lil's flat is a "fragile refuge whose borders are constantly invaded" (Mc Mullan 83) not by barbarians from abroad but by members of her own community (she wonders if the robbers are friends of her daughter Chrissie), destroying itself from within through self-medicating excess. Chrissie's death from heroin-related AIDS before the play opens is emblematic of an entire lost generation—"hardly a week goes by but we're burying some young one or young fellah from the flats" (416)—so that, as in Juno and the Paycock, the devastation in Lil's individual family resonates as a national crisis in which a whole people's future is being squandered. Just as tuberculosis and poverty are the unresolved issues haunting O'Casey's tenements [End Page 92] during the "national transition" of the revolutionary era, heroin and AIDS symbolize a continuing failure to acknowledge profound inequities and social disorders in 1980s Dublin. As Meehan has observed of her old inner city neighborhood on the near north side: "I come from what used to be the working class. We don't have a working class anymore, we have a dispossessed class who have no job and very little hope" (Praga 77).4 Thus Mrs. Sweeney repeats, in individual and contemporary terms, the "trauma, dispossession, [and] loss" which, according to social psychologist Geraldine Moane, resonate throughout Irish history "whether their causes are seen as colonization, natural disaster, [or] capitalist expansion" (113).

Positioned at yet another moment of historical transition, Buile Suibhne describes the dislocation and disorientation precipitated by a clash of cultures. When pagan king Sweeney threatens the cleric Ronan for building a church in his territory, Ronan curses him to a lifetime of exile and madness, as Sweeney imagines himself transformed into a bird flying across the length of Ireland. Meehan's play shifts the emotional center of the original tale, sounding not the lyric cries of mad Sweeney but, instead, the gallows humor of his wife Lil, a linguistic strategy that helps her generate the emotional energy to keep her home together in the middle of a disintegrating community. When the priest asks if he should fetch the guards to deal with the break-in, Lil replies "don't make me laugh" (403) and, instead, makes herself laugh in a running dialogue with her dead daughter Chrissie, whose shrine she tends with "maniacal exact[ness]" in an attempt to restore control and dignity. She lectures the absent thieves on "Flat Breaking for Beginners": "Rule number one: don't hit the same flat too often; [. . .] do not shit on the bed" (400). Humming her own parodic version of a familiar patriotic ballad—"O where are you now when we need you, Da da da da da da da dee, [. . .]And only our livers are free" (399)—Lil not only mocks her husband Sweeney, "King of the Avoiders" (399), conveniently absent from the flat when there's a mess to clean up, but also takes a swipe at sentimental nationalism's preoccupation with past conflicts rather than present conditions. As Meehan asserts, "[. . .] the battles of our country, especially for women, have been fought in the kitchen and in the bedrooms" (Praga 75).

Lil, her neighbor Frano, and Chrissie's friend Mariah manage grief, inequities, and disappointments with a raucous humor which functions as the psychological equivalent of the "Fuck-You-Money" Frano carefully hoards in order to leave her abusive husband. As Frano reassures Lil: "The lads up in Becketts [. . .] are drinking themselves into a stupor of condolences [about the robbery]. My Jimmy's half locked already. What they're not [. . . ] going to do when they get their hands on the perpetrators. They're [End Page 93] rounding up the posse" (403). The derision that drives such humor is not simply aggression; it is also an attempt to modulate the impact of what Juno Boyle famously describes as "the stupidity o' men" (O'Casey 145). At the same time, in a community where only one man in an entire block of flats has a job (427), where alcoholism fuels the violence of Frano's husband, where Sweeney avoids the tragedy of his daughter's illness by lavishing attention on his hobby of pigeon breeding ("He was up and out [of the flat] to those shaggin' pigeons first thing every morning. It was like she wasn't there" [415]), the need to protect masculine egos from the effects of social and economic impotence is something the women constantly monitor, even as they mock themselves for the lengths they will go to keep the peace. When vandals break into Sweeney's pigeon coop and kill his birds (named for heroes like Wolf Tone and James Connolly), Lil offers to wrap the min a shroud to give them the honor that the shattered Sweeney thinks is their due. But Mariah wickedly satirizes this whiff of martyrolatry: "The funeral cortege is now leaving Maria Goretti Mansions, winding its way slowly past the telegraph wires they loved so well [. . .] Pigeon fanciers from all parts of Ireland have flocked to say a fond farewell, the guard of honour holding aloft their trophies" (405). Later, when Sweeney's despair over the loss of his birds intensifies into a psychosis in which he imagines that he, himself, is one of his pigeons, Lil protects him from institutionalization, allowing him to nest in shredded newspapers under the dining room table. Frano and Mariah warn her to keep the bedroom door locked in case the "cock gets all strutty," commiserating that she'll soon "be scraping the shite off the mantelpiece morning, noon and night. Wait'll he starts moulting. Up to your oxters in feathers" (437). Their diverting wit protects Lil from the need to acknowledge explicitly that Sweeney's silent withdrawal is virtually indistinguishable from his previous state, a learned passivity and abdication of agency that has reduced him to a gull, a "pigeon," a victim, even before he descends into madness. In part, then, the humor of these women is ambivalent and ameliorating, functioning as a cathartic release that allows them to meet their "deepest unconscious anxieties face to face and find [. . .] relief in being able to laugh at them" as one theorist of black humor explains (Huckabay 324). In this way, they can manage the "ontological insecurity" (325) that distinguishes life in Maria Goretti mansions.

Significantly, however, when Mariah tells a mocking tale of the domestic politics in Frano's family, class solidarity is pitted against gender critique, and we glimpse the darker unmanageable insecurity of these lives. Mariah describes a sociologist arriving at Frano's door to administer "a survey to ascertain the decision-making patterns in Irish households." [End Page 94] Frano reports "My husband Jimmy makes all the important decisions and I make all the rest":

'O' says your man, 'how's that?' 'I decide how we spend the dole. So much for food, so much for rent [. . . ] Whether we have fried mince for dinner, mince stew, hamburgers, boiled mince, roast mince, grilled mince. Where the kids go to school [. . .] What time the kids go to bed. Whether the doctor should be got if one of the kids are sick.' 'And tell me madam, what decisions does your husband make?' says your man. 'O you know. The big ones. Who should run for president, what should be done about the North, whether the UN should get heavy with the Serbs. . . '

(427)

While Mariah "is cracking up all the way through" her story, and while the audience might be caught out in their own guilty laughter, the joke falls flat. "Nobody else laughs" reads the stage direction. In a community where domestic decisions are focused on simple survival and public policy is controlled by a remote elite, the gendered hierarchy of "decision-making patterns" is immaterial, and even dark humor cannot fully dispel the powerlessness that both men and women feel.

