‘I suppose I feel disappeared meself’: Shamed and Silenced Characters in Deirdre Kinahan’s BogBoy

Kinahan’s one-act play BogBoy presents the banal, everyday tragedy of Brigit, a young woman from a poor background, who drops out of drug rehabilitation and therefore loses access to her infant daughter. She is a dispossessed, marginalized character, one who is silenced, buried, or ‘disappeared’ from the discourses of contemporary Ireland. In the plot, she is connected to other marginal figures including the ‘bogboy’ of the title – Gerard, a victim of paramilitary murder – and her rural neighbour Hughie. Thus Brigit’s personal tragedy is just one strand in Kinahan’s ongoing exploration of economic and social dispossession in neoliberal, neo-colonial Ireland, seen also from her early work Bé Carna (1999) to her recent comedic adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs as The Unmanageable Sisters (2018).