Strained Dependency

The post-Agreement period has seen theatreNeoliberalismtheatre and and performance endeavour to map the struggles of marginalised groups to claim their place as equally a part of politics and society in Northern Ireland. The plays and performances discussed in this book tell a strikingly consistent story: that an enduring peace requires a shift away from forms of social life organised by patriarchal nationalisms as well as vigilance towards the compensatory appeals of revanchism and nostalgia, particularly among men. But rather than simply petitioning spectators to recognise overlooked identities, many practitioners have also sought to dramatise the shifting distribution of power and vulnerability that drives the constitution of political identities in the first place. Such work has been invested in tracing the darker consequences of a liberal peace that was supposed to render militarism and patriarchy a thing of the past. Rather than providing a materially abundant common ground to supersede political claims based on territory and exclusivist identities, the market has left many communities, those affected most by the conflict, feeling ever more precarious. As so ably diagnosed by the likes of Gary Mitchell,Mitchell, Gary Stacey Gregg,Gregg, Stacey Owen McCafferty, and Abbie SpallenSpallen, Abbie (among others), the failures of neoliberalism have played a crucial role in re-energising the very patriarchal forms of subjectivity and social life the peace promised to banish forever. It is all well and good to recognise, as the 1998 Agreement did, the constitutive interdependency of Irish and British identities in the North, but it is another thing entirely to develop political and cultural forms that are genuinely capable of fostering interdependency on materially egalitarian terms. Illuminating the critical possibilities that open up when inequalities of gender and class are thought together, and where economic violence is understood alongside sectarianism to be a salient political challenge, is perhaps the most important political gesture that contemporary performance makers have made, for in doing so they have created spaces to imagine alternatives, however modest or fleeting, to the predominant organisation of Northern Irish society. One lesson that can be derived from such work is that a break with the status quo will only be achieved by locating ways—both old and new—of levering ties of interdependency to reshape prevailing political and economic circumstances.