While Lil and her friends jab vigorously at local social conditions, disrupting and resisting, Meehan's plot focuses a more sustained satire on the inadequacies of public institutions like the church, the Gardaí, and even the estate's development group. In Act 2, the intensifying chaos in Lil's life—her besieged flat, her delusional husband—is mockingly illuminated by a lamp in the shape of the Virgin Mary, with a flashing halo and a glowing sacred bleeding heart that her sister purchased at Lourdes for intercession in Sweeney's madness: "You get a plenary indulgence every time you turn it on" (446). Thus the church's presiding presence is reduced to a piece of kitsch. In another scene, when Lil covers the flat's curtainless windows with the Starry Plough, declaring "I love that flag" (410), it is as if the promises of the labor movement have devolved into a mere veil to block out a view of the blighted cityscape. In a more sustained critique, Father Tom's attempts to comfort and aid the family in its troubles—"Maybe it would be an idea to call a special meeting of the Development Group. Or the Drugs Group. See what could be done" (406)—are shown not simply to be ineffectual, but his rhetoric of "community" and "self-help" masks the fractures, dysfunction, and internal predations in the very institutions to which he appeals. Mariah recollects a time when the neighborhood watch teams were mobilized and "we ended up with the pushers and the shagging vigilantes [. . .] beating up the poor junkies [. . .] [End Page 95] the pushers just kept a low profile until the hards went back to the bars, or to beating their own wives at night" (406–7). The net result is not a safer neighborhood, but a license for more violence, such that "self-help" comes to signify not communal solidarity but rampant individualism that profits only those able to work the system. As Lil sarcastically observes of community development funding: "All that funny money coming into the flats and the only local getting paid is Rose Doyle for cleaning the community centre two mornings a week" (408).

Meehan softens her satire of Father Tom at one point by granting him a brief moment of self-knowledge: "I thought I could organize the people, empower them, you know, Lil, the basic Christian community stuff. Live amongst the people, share their shelter and their lives, release their spirit, direct the anger, fight injustice [. . .] I was so full of it. Spiritual pride, really" (444). Meehan thus simultaneously acknowledges that commitment to social justice inspires some Catholic service even as she marks its limits. But even this momentary sympathy is undermined by a dark twist of the play's plot. Ironically but predictably, Father Tom is one of the three men presiding over the "Subcommittee for the Women's Community Leadership Project" (452, my italics) at Maria Goretti mansions, and they—with equal predictability—give the coveted position of director of the estate's women's project not to Mariah, who has worked exhaustively to earn it, but to an outsider. They have thus deprived her not only of her livelihood, but eventually, it is implied, of her life—for the prospect of the job was ex-addict Mariah's only hope "for staying clean. To have something to get up in the morning for" (440).

As life in the flats closes in and Sweeney's psychosis intensifies, Act 2's stage directions stipulate that, in the "dim and tidy" flat, "the sense of entombment. . . will grow. . ." (434). In this increasingly circumscribed world, the humor of Lil and her friends verges on hysteria, seeming manic and delusional, until we recognize that the underlying generosity of their friendship and the compassion that binds them together into an alternative community supply a ground for ontological security. Within the raillery and satire, Meehan balances Lil's solicitous care for Sweeney, her shelter of Frano when the abusive Jimmy returns home roaring drunk, and most of all her persistent mothering of Mariah, as she tries to save at least one lost child from addiction. In her Author's Note to Mrs. Sweeney, Paula Meehan recollects a small detail from Buile Suibhne: "There's a gesture in the old tale—the cook Muirghil would make a hollow with her heel in a cow pat and fill it with milk for the birdman to sip from. I witnessed that tender gesture again and again in contemporary guise many times when I lived there [End Page 96] [in Fatima Mansions]" (464). In Meehan's play, such tender gestures become breakwaters against a tide of desolation, as even mad Sweeney emerges from his dissociation to comfort Lil during her only moment of despair: "Sweeney begins to circle her tentatively, then gaining confidence, picking at her clothes, nudging at her until she is in his arms. Finally comes to rest with her enfolded in his wings, cooing, soothing her. Her sobs subside. Then she is breathing peacefully" (447).

The carnivalesque eruption of Halloween into the play's final scene releases a joyful excess into its humor, which has, until this point, been dark and defensive. Briefly we are offered a glimpse into an alternative space where the grim landscape of the Maria Goretti Mansions is transformed by color, creativity, and communal celebration. It is as if a different reality has been superimposed upon these dislocated lives or, to pursue Meehan's metaphor, as if they have broken through into another world. As critic Anne O'Reilly has observed, the Halloween celebration is associated with Samhain, the autumnal feast day in the pagan Celtic calendar "when the veil between the worlds was thinnest and the spirits of ancestors roamed freely in the everyday waking world" (246). While Meehan's staging of the holiday is emphatically modern—the neighborhood kids stoke the bonfire with seats stolen from an abandoned bus and musical entertainment is supplied by the "Effin Eejits" (439, 450)—the recuperative possibilities associated with the older spiritual order seem, momentarily, to be released into the inner city as everyone dons brilliant costumes and festoons the neighborhood laundry lines with marvelous buntings "recalling ships pennants, flags of undreamt republics, textless banners for libertarians" (452), in the unexpectedly lyric language of Meehan's stage directions.

Momentarily Lil, Sweeney, and their friends occupy an "undreamt republic" of regeneration, where even Chrissie can be resurrected in Lil's magnificent requiem banner, pieced together from her daughter's gregarious wardrobe. As Mariah proclaims: "She loved that velvet dress. Do you remember she wore it, there! There! She wore it with that goldy waistcoat! Our docs 'n frocks days [. . .] She wore that the day we were thrun out of school. You should of seen the nun's face when we walked in with the leather gear" (453). No wonder then, that when Frano suggests that the festival should be canceled out of respect for yet another family mourning a dead child, Mariah refuses: "we can't cancel. You'd end up cancelling everything. Let's cancel the rest of our existence now and save us all the bother" (436). Indeed, this brief respite of transcendence and renewal is fundamental to the community's capacity to withstand the unbearable future that Lil foretells for the mall in a bleak vision that, until the play's final [End Page 97] lines, their defiant humor has managed to keep at bay. Frano will be made sterile by a beating; "Mariah will be back on gear within months and strung out to fuck, living here, living there [ . . . ] Sweeney will be dead within a year [ . . . at] St. Brendan's. His lovely wings all crumpled up in a straitjacket [. . .] I'll be. . . I can't see it. My own future's a blank to me, a darkness" (462). As Dominick La Capra has suggested in his discussion of gallows humor in the context of the Holocaust, "it is tensely caught up between melancholy and mourning," constantly negotiating "the continual interplay between remaining captive to a past and trying to live in a present while creating openings to a more desirable future" (174). For all of her disruptive laughter and capacity for imaginative transformation, Lil Sweeney cannot finally envision her own future as, in La Capra's formulation, "the entire problem of the carnivalesque and humor is bound up with the uneven, often interrupted, and at times failed movement from victim to survivor and agent" (175).

