The paper focuses on the Irish playwright Marina Carr’s play Portia Coughlan and its eponymous character. Portia is a woman who does not fit in the traditional gender roles assigned to women in the Irish society. Due to her behaviour, strongly influenced by her craving after her lost brother, and thus different from the rest of the characters, she is deemed eccentric, strange, and excluded from the “normal” society, and labelled as a mad person. However, it is possible to argue that what “disables” her are, in fact, the social standards she does not fit in. In order to fully understand Portia’s “madness,” it is important to look at the matrix of intersecting social and cultural factors, in other words, to examine the character through the prism of disability studies, gender studies, the trauma theory and Christina Wald’s concept of the Drama of Melancholia.