Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
By
Carmen Szabo
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PROLOGUE ........................................................................................................1
The Beginnings
CHAPTER THREE..........................................................................................121
LANGUAGES
CHAPTER FOUR............................................................................................159
ADAPTATIONS
EPILOGUE ......................................................................................................220
The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................232
THE BEGINNINGS…
1
The Crane Bag, Spring 1977 Vol. 1., No. 1, pp. 3-5.
2
The Crane Bag (1977), p. 3.
3
The Crane Bag, Spring 1977 Vol. 1., No. 1, pp. 3-5.
2 Prologue
4
The Crane Bag (1977), p. 4.
5
The Crane Bag (1977), p. 4.
6
The Crane Bag (1977), p. 5.
The Beginnings 3
Thus, by the second half of the 1990s, the fifth province became
a space “we are travelling towards” rather than a space that could be found in
one’s mind. The determining element for the definition of a new identity is
embodied in the continuous quest for this space rather than in the found space.
The morphology of the fifth province changes from an idealized, mythical space
to a sought-for space that is never reached, the focus being on the process of
looking for it. The fifth province becomes a solution to almost every dilemma
encountered by the Irish cultural discourse, from the general, postmodern
difficulty of reaching definitions to the fragmentation that characterized the Irish
sense of self since the Great Famine of 1845. The initial space of the fifth
province mutates both under the influence of postcolonialism and
postmodernism, becoming a possible solution for the schizophrenic
fragmentation of the Irish identity discourse.
Within this discourse, the two dimensions of identity, self-
definition and identification, are strategically linked into creating the so-called
hyphenated identities, the modern constructions of a globalized world with a
lingering taste of colonialism. However, in the recent critical studies on the
identity problem emerging in Northern Ireland, the hyphenated identities of the
type Anglo-Irish, Gaelic-Irish, Ulster-Scots, etc., are exchanged for hybrid
identities, presented as a possible solution for the historical conflict between
Republicans and Unionists in the North.
The idea of implementing hybrid identities within the discourse
of Northern Irish criticism derives from ongoing discussions on the problem of
postcolonialism and the possibility of its application as a mode of analysis in
Northern Ireland. These new types of identities are no less problematic than the
hyphenated identities. The main difficulty arises from the definition of
postcolonialism proper. According to Luke Gibbons, the “post” in
postcolonialism “signifies a form of historical closure”, but it is precisely the
absence of a sense of an ending “which has characterized the national narratives
of Irish history”8.
Thus, I would suggest, it seems difficult to apply
postcolonialism in the definition of a modern Irish identity, having in mind the
7
Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland – Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 100.
8
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture–Field Day Essays–Critical Conditions
(Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 34. I am referring here to Luke Gibbons and not
to other defining representatives of postcolonial theory because of his close connection
with Field Day.
4 Prologue
fact that the so-called “proper” postcolonial cultures include Ireland within the
power structures of the former British Empire9. However, if the decision is
made and postcolonialism is used as a theoretical mode of analysis, hybridity,
together with syncretism, appear as strategies of cultural mixing.
Postcolonialism is further complicated by the suspicion that it emerged as an
imperial strategy, defining the new relationships required by a modernized
centre for the binary construction Self/Other. Hybridity10 is seen as a new way
of luring the periphery now that it became so close and so dangerous for the
centre. The mirror image that defined the periphery as a double to the centre is
broken into a multitude of pieces but the centre still defines the role each part
has to play. Gibbons advocates a new way of negotiating identity through an
exchange with the Other, namely that of making “provisions, not just for
‘vertical’ mobility from the periphery to the centre, but for ‘lateral’ journeys
along the margins which short-circuit the colonial divide”11. It is important to
keep in mind the idea of reciprocal hybridity in the case of Northern Irish and
Irish identities, so that the hierarchical relationship between colonizer and
colonized ceases to be detrimental to the development of both cultures,
becoming a balanced, and should I say constructive, game of power relations.
