No abstract
This chapter interrogates the choices made by Amanda Coogan in collaboration with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf in the 2017 adaption of Teresa Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935), staged as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival at the Peacock Theatre. Produced by Lynette Morgan (Live Collision), the production – Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady – was an important moment in Irish performance practice in that it was designed to be equally accessible to deafened and hearing audiences. This chapter considers how directorial vision, collaborative authorship, design, and ensemble practice combine to expose the exclusions of theatre practice that prioritise spoken language. Additionally, the chapter analyses how spoken language-based texts can be transposed by gesture, image, and spatial, temporal, and sound design to become adaptations that reinvent, and destablise, the original text and simultaneously reflect on the wider socio-cultural environment from which that original text emanated.
Born in 1894, into a middle-class family with nationalist sympathies, Teresa Deevy was the youngest of thirteen children whose father died when she was two years old. Her mother prioritised her daughters' education and Teresa boarded in the Ursuline Convent a short distance from her home, taught by a community of Catholic sisters with one hundred years' experience in educating young women. St. Ursula's Annual (1911) to which Deevy contributed, reveals a formal and informal curriculum of music, sport, dramatic, critical and journalistic writing, and debating. A debate in 1911 asked audience and participants to consider whether women should have equal social and political rights with men (St. Ursula's Annual 10) while a series of guest lecturers to the school that year, gave lectures on Sheridan Le Fanu, approaches to studying history, the development of Irish music, Saint Bridget and, the genre of the passion play (St. Ursula's Annual 34). Regular school trips to musical recitals and concerts in the city occurred and students were encouraged to write and perform original plays. In an article entitled "Books We Have Read" Deevy's love of literature emanates from her reflections on the books she and her friends read that school year. Leeney references Deevy's contributions to the annual as evidence of an "optimistic, energetic and intellectually alive" (Irish Women Playwrights 161) young woman while O'Doherty asserts that they attest to an "infectious ebullience" ("Wife" 25). One can add that the prioritisation of social, cultural and intellectual concerns and the development of practical skills, evident within the activities described within the annual, provided the intellectual groundwork and commitment towards social and political activism that is manifested within The King of Spain's Daughter.Deevy submitted Reserved Ground and After To-Morrow to the Abbey reading committee in the 1920s. These were rejected, however, and the first of her plays, Reapers, was produced there in 1930. 2 While Reapers is no longer extant, quotations from it exist in articles critiquing Deevy's work written in the 1940s and 1950s and within her correspondence with Sahal in the mid-1950s. Jordan quotes a line attributed to the character of Jack Doherty who says "Pattie believes, and so do I, that life's meant to be lived, not Úna Kealy works as a lecturer in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT), Ireland. Úna is a principle investigator within the WIT research group entitled "Performing the Region", a research project that encompasses projects that seek to critically examine the place of playwrights and practitioners from the south east of Ireland within the narrative of Irish theatre while also considering the contribution made by women to this narrative.
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