The American playwright Tennessee Williams once said: “If I got rid of my demons, I would lose my angels.” No sentence could better describe the human condition of the characters in the work of Irish playwright Deirdre Kinahan - all are shaped by the injuries that they have experienced in their past that determine their present or prevent their future. And at the same time they all have a vague hope that every negative experience can always have a positive effect, as it were, the reversal of Adorno's verdict: There is perhaps something right in wrong.
Kinahan, born in 1968 in Dublin, is so far almost unknown in the German-speaking world - although she has been writing pieces since 1999, there are now around 30. Kinahan, who has lived in County Meath, Ireland with her husband and two daughters, since 1998. By chance: she was, as she relates in an interview, an aspiring young actress who also worked for an organization that offered Dublin courses for prostitutes in literature and computer skills. This should give them the chance to change their profession. When the women saw the actress Kinahan on stage, they asked if she could write a play about and for her - this is how BÈ CARNA (the old Gaelic term for prostitution), a play consisting of five monologues about fates, came about of easy women.
Emphasis on family life
Even after their debut, Kinahan's pieces should continue to touch heavily socially critical issues: "Passage" (2001) tells the story of the lesbian career woman Kate, who has to deal with the death of her mother and thus her Irish past - at Kinahan, the family is always one determining space whose traumas always have something to do with national history. So it is hardly surprising that one of the author's role models is the Irish playwright John Millington Synge (unfortunately also far too seldom played in this country), who invented the unheroic hero for dramatic literature with "Playboy of the Western World" (legendary to today is Peter Palitzsch's production from 1948 at the Berliner Ensemble). Kinahan told him “Attaboy, Mr. Synge!”(2002) set a newer monument - perhaps also because Synge, with“ Deirdre, Queen of Pain ”, ignorantly gave the author herself a piece and a premise avant la lettre. And his quote “I remember the things I want to forget and forget the things I don't want to forget” could also come from a character from Kinahan.
Dedicated theater maker
It is also worth taking a look at Kinahan's pieces because they are formally very different in terms of their subject matter similarity: That goes from the delicate chamber play “Melody” (2005), which depicts a bizarre yet tender encounter on a park bench - the one, so to speak positive variant of Edward Albee's "Zoo Story" - about the complex work "Bogboy", a piece about the IRA, told in nested letter form with flashback sequences, to the large painting of the century "Crossing" (2018), which depicts an English village community from 1919 to 2019 . All of the author's pieces are published by the London publisher Nick Hern Books, and there are hardly any German translations to date. Many of her works have now been awarded prizes.The author herself is a very dedicated practical theater maker - she founded the Tall Tales Theater Company and is a member of Theater Forum Ireland & The Abbey Theater.