Richard Kirkland considers that “the relative absence (until
recently) of hybridity as a means of analyzing Irish identity indicated a wariness
about the dangers of a possible cultural relativism unable to do anything more
than compare and contrast”12. Paradoxically, within the framework of the
postcolonial discourse applied to Irish cultural readings, the hybrid identity has
been defined “as marginal or ‘liminal’, given the fact that it is the meeting of
two cultures which have been posited as stable and homogeneous”13. However,
passing beyond the usual binary oppositions of the colonial discourse, the recent
9
For an in-depth discussion of the issue of postcolonialism and Ireland see Edward W.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), which includes the text of the
pamphlet Said wrote for Field Day, “Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature – Yeats
and Decolonization”, Field Day Pamphlets No. 15 (Derry: Field Day, 1988).
10
For a thorough analysis of hybridity and hyphenated identity within the postcolonial
discourse see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), or
Homi Bhabha, “‘Caliban Speaks to Prospero’: Cultural Identity and the Crisis of
Representation” in Philomena Mariani (ed.), Critical Fictions. The Politics of
Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 62-5.
11
Luke Gibbons, Transformations, p. 180.
12
Richard Kirkland, “Questioning the Frame: Hybridity, Ireland and the Institution”, in
Ireland and Cultural Theory – The Mechanics of Authenticity, edited by Colin Graham
and Richard Kirkland (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 210-228, p. 220.
13
Richard Kirkland, “Questioning the Frame: Hybridity, Ireland and the Institution”, p.
221.
The Beginnings 5
cultural thought finds that all cultural formations are essentially hybridized. That
is, there are no “pure”, “stable” and “homogeneous” cultures and thus the binary
oppositions tumble to the ground in front of a new pluralism that has at its basis
the idea of hybrid identity. The present impossibility of relying on binary
oppositions is enhanced by the definition of culture as a process of “iteration”
and “translation”. Through these processes, the idea of cultural “purity” and the
binary thinking are exchanged, quite suddenly, for a pluralism revolving around
hybrid identities.
The concept of the ideal fifth province of the imagination was
created with such a new type of identity in mind, notwithstanding the fact that
the a-political nature of this space denies hybridity. The articles and interviews
published in the first volume of The Crane Bag focus on the Northern Irish
“problems”, and continuously attempt to define new identities within the two
conflicting communities. This is doubled by the need to escape the
mythologization of Mother Ireland and the historical clichés attributed to Eamon
De Valera’s image of Ireland with its happy peasants and lovely lasses. The re-
consideration and re-evaluation of an existing cultural past and of the frames of
representation determining this past make up the main body of The Crane Bag
essays. The intention behind the creation of the fifth province subscribes to the
attempt to re-imagine the Irish cultural discourse by returning to a neutral space,
beyond history and myth. Nevertheless, the basic structure on which these
affirmations were constructed does not match the re-evaluative enterprise. The
main problem with the fifth province is that its creators and its users, changed its
position from a theoretical, Utopian space, existing in an a-political vacuum
which rendered possible its own Utopianism, into a space discovered by each
person “within himself”. This passage from an illusionary space of the mind to
an identity-creating zone from within the individual brought about the
politicization of the fifth province. The two communities, which are defined and
re-imagined in The Crane Bag essays, appropriate this space for themselves.
The individuals, belonging to both Republican and Unionist agendas, discover
this imaginary space “within themselves” only to define it within the boundaries
of the traditional binary oppositions of Self versus Other. This causes a fall from
the lofty perspective of an idyllic resolution into the binary structures that
characterize the critical discourse of Irish Studies.
Notwithstanding the problematic character of the fifth province –
or maybe precisely because of that – the Field Day Theatre Company borrowed
or, according to critics like Edna Longley and Lynda Henderson, hijacked the
term from The Crane Bag editors and built its policy on the quick-sand lying at
the foundations of this term. The main difference, however, is that with Field
Day the fifth province becomes openly political. It is initiated as a space of
dialogue between the two conflicting communities, only to be pushed later on
6 Prologue
towards a cultural expression of nationalism. The present study of the Field Day
Theatre Company attempts to dissect the company’s policy and observe the way
in which this policy is reflected in the theatrical productions. Was Field Day a
company which wanted to create a critical view through its theatre or did it use
the theatrical framework to impose a critical discourse? Was Field Day simply
the “cultural wing” of Sinn Fein and the IRA, as Edna Longley or Lynda
Henderson preferred to see it, or indeed did they try to give voice to a new
critical discourse, challenging the old frames of representation? The fact that
they constructed their policy on the basis of the fifth province is not
encouraging, but it is worth analyzing the way in which Field Day applied this
concept to their own needs of creating a foundation for the ideological
manifesto of the company.