If, as Kathryn Kirkpatrick has argued, Paula Meehan's poetry has penetrated the position of "bourgeois privilege" that maintains the illusion "that private life is somehow separate from the political struggles and power relations of the public world" ("Between Breath" 49), then clearly the same may be said of her dramatic works. Meehan's plays address the challenges of poverty, urban living, class, and gender oppressions head-on with a blast of political backtalk and rebellious humor that is distinct from her own poetic voice. In a 2008 radio interview, Meehan explained: "I turned to the stage again [because . . .] the poetry was coming under a certain amount of stress. [. . .] Other voices kept intruding and disrupting the kind of singular lyric voice that you would write your poems in [. . .] strong urgent voices. I felt like they wanted me to tell their stories" (Woods).

In "Janey Mack is Going to Die," a radio play for one voice first broadcast on RTÉ in November 2001, the title character dodges the curse of the Celtic Tiger by raising a mocking two-fingered salute to its entrepreneurial moral free-fall. With wit and grit, Janey transforms the bleakness of the bleak situation she finds herself in: alone on a strand, with six months to live, she is recording a final word for a pair of upwardly mobile siblings who abandoned her to grief and isolation in a time of tragic need. The taping begins with miss-starts and throat-clearings as Janey rejects the safely legal discourse of a last will and testament ("you'll have been given a copy of this tape [upon my death] by my solicitor, Harold McGee of McGee, McGonagle and McGregor" [13]) and, instead, announces her legacy in raucous working-class Dublin vernacular: "feck it. She presses Stop. Presses Rewind. Okay here we go again" (14). Janey refuses to conform to the linguistic "passing" [End Page 98] by which her brother and sister have purchased their access to social respectability: "I suppose I should explain where I made the money. Not, as I bet was your first thought, from drugs. Go on! It was; wasn't it? Or even peddling me hole. Sorry. Sorry. Forgot how delicate you both are—peddling my hole. In fact nothing illegal at all. I merely became, in the current jargon, an entrepreneur" (17). She thus satirizes her siblings' class disloyalty and simultaneously makes the financial success upon which her surprise bequest to them is based an even greater goal. Caliban-like, Janey may profit from her appropriation of the discourse of the striving classes, but her true power lies in the fact that she still knows how to curse.

The inheritance Janey promises her brother and sister is an unexpected payoff, but the tape with which she announces it is very much a payback and an indictment. Leaving a recording rather than a letter, Janey accuses "Padser" of being "functionally illiterate. Or so I'd have thought seeing as you never replied back in 1996 when Julian OD'd and I wrote to you for help and thought my world was ending" (14). Janey's censure of Annie is even more scathing: "I despise you, your children, your petit bourgeois aspirations and all the delirium of your patios and your wall to walls. . . I can still see your face, Annie, in the kitchen telling me how well your Robert did on his Leaving Cert and how fabulously (that's the word you used) he was getting on as an assistant manager in Price Valu [. . .] while my beautiful boy lay stretched on the coroner's slab" (14–15).

Once again, Meehan's family drama insinuates itself into a wider national narrative. Irish sociologist Tom Inglis cites a recent survey of seventy-four countries by the Economist that examines nine different quality of life indicators. It found that Ireland was "the best country in the world" in which to live because it "'successfully combines elements of the new (the fourth-highest GDP in the world in 2005, low unemployment, political liberties) with the preservation of certain cosy elements of the old, such as stable family and community life'" (qtd. in Inglis 17). Nonetheless, Janey's accusations of her siblings suggest that the new and the old are very much in conflict in her version of the New Ireland, as "bourgeois aspirations," the drive for individual success, and "the delirium" of "patios" and "wall to walls" fuel Annie's and Patrick's anxieties about Janey's social degeneracy to the point that they abandon her and her child. Thus Janey's monologue implicitly asks, along with Tom Inglis, "What is the nature of social bonding in a world where people increasingly see and understand themselves and relate to each other in terms of consumption and similar/different tastes, preferences and lifestyles? What does this do to families, groups and communities?" (Inglis 28). [End Page 99]

In stark contrast to the siblings who refuse her kinship, Janey functions as a steadfast foster mother to Gerry, a country lad and friend of Julian whose parents "don't want to know him" (18) once they discover his drug use. Although—or perhaps because—they are unrepentant fringe-dwellers, Janey and Gerry compose a family unit, emotionally functional if socially disruptive (he's a petty thief): "Gerry had been in the house for over a year at that stage. It was a link you see, to Julian. Kind of like Julian's ghost life unwinding as Gerry lived out his life" (18). Their adaptation becomes simultaneously a parody of, and an alternative to, the smug domesticity and rigidly policed middle-class values of the "basic unit" of society, a defiant redefinition of one of the most elemental of human bonds.

Even as they seize the means by which social legitimacy and national solidarity are reproduced in the New Ireland, Janey and Gerry simultaneously hijack the engine of economic success, driving headlong into the corporate world. Noticing the pleasure her dog Whiskey gets from the booming bass of the stereo speakers—"her tail was going like billy-o" (19)—Janey invents the ultimate New Age accessory: "Music for Dogs." They decide to record tunes "high out of the human range of hearing, sounds that would get the dog excited," and sell them to doting dog owners. But soon, Janey and Gerry rationalize that the music itself matters far less to the animal than the lavish attention of an owner treating his or her pet to a novel pleasure. They realize they can simply sell blank CDs: "It'd be the owner saying things like 'There, there's a good Rover. Do you like that Rover? Aren't you the great boy?' That would get the dog going for sure" (20). Like all good start-ups in the golden age of double-digit growth, Janey and Gerry institute a marketing plan (ads in Hot Press and the Catholic Weekly), a logo (a retro "housewife polishing a hi-fi system with a wee dog at her feet wagging up at her"), an Internet domain ("music-for-dogs.com"), and specialist product lines ("Jazz for Dogs [is] a surprise runaway hit"), and then they sit back and watch the euros roll in (21, 22, 25).

