Representations of Sexual Violence in Irish and Indian Theatre

This thesis examines representations of sexual violence on the contemporary Irish and Indian stage over the past three decades. It analyses the aesthetic strategies of theatrical representation, considering the social dimensions of violence and performance. The selected plays lead us to interrogate the ways in which we “see” sexual violence, and how we “hear” it—or, rather, how we hide and silence the survivors who have suffered from it. The thesis seeks to demonstrate how depictions of sexual violence in different cultural contexts display political and regional particularities but are also yoked by analogous strategies. These strategies relate to the fact that sexual violence is not limited to one culture but is a global issue that we have to understand in order to change. The endeavour here has been to study the plays and dramatists while paying attention to their cultural specificity. Through comparative analysis of Indian and Irish theatre, shared patterns and tropes will emerge, such as polluted land, body memory, questioning the credibility of survivors, and the appeal/abhorrence of a ravaged body. This is a unique project: contemporary Irish and Indian theatre have often been independently compared to the British stage but have never been juxtaposed alongside each other and this project is a timely step towards addressing two glaring knowledge gaps regarding transnational theatre and global attitudes to sexual violence.