Camp Comedy and “Submerged Trouble”: Molly Keane's Queer Collaborations

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1930s and 1940s, the Anglo-Irish writer Molly Keane embarked on a collaborative playwriting career with her close friend and co-author John Perry, facilitated by a network of gay men in London’s West End. Through a comparative reading of Treasure Hunt, a collaboratively-written play that was adapted into a single-authored novel by Keane, this article argues that her unique camp sensibility was honed through her collaboration with queer creatives. Collaborative work opened up new sexual and gendered possibilities for Keane and helped her to become attuned to the dynamics of the closet as a framework for repression, trauma and “submerged trouble”. Ultimately, she depicts Anglo-Ireland—a colonial class studiously ignoring the changing world around them—as an exercise in closetedness, as engaging in a camp response to the “bad feelings” that pervade the Big House in independent Ireland.