“Hers and His”: Carolyn Swift, Alan Simpson, and Collective Creation at Dublin’s Pike Theatre

Abstract

This chapter examines issues of gender and attribution in the historical positioning of Dublin’s Pike Theatre Club, best known today for its 1957 production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, which led to the arrest of club co-founder Alan Simpson and, eventually, to the Pike’s demise. Yet, it was a series of late-night revues called Follies that ensured the club’s stability throughout the 1950s. Pike’s other co-founder and Simpson’s wife, Carolyn Swift, oversaw Follies, writing a significant portion of the shows, which also contained sketches devised by other company members. Existing research has overlooked the Follies and the use of collective creation in Pike productions. O’Gorman explores how the Pike was—from its inception—characterized by collaborative activities in which discrete roles and responsibilities often became blurred.