Mr. Browne, the lone Protestant Anglo-Irishman at the Misses Morkans’s party in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” offends the Catholic ladies by playing the part of a drunken stage Irishwoman. In order to perform the part of Mrs. Cassidy, Browne, with “sidling mimicry,”“assumed a very low Dublin accent”(D 183). This scene of failed performance in Dubliners is a rare instance of an Anglo-Irish character positioning himself as actor rather than audience. Browne’s stage Irish performance, with its mimicry of Catholic “low Dublin,” raises the question of what defines a nonmimetic Anglo-Irish performance.

In a very different instance of Anglo-Irish performance, the aptly named Miss Fitt in Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall reluctantly helps Mrs. Rooney down a precarious flight of stairs, referring to her act of begrudging charity as “The Protestant thing to do”(23). Altering the phrase,“the Christian thing to do,” Miss Fitt stresses the Protestantism of her actions so that her gesture of charity becomes a performance of identity directed vaguely at Mrs. Rooney and any listeners. In these works Joyce and Beckett both ask the question: what, in dramatic terms, do Protestants do? Dubliners and All That Fall depict the performative nature of Protestant identity in Ireland, particularly its claim