This essay asks: what is it that women's dramatic literature exposes and interrogates? It proposes that drama by women disrupts hegemonic narratives, resulting in a popular and critical perception that such work exists outside of the mainstream dramatic tradition. The near total absence of plays by women from Dublin's main stages, the construction of the national repertory around a body of work by male authors, and the critical response to work by women when it is performed, suggest difficulties in producing critical responses to women's writing, and in situating that writing within the national tradition. This essay examines the question of the interrogatory power of women's drama, through an exploration of work by three professional playwrights--Marina Carr, Anne Devlin, and Christina Reid--with an emphasis on their stylistic and textual engagement with dominant tropes and conventions of the Irish theatre. The main focus here is on their interventions into dominant identity narratives of postcoloniality, nationalism, and loyalism. Although the playwrights come from the Republic, and the Northern Irish nationalist and loyalist communities respectively, it is not the intention to designate any of them as the 'voice' of her community, or to suggest that the cultures of this island be unproblematically subsumed under one label. The works are chosen to illustrate the formal and thematic range of late twentieth-century women's dramatic writing, and to examine their engagement with dominant cultural narratives, as they seek to incorporate previously invisible and inaudible female experience. Anne Devlin confronts the figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in After Easter, having presented a terrible maimed effigy of the woman-nation in Ourselves Alone. Christina Reid explores the dynamic between cultural and political frameworks in loyalism, and the exclusion of women from positions of power, in plays that assert the primary importance of family and domestic life. In the process, she creates new symbols of identity and community from the domestic world, as does Marina Carr in By the Bog of Cats ... In both their dramatic inventions, china cups and white dresses take on new layers of meaning and significance.
