The rumblings underneath a year celebrating women
The long-mooted all-women’s programme is here. It seems like a trap after all.
In November 2015, during the early pulsations of the Waking the Feminists movement, the novelist Belinda McKeon appeared on an episode of the Irish Times’s Women’s Podcast discussing what the Abbey Theatre should do after unveiling a programme of plays nearly all authored by men. The newspaper’s theatre critic Fintan O’Toole suggested, as a short-term solution, that the venue host a festival of women’s plays. McKeon cut him off: “That’s exactly what doesn’t need to happen.”
“What needs to happen is that the thinking about gender balance needs to become an everyday part of how things work,” she said, urging the Abbey to instead host a meeting to hear-out the industry’s artists. McKeon sounded instinctually alive to the illusions of tokenism, how it can resemble a kind of service, when it’s really a dangerous symbol of effort – and, worse, a potential future defence by an establishment uninterested in change. (“No plays by women? Remember that festival we put on?”).
Nine years later, after improvements made to programming in the wake of insightful research and fierce campaigning, there is, bizarrely, a version of that programme that O’Toole suggested. 2024 is undoubtedly a year front-loading women playwrights.