Mimesis of Mimesis: Mise-en-abyme and the Ethics of (Re)presenting Trauma in Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls

Set in 1980s Derry, Northern Ireland, Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls is inevitably haunted by the legacy of the Troubles, yet it resists the communal frameworks of post-conflict storytelling. While much post-Troubles Northern Irish drama engages in the politics of truth and reconciliation, foregrounding testimony, collective memory, and the ethics of representing suffering, McGee’s play instead centers on two young female offenders whose fragmented recollections and guilt fall outside conventional categories of empathy or victimhood. Rather than recounting past events solely through linear narrative (diegesis), Girls and Dolls evokes the essence of what happened (mimesis) through mise-en-abyme; a self-reflexive structure in which scenes mirror each other, collapsing temporal boundaries and layering past and present. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas, this paper interprets McGee’s mise-en-abyme as a theatrical way of showing how representation recursively collapses—mimesis of mimesis—where the represented (trauma) and the representing (two offenders) spiral into ethical and narrative delay. Doll play, shifting narration, and unstable embodiment blur the boundary between storytelling and re-enactment, immersing the audience in a process where meaning is not recovered but endlessly postponed. Rather than reaffirming the ethical binaries often negotiated in post-Troubles narratives, victim and perpetrator, memory and history, empathy and guilt, Girls and Dolls dramatizes trauma as recursion and opacity. In doing so, it opens a space to reconsider the fragile boundaries between culpability and innocence, and to attend to the silenced voices of young offenders who suffer in exclusion, ethically unacknowledged and empathetically unheard.