In an interview for The Irish Times Brian Friel, one of the co-
founders of Field Day together with Stephen Rea in 1980, recognized the fact
that the fifth province was appropriated by Field Day in an attempt to use it as
basis for their policy. Friel suggested that the fifth province
“may well be a province of the mind through which we hope to devise another
way of looking at Ireland, or another possible Ireland – an Ireland that first must
be articulated, spoken, written, painted, sung but then may be legislated for.”14
14
The Irish Times, 18 September 1984.
15
The Irish Times, 18 September 1984.
The Beginnings 7
“we must never cease to keep our mythological images in dialogue with history;
because once we do we fossilize. That is why we will go on telling stories,
inventing and re-inventing myths, until we have brought history home to
itself.”16
16
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland” in Ireland’s Field Day (London:
Hutchinson, 1985), p. 80.
17
Stephen Rea in John Gray, “Field Day Five Years On”, The Linenhall Review,
Summer 1985, pp. 4-9.
8 Prologue
18
Brian Friel in an interview for The Sunday Press, 30 August 1981.
19
Brian Friel quoted in John Gray, “Field Day Five Years On”, The Linenhall Review,
Summer 1985, p. 5.
20
Seamus Deane, “What is Field Day?” in Programme notes to Brian Friel’s version of
Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, 1981.
21
The building played a determining role in Brian Friel’s pre-Field Day play The
Freedom of the City (London: Faber and Faber, 1974).
22
Stephen Rea in Mitchell Harris, “Field Day and the Fifth Province”, in An Gael,
Summer 1985, New York, p. 11.
The Beginnings 9
23
Stephen Rea in John Gray, “Field Day Five Years On” in The Linenhall Review,
Summer 1985, pp. 4-10.
24
Stephen Rea in John Gray, 1985.
25
Seamus Deane, “What is Field Day?”, in Programme notes to Anton Chekhov’s Three
Sisters in a version by Brian Friel, produced by Field Day in 1981.
26
Seamus Deane in Programme notes to Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
10 Prologue
Stephen Rea, was a “radical snapping of the links with the past”, including the
cultural past represented by Yeats and the Celtic Revival. Seamus Deane argues:
“it is impossible to do without ideas of tradition, but it is necessary to disengage
from the traditions of the ideas which the literary revival and the accompanying
political revolution sponsored so successfully”27.
27
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: the tradition of an idea”, in Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 56.
28
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles”, p. 58.
29
Seamus Deane, “What is Field Day?” in Programme notes to Anton Chekhov’s Three
Sisters.
The Beginnings 11
30
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland”, in Ireland’s Field Day (London:
Hutchinson, 1985), p. 61.
31
Seamus Deane, “Remembering the Irish Future”, The Crane Bag, Ireland: Dependence
and Independence (Dublin: Crane Bag, 1984), pp. 81-92, p. 90.
32
Declan Kiberd in “Anglo-Irish Attitudes”, Ireland’s Field Day, (London: Hutchinson,
1985), pp. 83-105, p. 84.
33
Gerry Smith, “Decolonization and Criticism: Towards a Theory of Irish Critical
Discourse” in Ireland and Cultural Theory – The Mechanics of Authenticity edited by
Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 29-49, p. 31.
34
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Souvenir Press, 1974), p.
120.
35
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
12 Prologue
not a regression to an imaginary age prior to modernity (as Yeats would have
imagined it), but one that addresses itself to the problems caused by partition”,
to the contemporary issues faced by the Northern Irish community, both
nationalist and unionist. Field Day tried to help restore the community spirit in
the North by creating a theatre company for the people, but also a company for
“poets, philosophers, dreamers and politicians”39, a melting pot from which a
new identity could spring to life.
