• Anne Devlin
• Marina Carr
• female characters
• Irish theatre
• 1990s

The works of Anne Devlin and Marina Carr portray female characters resisting patriarchal power by enacting different strategies.
Northern Irish playwright Anne Devlin's "Ourselves Alone" (1985) and "After Easter" (1994) engage with the male-dominated Republican community during the Troubles and portray women escaping this limiting environment through the physical crossing of borders and the metaphysical access to an otherworldly dimension.
Marina Carr's "Portia Coughlan" (1996) and "By the Bog of Cats..." (1998), instead, deal with patriarchal expectations of motherhood and female behaviour; Carr’s characters resist oppression by employing physical and psychological violence and ultimately find escape from their constraints through death. Similarly to Devlin's plays, in Carr's work the trope of exile functions as symbolic representation of these women's status as outsiders.