"Yer both talkin’ history. It ends at midnight." – the opened wound of trauma in Christina Reid’s Clowns

Abstract

Since the #WakingTheFeminists movement in Irish theatre, there has been a recrudescence of interest given to women playwrights who had been erased from the canon of the nation, focusing amongst other things on their contribution to Irish national identity and on their feminist messages. With this article, I would like to add to the discussion by focusing on the ways in which Christina Reid portrays the trauma left behind by the sectarian conflict in the North of Ireland on the women that were in its midst through an analysis of Clowns (1996), the sequel to one of her most famous plays, Joyriders (1986).

In Joyriders, the audience followed four teenagers from the Falls who lived as normally as they could in an atmosphere of violent conflict, until the play closed on the death of one of them, Maureen. In Clowns, set on the eve of the 1994 IRA ceasefire, the teenagers are back on the stage – even Maureen, unchanged, haunting her friend Sandra, who just came back to Belfast and grows more and more agitated throughout the play. Through distancing effects influenced by Brecht’s theories, the audience never really knows if Maureen really is haunting the stage or if she is a product of Sandra’s imagination, a symptom of the trauma she suffered when she witnessed her violent deaths ten years prior.

Through Sandra and Maureen’s relationship, Christina Reid challenges the masculine hegemonic discourse of the State at the time of the play, as it focused on peace negotiations and mourning for male heroes while relegating women’s suffering to the background. Maureen, a casualty of the conflict, is turned into a martyr for the cause by the population, but it is through Sandra’s descent into madness that the audience is confronted with the real trauma that the conflict left behind.