Performing Grief: A Case Study from Irish Theatre Performing Grief Conference, University of Paris (Sorbonne)

For the professional actor working within the theatre of modernity, acting can sometimes entail a process inextricably connected to an experience of grief-- often incoherent expressions of grief for an agency that is felt as expansively subjunctive and yet has to be executed within the constraints of the institutional theatres internal protocols of obedience, and according to the regulations that govern the production of theatre within a capitalist society. This grief can be especially intense, I want to argue, when (as is so often the case in Ireland) the professional theatre sets out to engage with performance traditions that pre-date or exist outside of and apart from the theatre as an institution. My paper proposes an examination of this cluster of ideas in terms of the relationship between the Irish actress Siobhn McKennas career as a political and cultural activist and her final and much celebrated theatrical performance as Mommo in Tom Murphys 1985 play Bailegangaire. In Murphys play what begins as Mommos senile and barely decipherable narrative is revealed gradually by the action as a personal lament for the tragic death of her infant son. As is conventional within the theatre of modernity, then, the plays narrative brings the audience to a point of recognition: Mommos storytellingshown as digressive, highly performative and as rooted in the Irish language tradition of the seanachais exposed as a subterfuge for the trauma of personal loss. In short, the audience is encouraged to recognize that Mommo is a victim to a deleterious and compulsive attachment to an Irish-language based performance tradition. It is deleterious because of the way in which it is shown as structured around strategies of digression and avoidance that prioritize the communitys survival and competitive self-interest over personal reflection and self-fulfillment. Nevertheless, what took place in McKennas performance at the premiere of the Druid Theatre Companys performance of Bailegangaire in December 1985 entailed a far more unsettling arrangement of affect in which McKennas moving performance in the final scene managed to ratify this storytelling tradition as a vital and still-appropriate cultural resource. As I hope to explain, this was an experience that led to tension between McKenna and the plays director Garry Hynes. On the one hand, Hynes sought both to reconcile the production of Bailegangaire to the theatre companys modernizing agenda, and to assert her directorial authority as McKennas employer. McKennas own experience of this long-running production, on the other hand, is marked, increasingly, by expressions of grief.