Meehan's portrait of boom time Ireland is deliciously satiric, a reductio ad absurdum of a global commodity culture so overheated that shoppers don't even need an actual commodity to consume; thus it is only poetic justice that the company's first big international order comes from L.A. and that Japanese trade is phenomenal. But Meehan's critique becomes sharper and more poignant when we recognize that what Janey and Gerry have capitalized upon is a local epidemic of loneliness and isolation, a need for emotional connection that is so intense that purchasers believe that money might buy you love, as with an order from "Mary Gibney in Knocklyon who'd lost her Jack Russell a year before and still wasn't over it and thought [End Page 100] Music for Dogs would make her feel closer in spirit to Jay Orr" (22). Like all good parodies, "Janey Mack is Going to Die" appropriates the dominant discourse—in this case commodity capitalism—to subvert its social authority by revealing the destructive powers it masks: the weakening of relational bonds in raw individualism and the clamor of getting and spending. In the discursive space thus cleared by parodic subversion, Meehan proposes a healing alternative to runaway materialism by discovering an unexpectedly spiritual dimension to Janey's enterprise: "I loved most the notion of packaging up this silence and sending it off to the four corners of the earth. All these little bundles of silence. I loved the idea of a person in a room with a dog listening hard, really, hard, to nothing. I thought . . . I still think . . . there is too much noise in the world" (25).

If "Janey Mack is Going to Die," then at least she gets the last word. It is a fantasy familiar to anyone who has felt undervalued, neglected, or wronged, so that Janey's tape to her siblings stands as a judgment that cannot be appealed—the only privilege the dead can assert over the living. Ironically, however, Janey's message from beyond the grave functions neither as revenge fantasy nor as a self-elegy. It offers, instead, a surprising vision of redemption. Using assets from the one value system Annie and Patrick are sure to recognize—ready cash—Janey rewards a very different set of values: the spontaneous generosity and kindness of "two small incidents from the sad country of our childhood which redeem you now in memory" (15). Long ago, on the very strand where Janey is speaking, her self-centered teenage brother took his seven-year-old sister, "terrified to take her feet off the bottom," into the water and "talked [her] into lying back": "The cold of the water in my hair, the sun warm on my face, your boy's hands under my skull and you talking soothingly, murmuring. For ages. And then your hands weren't there and I nearly panicked and I'm here. I'll catch you. And I didn't panic and I was floating" (15). Teaching her to float was Patrick's unexpected and gentle gift, reminiscent of Muirghil's tender gesture in Buile Suibhne, and for a similar moment of sympathy Annie too is forgiven. Schooled by nuns and TV documentaries about starving Biafrans, five-year-old Annie delivers the children's picnic sandwiches to a black family she notices down the strand. "Those two things. Incidents. Floating, the Biafrans. Let these two incidents be or stand for . . . something. . . . Goodness? They've stayed in my memory all these years" (17, ellipses original). Unexpectedly then, the unruly backtalk of Jane McDonald, drug user and scam artist, modulates into a voice rich with lyric beauty and compassion, one that celebrates something like goodness. [End Page 101]

While elements of grotesque comedy and wit surface in Meehan's other plays—Cell, Threehander, and The Lover—tragedy is their dominant tone, yet speech itself, and the power of the visionary imagination, remains therapeutic. The "sense of entombment" that intensifies throughout the second act of Mrs. Sweeney, constraining Lil and her friends to diminishing opportunities for agency, becomes complete in Cell, first produced by the Calypso Theatre Company in Dublin in September 1999 and nominated for "Best New Play" at the ESB/Irish Times awards in 2000 (Calypso). Cell opens on what seems a comfortably domestic scene: a table laid for tea-making with "milk, sugar, cups," two sets of "heavily decorated, adorned, individualized" bunkbeds "dressed with duvets, sheeting, quilts" (7). Yet the security and individuality of this space is immediately belied by the claustrophobic walls of the institutional "cell." Here the inmates' lives are closely circumscribed by the rigid and artificial routines of a prison authority exercised solely through the disembodied voice of the intercom, a force so powerful it can even declare the dawn, "Though nature has yet to get the message" (10).

In a burst of crude physicality and violence—the first sound we hear is a "strong stream of piss into a galvanized bucket" (7)—the alpha inmate, Delo, immediately asserts her dominion by rousting her cellmates Martha and Lila from their sleep because she has discovered someone has violated the strict hygienic protocol of the cell and left menstrual blood in the slop pail. An extension of—and enabled by—the penal regime, Delo's rule is so comprehensive that she even tries to regulate the menstrual cycle of her cellmates. But her true genius is for commerce, and she runs her prison-wide trade empire as if it were a family business. Jauntily bullying her chief sales rep Martha, Delo proclaims: "A new day. Work to be done. Deals to be struck. Profits to be made. . . Hasn't that always been the motto? The family motto so to speak? Have I not been like a mother to you both?" (10). Mouthing the platitudes of a bourgeois tradesman—"do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends" (13)—Delo has cornered the market on the hottest commodity in the community—heroin—and she uses it not only to extend her influence abroad in the prison, but to maintain her authority at home. Cell thus anticipates Meehan's parodic critique of entrepreneurial culture in "Janey Mack is Going to Die." "I tell you, Alice," Delo says to her new cellmate, "the world of multinational corporate finance has nothing on the machinations going on outside that door" (70). Except, of course, Cell's satire of entrepreneurial Ireland is darkened and intensified by the fact that human need and suffering are not regrettable by-products of Delo's marketing strategy but a direct profit stream, and the literally disenfranchised [End Page 102] inmates are locked into place by forces even more pitiless and intransigent than economic stratification.

