Playwright Teresa Deevy's revival from the sidelines

Waterford woman Teresa Deevy was acclaimed as one of the nation’s best playwrights. So why has she faded from memory, asks Marjorie Brennan

TERESA DEEVY isn’t a name you’d often see listed among Ireland’s great playwrights. The Waterford woman’s plays were performed in Ireland, England and the US, but she has been long forgotten in her home place and beyond. Now Deevy’s work is being reclaimed from history and a major production of her best-known work, Katie Roche, is being staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

While there has been an increase in scholarly research conducted on Deevy in the last decade or so, much of it due to the revival of her work by New York’s Mint Theatre, her plays have rarely been performed on stage in Ireland. Her sidelining is all the more mystifying given her extraordinary life.