Spatial Politics, War Writing and Identity Negotiation in Frank McGuinness's Dolly West's Kitchen
Frank McGuinness's Dolly West's Kitchen (1999), set in an Irish border town during the Second World War, transforms the domestic kitchen into a political space where multiple boundaries—national, gendered, and class-based—converge and are renegotiated. This article offers an analysis across three dimensions: spatial politics, war writing, and identity negotiation. It reveals how the play, through the redistribution of power within an everyday domestic space, stages the decline of patriarchal authority and the emergence of female subjectivity; how it internalizes international conflict as familial trauma and class tension beneath the discourse of Irish "neutrality"; and how it achieves the legitimation of suppressed identities and the reconstruction of subjecthood through gender transgression and the active writing of cultural memory. Drawing on spatial theories, border theories and performativity theories, this article argues that Dolly West's Kitchen transcends the generic limits of domestic drama to become a vital theatrical text for understanding the spatial restructuring, border fluidity and identity crises that marked twentieth-century Irish society under the pressures of modernity.
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