In this context, we can see Meehan deploying a kind of kitchen-sink (or, more accurately, slop-bucket) realismin Cell to scrutinize the overcrowded, often squalid, conditions in antiquated prisons, where "two out of every five Irish prisoners have no option but to use a chamber pot at night" (O'Donnell, n.p.); where medical and psychiatric care is often inadequate; where physical contact with visitors—even between imprisoned mothers and their children—is often prohibited; where heroin use before, during, and after incarceration is widespread and chronic ("in studies of the population of Mountjoy prison. . . almost two thirds of the men and women have histories of heroin misuse" O'Donnell, n.p.). Each of these disturbing conditions finds its direct embodiment at some moment in Cell: Lila struggles, without medical assistance, to withdraw from her addiction and, in a moment of despair, kills herself;Martha speculates that "if I keep it together, if I stay straight, I could maybe ask to see Jasmine [her daughter] on a visit" (56); all four of the women crowded into the claustrophobic cell fantasize about life in a new, humane, facility: "I heard the toilets flushed by themselves" says one. "I heard there's two to a cell and all self-contained. Stainless steel everywhere. Your own shower in the cell itself. And blue curtains" says another (53).

Indeed, Cell's interest in prisoners' rights and reform is rooted in its origins. Paula Meehan has worked closely for over twenty years with inmates of Mount joy and Portlaoise in writing workshops and outreach programs (O'Halloran and Maloy 2; Stenson 211). The theater company which commissioned and staged Cell, Calypso Productions, was founded in 1993 by Donál O'Kelly and Kenneth Glennan not simply to produce new work for the stage, but to "become the voice of the voiceless" by focusing the resources of theater—as well as educational programs and instructional materials—on contemporary social justice and human rights issues (Merriman 280–81; Calypso). As Cell's powerful plot and sympathetic characterizations generate audience concern for the circumstances of Irish prisoners, the Irish Penal Reform Trust has worked to focus that emotional energy through a consciousness-raising campaign sustained by the educational packet, Cell: Information and Action on Irish Prisons, authored by IPRT and Calypso director Dr. Ian O'Donnell and published as a companion text to Meehan's play.5

Moreover, while Cell is acutely attentive to local conditions within Irish prisons, it simultaneously—and ambitiously—yokes the dehumanization and repression within the prison environment itself with the hegemonic [End Page 103] class and gender order outside the walls. Quoting from Ireland's National Crime Forum (1998), Cell: Information and Action observes:

[There is . . .] a clear link between socio-economic deprivation and certain types of crime. That is neither to condone criminal or antisocial acts nor to deny the element of personal responsibility which we all bear for our actions. What is undeniable, however, is that the socio-economic conditions of a given community are one factor which can encourage offending behaviour and that those conditions are the proper responsibility of society as a whole, not of the offending member.

(qtd. in O'Donnell, n.p.)

In this context, we might argue that the cell for which Paula Meehan's play is titled functions as a microcosm of the wider society's struggle to understand its "proper responsibilities" in the new economic order. Even as its penal setting galvanizes the play's realism, Cell simultaneously finds a dark humor and an anarchic logic reminiscent of theater of the absurd in Delo's manic wit, code-shifting, and grotesque physicality. And, as Delo expands into a larger-than-life, almost mythic, figure, Cell gestures toward broader psychological, even allegorical, themes in its complex staging of the relationship between gender and power. A forty-two-year-old Dublin woman with grown children, serving the fourth year of a seven-year trafficking sentence, Delo performs various iconic masculine roles as she plies her trade. Part Mafia Don ("Capisco?" she asks Martha and Lila when she orders them not to speak the name of a former cellmate [17]), part swaggering Texan ("Innocent yang thang" she coos to Lila [19]), part Victorian tycoon ("We're a bit short [on product] today so go easy. Err not on the generous side" [30]), Delo simultaneously enacts the part of unreconstructed paterfamilias, as sex and domestic comforts have become the commodities that Lila and Martha—the women Delo has cast as her wives—must trade for her pharmaceutical largesse. In Delo's mimicry of patriarchal excess, sexual coercion and humiliation are founded upon Martha's and Lila's economic dependency, and her gender-bending becomes most pronounced in her domination of Lila who, "dope sick," barters her sexual services for a fix—"Fair exchange being no robbery" (15). Two regimes of masculine power are consolidated in Delo's breathless reaction to Lila's manipulations—corporate and corporeal, business and pleasure—and this fusion, in turn, sponsors the emergence of Delo's phallic alter-ego: "Yes. Yes. Faster now. Yes. Hi ho hi ho it's off to work we go, go, go. Snakey loves it. Yes. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely." (15) Later, when chastening a rebellious Lila, Delo threatens her with the tattoo of a snake on her arm: [End Page 104] "Come on. Snakey wants you. Don't you baby? Ah look Snakey's sad? Has lil Lila hurt his feelings? What's that? Eh? (Listening to snake). Lila's a bold girl? Lila should be punished? How so? Ooh. Nasty" (32). The point is not that Delo is asserting a male identity or literally enacting a trans gendering when she bares Snakey. Rather, with that iconic image, she appropriates and deploys modes of domination adapted from the wider patriarchal society, thereby claiming phallic authority. This ruthlessness and brutality is made even more insidious by Delo's seemingly good-humored patter and her rapid metamorphosis from sado-masochistic dominator to parental protector ("Who's my girl" she cuddles Lila after sex). Alerted by the similarity of their names, we immediately recognize that Bello/Bella Cohen of the "Circe" chapter of Ulysses may well be Delo's kinswoman.

Delo's exercise of phallic power takes on a wider—symbolic—resonance when we consider the trope with which she introduces herself in Cell's very first scene. Shaking Lila and Martha awake, she urges "Rise and shine, little piggies. Mama sow has a bone to pick. . . A bone to chew! With one of you" (7). Here Delo metamorphoses into that most potent—and threatening—of Irish feminine figures, the old sow who eats her farrow. Masquerading as maternal nurturer, her carnal appetites and lust for control are so all-consuming that she threatens the autonomy and security of any tender or dependent figures in her path.

Annie, a young traveler who commits suicide before the play opens, is Delo's first victim, and Lila is haunted by her memory, quoting Annie's compassionate aphorisms fondly: "Every cripple has a way of dancing" (14). Troubled by the abuse Annie endured, Lila is inspired to try to get "off the gear" (35) and free herself from Delo's control, as if the gentle dreaminess of the traveler girl is an antidote to Snakey's venom. Importantly, both Lila and Annie seek sustenance in the landscape beyond their prison walls which they are able to glimpse through the cell's one window, which Delo, "in her mimicking of bourgeois property relations, has limited access to. . . by 'owning,'" as Kirkpatrick has observed ("Between Country and City" 2).6 Lila's attempt to stay connected to that truer reality yields the play's most lyric moment, as she trespasses onto Delo's top bunk to steal a glimpse of the wider world. Martha dismisses the view—"There's little enough to see out there" (20)—but Lila's Words worthian reverie transforms the blighted urban scene into a healing vision:

You're wrong Martha. [. . .] Jesus, Martha, it's beautiful—there's a full moon up. In the daytime, imagine. Isn't that a brilliant thing. It's like you can look right through it. And it's been raining in the night. The roofs are all black [End Page 105] and glittery. There's two more cranes on the site for the new prison. It's flying up [. . .] And there's the edge of that big tree. The weeping willow in the back garden at the other end. Very sad looking. The leaves beginning to fall. Yellow they are now. Annie loved that tree. And I can see the top-half of a lamppost with the election poster with your woman's face on it. . . wait a minute. . . A New Ireland. Forward to. . . something. I can't make it out. I wish I could see more of the garden.

