Women and Marriage: Hazel Ellis' Gate Theatre Plays of the 1930s in Context

This essay considers two unpublished plays written by Hazel Ellis in the 1930s and produced by the Gate Theatre, Dublin, where Ellis had started out as an actor. While the two plays appear to have little in common, the substance of each echoes the public debate in Ireland at the time regarding marriage, divorce, and women in the workplace. These were the years leading up to the adoption of the 1937 Constitution, which sanctified the nuclear family and the central role of the wife and mother within it as the moral cornerstone of society. In both plays the female characters struggle to make meaningful choices within a restrictive, patriarchal environment. Portrait in Marble (1936) is a historical biographical drama dealing with Lord Byron’s turbulent relationships with two very different women: his lover, the outrageous (and married) Lady Caroline Lamb, and his wife, the intellectual and prudent Annabella Milbanke, who eventually chooses to separate from her husband. Women without Men (1938) features an all-female cast and is set in the teachers’ sitting room of a private girls’ boarding school modelled on the French School in Bray, Co. Wicklow, which Ellis had attended. It focusses on the anxieties, obsessions and grievances of the school’s teachers, all of whom are unmarried. This essay considers Ellis’ plays in the context of contemporary newspaper reporting about the low marriage rate in Ireland, legislation curtailing the right of married women to work in certain positions (the ‘marriage bar’), and the clerical and legal debate concerning divorce. Keywords: Hazel Ellis, Gate Theatre Dublin, Irish theatre, women, marriage, divorce, marriage bar