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Katie Roche (Caoilfhionn Dunne) is a confident young woman keen to elevate herself beyond her current station as a housekeeper. She considers joining a convent; she fancies herself a potential saint. She becomes briefly convinced that she has aristocratic blood, tainted only by her ‘illegitimate’ conception. And when her employer’s brother Stanislaus Gregg (Sean Campion) turns up she discovers  another path open to her: marriage. And yet, Katie’s search for freedom and growth only end up constraining her further, which is all the more painful because her agency, and lack of it, appears to have chosen her future.

In many ways, Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche is a play about a woman who discovers that her very desires collude in her oppression; that all she can do is work within a trap that has already sprung. In this sense, the play is a classic critique of patriarchal power: Katie’s society (within the microcosm of the home) sustains itself by coercing women to internalise and reproduce a web of desires that work against their interests. Katie becomes a prism that scandalously reveals the contradictions of this structure. And she laughs at it outright even as it renders her increasingly powerless.

Both Dunne and Caroline Byrne, the director, have made sure to draw out the comedy that lies within the lines of this tragedy. But in this play, comedy is deployed as critique rather than relief. Katie moves around the stage awkwardly and hurriedly, performing her housework with the exaggerated gestures of a clown, talking fast and loud, and humorously berating the other characters with an accent that, to Stanislaus’s dismay, she refuses to “improve.”

It is precisely this refusal to progress that causes her the most trouble. For Katie does not want to change herself, more so her relation to others. What convinces her to marry Stan, it seems, is not only that he offers her an (emotional, economic, or literal) escape from the situation into which she was born. But more importantly, Katie understands that this step might enable her to establish herself more solidly in her home and, crucially, on her own terms. The tragedy that unfolds is one of a woman who finds that the more she tries to build a relationship with what she understands as her home, the more hostile and alien that place becomes.

The minimal set underscores this paradoxical development: the stage is covered in a layer of earth when the lights go up. As Katie starts to change her life, she literally clears white paths through the dirt from which she emerged: her platform will soon be in order. But by the end, the stage, which should be pristine white, is scattered with dirt and looks more disarranged than at the beginning. Meanwhile, behind all this an enormous guillotine-shaped shard of glass descends incrementally as the play goes on. Between scenes the set changes in a dreamlike flurry of lights and ambient music, propelling Katie into the next stage of a life that she has less and less control over.

While some people may find this contemporary take on Katie Roche jarring, and even if at times the acting and symbolism is cruder than it need be, it is worth seeing what Byrne and Dunne’s daring does to this underrated play.

 

Katie Roche was at the Abbey Theatre through 23 Sept. 2017.