(20, ellipses original)

Lila's vision opens on a site of imaginative prospects, emotional connection, beauty and comfort in a conceit that reiterates, in pastoral terms, the alternative world glimpsed in the Halloween celebration in Mrs. Sweeney. In the bleak landscape of both plays, these interludes gesture toward the healing possibilities that critic Kirkpatrick has perceptively identified in the Buddhist spiritual practices that Paula Meehan invokes in Dharmakaya.7

Delo's symbolic function as a perverse Mother Ireland becomes even clearer when Alice Kane, a fourth cell mate who takes the place of Annie, is introduced late in Part 1. Alice is from Leitrim, and while she is mocked as a "bog woman" by street wise Martha ("Here Alice. What are you in for? Rustling is it? Or sheep shagging?" [27]), she immediately changes the dynamic in the cell, congratulating their domestic ingenuity with an unselfconscious countrywoman's idiom: "Ye have the place lovely, I'll give ye that. Tea and all. Sure this is grand. I didn't know what to expect." In turn, Lila is provoked to spontaneous hospitality: "Will you have a cup? We should've offered" (25). Recognizing a rival, Delo greets Alice by mimicking the kitchen-table intimacy of two matriarchs commiserating about aching feet and offspring—"your heart'd break for the young ones" (36). While the sight of Delo preying upon Alice's rustic affability yields some menacing comedy, it is soon clear that Delo has met her match in Alice's rural shrewdness and rock-solid decency. "There's something not right there," Alice says of her cellmate. "It's in her eyes. The look you'd get in a dog that goes prowling lambs at night" (43).

As Delo and Alice square off, we recognize a conflict between the two symbolic sites upon which Irish identity has been historically contested (urban versus rural, East versus West), but the opposition deepens when we read their rivalry as a struggle between two symbolic constructions of the Irish feminine which mark, in turn, two distinct social ideologies: competitive individualism versus communal cooperation. When Part 2 opens a month later, the power center in the cell has shifted. Martha is taking crochet lessons from Alice as a therapeutic diversion during heroin withdrawal. "Your body's only trying to come back to itself," Alice counsels her [End Page 106] "daughter." "It has to find its way into the world all over again. It's like you've just been born" (55). Freed from her addiction, Martha will be able to resist Delo's coercive power. Yet Alice's role as sustaining mother is neatly ironized (or, depending upon the militancy of one's feminist politics, reiterated) by the fact that she has been imprisoned for murdering a neighbor (a man who has harassed her ever since she became a widow) when he makes "a run" at her late one night (45). In a later version, Alice hints that the murder wasn't as "pure [an] act of self defence" (44) as she has first implied, but whether self-protection or violent resistance, Alice's actions demonstrate that she is no passive Cathleen. In the play's climactic scene, Martha's attempt to withdraw from heroin is sabotaged by Delo, who tempts her with a palliative drug that is really a hallucinogen. Deciding to defend herself at last, Martha wrenches herself free from her addiction—and her subordination—by knifing Delo in the back. Rather than allowing Martha's hard-fought liberation to be negated by a murder charge, Alice steps forward to take the rap for the killing. Putting communal interest before self-interest, Alice thus becomes the model of a strong but compassionate wise-woman, mounting a vigorous defense against violation and oppression, an avatar of the Granny figure familiar from Meehan's poetry. In part an examination of how power circulates within an enclosed homosocial community, Cell seems to speculate upon how Irish woman have deployed the relative gains they've made in the past two decades, especially in their relationships with each other. Through Alice, Meehan reconnects us with "[. . .] the strong matriarchal elements in Irish proletarian life in the city and amongst the rural dispossessed, to use those lovely old-fashioned words—proletariat, dispossessed" (O'Halloran and Maloy 6).

In the scene considered earlier, at the edge of Lila's lyric vision of the natural world beyond the cell, we glimpse the wider national context within which Meehan's interrogations of gender, class, and power function. Lila describes an "election poster with your woman's face on it" that promises "A New Ireland" and urges the march "Forward to . . . something. I can't make it out" (20). While Lila cannot "make . . . out" the future—indeed, Alice arrives in the cell too late to save her from the suicide which seems to be her sole escape—Alice embodies one hopeful manifestation of it. In the face of Delo's economic domination, insatiable materialism, and coercive power, the triumph of Alice's model of agency—grounded in communal values, generosity, and common sense, capable equally of vigilant self-defense and maternal solicitude—offers a powerful alternative to phallic striving. For Meehan, the face of the future has yet to be drawn. Yet with [End Page 107] the Delos of the world safely disabled, a different future, perhaps one such as Geraldine Moane describes, becomes imaginable:

The Celtic Tiger thus offers an opportunity for a renegotiation of the legacies of history, offering a way out of perpetuating a top-down system of domination and the opportunity for developing a more egalitarian society [. . .] where basic needs would be met [. . .]where diversity and creativity would be encouraged, [. . . where] our potential for compassion, co-operation, generosity, support and solidarity [would be nourished].

