The Theology of Teresa Deevy, Exhuming the Playwright's Life and Later Works

Abstract

In the first half of the 1930s Teresa Deevy, a deaf writer from Waterford, was one of the most prolific and acclaimed woman playwrights in the world. At the height of her career, Deevy was a favourite of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, heralded as 'the most important dramatist writing for the Irish theater' by Abbey producer Lennox Robinson. Reviews from her contemporaries named Deevy 'the new voice of the Irish theatre,' and a rather relentless voice at that. She was a political radical and proto-feminist whose early writings chronicled the lives of working class Irish women, all caged in by social convention and left with limited options. Perhaps it was her gender politics that caused the increasingly conservative Abbey Theatre to turn its back on her in 1936, effectively ending her career as an 'Abbey playwright.' Yet despite these setbacks, Deevy never stopped writing. In the wake of new media, she became an early innovator of television and radio, authoring works for both mediums in addition to (mostly) unproduced stage plays. This dissertation engages with Deevy's work from this period, specifically her final three plays, Supreme Dominion (1957), In the Cellar of My Friend (1957), and One Look and What it Led To (1962). Across these three works, I observe an emerging theological framework that explores the profound dimensions of historical revisionism, revision of the self, and feminist revisionist mythmaking: thus, framing these plays as not only the work of a dramatist, but also that of a theologian. In this vein, 'the theology of Teresa Deevy' is not only a framework with which one might interpret these plays, but rather an invitation to reconsider the spiritual and temporal qualities of the Catholic imaginary.