(112)

While they are less explicitly concerned with class politics than Meehan's other plays, The Lover and Three hander, both produced for RTÉ,8 seem equally preoccupied with maternal presence and absence, lost children, unheard voices, and the promise of talk itself as the path to some as yet unimagined future. Assigned to write letters to her dead mother by a counselor, Sinta, of The Lover, composes a "soul diary" (38) that expresses all of the guilt, grief, and sense of betrayal that the daughter of a suicide might feel. Reflexive teenage sarcasm here becomes therapeutic as when Sinta, who has taken over the parenting of her eleven-year-old brother in the face of her father's withdrawal into the lyrics of dead pop stars and South African weed, describes a trip to the pet shop to buy crickets to feed his gecko: "You can specify, you know—silent or singing. You would not believe Mam how much I've learned about geckos—their food chain, their habitat, their cute little ways, since you opted out. An unexpected by-product of the grieving process. It's a pity it's not on the Leaving Cert" (42). As her monologue unfolds, Sinta negotiates the passage to adulthood using the discourses available to teenagers with living mothers: rudeness, confidences, impertinence, good old-fashioned rows, and secrets, as when she reveals—and then censors—the "one thing" she really has on her mind. "More John. More John. More John. I'm sore from last night. I can hardly write that to Mam. Even if she's dead. Dear Mam, he fucked me good. I'm sick for the want of him[. . .] See that's the crux of the matter. I'd never say things like that to my mother" (39). Nonetheless, Sinta eventually talks herself into a new reality and a rapprochement with the mother who abandoned her, sending her the sounds of crickets singing "through the veil that is between the living and the dead" (42). Enamored with John and, now, her own future, she is free to sign off as "your loving and forgiving daughter" (53).

The daughter of Three hander finds no such liberty, as the isolation and "sense of entombment" that closes around Lil Sweeney and the prisoners in Cell confine her to the smallest, most elemental, scope. A failed suicide, in a [End Page 108] coma that allows her to hear and respond but not to move or speak, she must listen to her long-divorced "Mother" and "Father" wrangle over her (nearly) dead body even as she remains incapable of voicing her replies. The "ur-breathing" of the respirator always "in the background, low down in the sound mix" (59) sounds a fundamentally human counterpoint to the dialogue of parental recrimination that is so familiar that, after twenty years, "Daughter" can predict the next line of the exchange and keep score: "Hell. This demonic comedy. Forever trapped here unto all eternity listening to the Ma and the Da acting out the same old, same old. Or unto that moment when they pull the plug" (70). Abandoned by her mother to a life with a father more interested in saving the working classes than raising his child, "Daughter" attempts to defend herself with backtalk, even in her muteness, fighting to counterbalance her mother's sentimentality and challenge her father's neglect:

Mother: You were such a happy child.

Daughter: No I wasn't. I lived in a state of perpetual fear.

Mother: And you brought us such deep deep joy.

Daughter: Pull the other one. For Jaysus sake. I remember you hated motherhood. You beat me black and blue on a regular basis [. . .] After you left home he'd look at me sometimes like I was from another species. He'd scratch his head and give me a few bob.

(63–64)

But, of course, whereas Sinta is able to talk her way out of her trauma, "Daughter"'s insubordination remains unheard and, thus, she is trapped in "the place between . . . The Bardo" (77), a suspended animation emblematic of the gaps in sympathy and the failure of apprehension and emotional attentiveness that seem to have entombed her long before her suicidal coma.

In a recent interview, Paula Meehan has observed that at the center of each of her radio dramas—and, one might add, her stage plays—"there is some [. . .] traumatic grief," which she places in a wider social context: "There has been such rhetoric [in the past few years] about how great we are and how great everyone is; everyone has a job and second home. In fact, really, underneath—not far underneath—there's this terrible experience of trauma" (Woods). If, as Terrence Des Press has argued, "the hidden spirit" of an oppressed community resides in its laughter, allowing it to gain "a margin of self-possession [. . .] a small priceless liberty, urging us to take heart" (220), then Lil Sweeney and Janey Mack have found a means to displace, if they cannot deny, the traumatic realities they face. Even in the [End Page 109] somber worlds of Cell, Three hander, and The Lover, Meehan's resourceful women discover a "small priceless liberty" in talking back, and in stealing a glimpse out a prison window to the pastoral world beyond the bars—each moments of self-possession and "heart."

In this context, Paula Meehan's choice of genres—stage plays and radio dramas—can be read as an extension of the community activism that has informed her long-time work in schools, prisons, and recovery groups.9 Inspired by her engagement with women in Mountjoy Prison and elsewhere, and supported by Calypso's mission to "change the world" (qtd. in Merriman 280), Cell deploys the power of theater to inject their voices and perspectives back into the wider public arena from which they have been excluded by incarceration. Capitalizing on the ubiquitous technology of RTÉ, Paula Meehan's radio plays call upon the widest imaginable Irish audience—students listening to podcasts; commuters driving home from jobs in retail, IT, and banking; people preparing dinner in council flats in Limerick or the far western suburbs of Dublin or a town land in County Leitrim—to attend to the traumas of people they might otherwise never consider. Demanding that its audience enter imaginatively into their neighbors' realities or eavesdrop on the most intimate exchanges, theater is inherently a political forum in which the private becomes public, where the "individual [exists] in the flux of history" (O'Halloran and Maloy 10), where a community can be called to recognize its own stories or to reconsider its apparent destiny. Into the public space of an evolving Ireland, where social and economic struggles belie, for many, the promises of global capitalism and material prosperity, Meehan interjects the voices of those who have been dismissed from the larger consensus. Alluding to a remark by Hélène Cixous in a preface to a collection of Cixous's own plays, Meehan has observed that "theater is an arena where [. . .] there is identification with suffering [. . .] where you pity through identification. And through laughter" (O'Halloran and Maloy 10). Clearly, for PaulaMeehan, theater is therefore also the space in which to accomplish critical culture work.

Kim McMullen

Kim McMullen teaches Irish literature and Modernist literature at Kenyon College, where she is also chair of the English Department. She has written essays on Irish topics for journals such as Novel, Women's Studies, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, and The Kenyon Review. She is currently completing a study entitled Decolonizing Rosaleen: Gender, Nationality, and Sexuality in Contemporary Irish Literature and Film.

Notes

1. Foster's assertion that Ireland has been "reinvented" in the economic boom of the 1990s is widely shared. However, some critics, such as Peadar Kirby, argue that Foster's assumption that there is a cultural (rather than simply an economic) basis for change in Ireland presupposes a wider consensus about the direction in which the country is heading than actually [End Page 110] exists. For Kirby and others, "the [economic] bases for Ireland's reinvention are seen as having very ambiguous social and political consequences" ("Contested Pedigrees" 32). More than simple "begrudgery" (Foster's term for Kirby and other critics of the boom), Kirby's fundamental critique focuses on the distorting effect of global capitalism and commodity culture on Irish society.

2. Given the current worldwide recession sparked by the U.S. banking crisis, it is sobering to learn that the term "Celtic Tiger" was coined by the U.S. investment firm Morgan Stanley in 1994. See Kirby, Gibbons, Cronin 17.

3. For further discussion of Paula Meehan's work in relationship to socioeconomic inequity in the New Ireland, see Mary Trotter, "A Sort of Nation coming: Invasion, Exile, and the Politics of Home in Modern Irish Drama." Theatre Symposium 9 (2001): 95–106; Kathryn Kirkpatrick, "'Between Breath and No Breath': Witnessing Class Trauma in Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya." An Sionnach 1:2 (Fall 2005): 47–64; Maria Kurdi, "Updating Male Texts, Humour, and Theatricality: The Representation of Marginalised Irish Womanhood in Paula Meehan's Mrs. Sweeney." EPONA: E-journal of Ancient and Modern Celtic Studies 1:2 (2007): 1–9. <http://www.epona-journal.hu>.

4. In this context, it is interesting to consider the analogy R. F. Foster has drawn between drug traders in the 1980s and the morally questionable, financial free-wheeling and profit-mongering of the era of Taoiseach Charles Haughey. Despite "a quarter-million unemployed, double digit interest figures, [and] factory closures" (83), Haughey promised a rosy economy while he and his cronies profited hugely from various government deals. Arguing that those who were "actually making money in the Haughey era" were political insiders and gray marketeers, Foster observes dryly: "At another social level, family businesses established in the heroin-trading flats of Weaver Court, Dolphin's Barn, rather than in the mansions of Killiney and Ballsbridge, cemented their money and power in these years: the black economy of bundles of cash transported in sports hold alls operated all across the social spectrum" (85).

5. I am deeply grateful to Shonagh Hill and Eileen Denn Jackson for drawing my attention to the Irish Penal Reform Trust's educational packet and to the IPRT for supplying me a copy. Victor Merriman further reports that Cell "attract[ed] funding from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform because it addressed the issue of women's experience in prison" (281).

6. For an excellent discussion of this scene in the wider context of the ecological themes in Paula Meehan's poetry, see Kathryn Kirkpatrick, "Between Country and City: Paula Meehan's Eco-feminist Poetics."

7. See especially Kirkpatrick's incisive discussion of the capacity of a "Buddhist perspective [to] transform the incompatible [elements of trauma and [End Page 111] violence] into paradox, radically incorporating an awareness of death by inviting it into the midst of life" ("'Between Breath and No Breath'" 52).

8. First broadcast in 2005 as part of The Seven Ages series, and produced by Daniel Reardon with Lisa Lamb in the role of Sinta McGrath, The Lover received the 2005 Phonographic Performance Ireland Award for Drama (Music for Dogs 4, 33).

9. In addition to the stage plays and radio dramas under consideration here, Meehan has authored three plays for children, Kirkle (1995), The Voyage (1997), and The Wolf in Winter (2004). While the themes of these plays are appropriate to the ages of their audiences, it is important to observe that they, too, perform the significant culture work noteworthy in Meehan's plays for adults. Meehan reports that when The Voyage (a shipboard tale focused on a family fleeing the famine) traveled to schools in Dublin, children in subsequent workshops readily extended their insights about characters dealing with the traumas of 1847 into their own lives, marked by losses "from AIDS related illness got as a result of intravenous drug use" (O'Halloran and Maloy 15).

Works Cited

Calypso Productions Homepage. 18 March 2009. Calypso Production Company, Dublin Ireland. <http://www.calypso.ie/>.
Des Press, Terence. "Holocaust Laughter?" Writing and the Holocaust. Ed. Berel Lang. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 216-33.
Foster, R.F. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Huckabay, Keith. "Black Humor and the Theatre of the Absurd: Ontological Insecurity Confronted." Black Humor: Critical Essays. Ed. Alan R. Pratt. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. 323-40.
Inglis, Tom. Global Ireland: Same Difference. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Kirby, Peadar. "Contested Pedigrees of the Celtic Tiger." Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy. Eds. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin. London: Pluto Press, 2002. 21-37.
Kirby, Peader, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin. "Introduction: The Reinvention of Ireland: A Critical Perspective." Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy. Eds. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin. London: Pluto Press, 2002. 1-18.
Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. "'Between Breath and No Breath': Witnessing Class Trauma in Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya." An Sionnach 1:2 (Fall 2005): 47-64.
———. "Between Country and City: Paula Meehan's Eco-feminist Poetics." Out of the Earth: Eco-Critical Readings of Irish Texts. Ed. Christine Cusick. Cork: Cork University Press, 2009 (forthcoming).
La Capra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. [End Page 112]
McMullan, Anna. "Unhomely Stages: Women Taking (a) Place in Irish Theatre." Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face of Irish Theatre. Ed. Dermot Bolger. Dublin: New Island Books, 2001.
Meehan, Paula. Cell. Dublin: New Island Books, 2000.
———. Dharmakaya. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest UP, 2002.
———. Janey Mack is Going to Die: Music for Dogs: Work for Radio. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2008. 9-29.
———. The Lover. Music for Dogs: Work for Radio. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2008. 31-53.
———. Mrs. Sweeney. Rough Magic: First Plays. Ed. Siobhán Burke. Dublin: New Island Books, 1999. 393-464.
———. Pillow Talk. Loughcrew: Gallery, 1994.
———. Threehander. Music for Dogs: Work for Radio. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2008. 55-103.
Merriman, Victor. "Songs of Possible Worlds: Nation, Representation and Citizenship in the Work of Calypso Productions." Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre. Ed. Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000. 280-91.
Moane, Geraldine. "Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision." Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy. Eds. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin. London: Pluto Press, 2002. 109-23.
O'Casey, Sean. Juno and the Paycock. Three Dublin Plays. London: Faber and Faber (1924), 1998.
O'Donnell, Ian. Cell: Information and Action on Irish Prisons. Dublin: Calypso Productions in association with Public Communications Centre and Irish Prison Reform Trust, n.d.
O'Halloran, Eileen, and Kelli Maloy. "Interview with Paula Meehan." Contemporary Literature. 43:1 (Spring 2002): 1-27. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209014>.
O'Reilly, Anne. Sacred Play: Soul-journeys in Contemporary Irish Theatre. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2004.
Praga, Ines. "Paula Meehan" (interview). Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics. Ed. Jacqueline Hurtley, et al. Atlanta: Costerus New Series 115. 71-81.
Stenson, Sara E. "Paula Meehan." Irish Women Writers: An A to Z Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
Woods, Vincent. "Interview with Paula Meehan." RTÉ Radio One: The Arts Show. 7 November 2008. <http://www.rte.ie/arts/2008/1107/theartsshow.html>. [End Page 113]

Share