The main body of the Field Day policy was presented in the
Preface to the first collective edition of the company’s pamphlets. It read:
“All the directors felt that the political crisis in the North and its reverberations
in the Republic had made the necessity of a reappraisal of Ireland’s political and
cultural situation explicit and urgent. They all believed that Field Day could and
should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analysis of
the established opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both a
symptom and a cause of the current situation. The collapse of constitutional and
political arrangements and the recrudescence of the violence which they had
been designed to repress or contain, made this a more urgent requirement in the
North than in the Republic.”40
39
Gerard Delanty, 1995.
40
Preface to Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. vii-viii.
41
Seamus Deane, “Canon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland”, in Jean Lundy and
Aodán Mac Póilin (eds.), Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster (Lagan
Press: Belfast, 1992), pp. 22-32, p. 25.
14 Prologue
42
Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 66
The Beginnings 15
43
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).
16 Prologue
useful to examine the idea of event and its general implications for the act of
reception.”44
44
Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences – A Theory of Production and Reception (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 45.
45
Seamus Deane in the Programme Notes to Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters in a version
by Brian Friel and produced by Field Day in 1981.
46
Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 35.
The Beginnings 17
problems. The “place” as the most common signal of art and the theatre building
as a cultural institution further shape the spectator’s experience. The
architectural elements of a community centre, a union hall, or of factory gates
will impose ideologically on performance and on the audience’s perception.
This must have happened to the Derry audience the first night of Field Day’s
production of Brian Friel’s Translations. Many of these people entered for the
first time in their lives a space symbolizing the oppressive power. One could
draw a parallel between the image of the Derry audience entering and
“disrupting” the space of power and that of the characters Lilly, Skinner and
Michael entering the Guildhall and “taking over” in Brian Friel’s The Freedom
of the City47. The three characters, driven in by the forces of power after a Civil
Rights march, experience the same exultation as the Derry audience would have
in disrupting a closed space of power and politics. Both characters and audience
cross the boundaries between the communal and the political in an attempt to
change or restructure the well-established system of power. Between the
entrance and the violent death of the characters, there is an uplifting experience
of freedom and solidarity. As John McGrath comments, the power of theatre
relies not necessarily in the possibility of causing a revolution but in the fact that
through the dramatic production the audience is made aware of the surrounding
social and political realities.
“The theatre can never cause a social change. It can articulate the pressures
towards one, help people to celebrate their strengths and maybe build their self-
confidence. It can be a public emblem of inner and outer events, and
occasionally a reminder, an elbow jogger, a perspective bringer. Above all, it can
be the way people can find their voice, their solidarity and their collective
determination.”48
47
Brian Friel’s play The Freedom of the City will be discussed in-depth later on in this
book.
48
John McGrath, The Year of the Cheviot – the Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black
Oil (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 56.
CHAPTER ONE
HISTORIES
1
The problematic distinctions between modernism and postmodernism and between
neoconservatism and postmodernism are discussed, among others, by Marvin Carlson in
his book Performance (London: Routledge, 2004).
2
Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991), p. 43.
3
Stewart Parker, Northern Star in Three Plays for Ireland (Birmingham: Oberon Books,
1989), p. 13.
Histories 19
chose for their premieres, the historically and politically determined city of
Derry/Londonderry, immersed in the continuous past they tried so hard to
escape.
Postmodern theory shows that the repression and bracketing off
of history reach their most disturbing dimension in the idea that aesthetic
abstractions can mask the immediate urban context of violence and death. The
city, following the centrifugal movement of culture, becomes unstructured,
fragmentary and discontinuous, being composed of overlapping elements that
might change independently from each other and lack a central perspective.
Derry/Londonderry contains in its image not only the postmodern tendency of
centrifugality but at the same time, the historical, political, sectarian tendency of
centripetality. These two forces interact, clash continuously, creating a
whirlpool of violence and despair. Johannes Birringer’s description of the city
of Berlin fits perfectly the image of Derry:
“Berlin: a deterritorialized city trapped between different historical times and
political systems, walled into the schism between East and West, overcharged
with the seductiveness of its schizophrenic space and the negative suspense
created by the no-man’s land that runs along the Wall.”4
4
Johannes Birringer, (1991), p. 56.
5
Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City (London: Faber and Faber, 1974). All further
references will be made to this edition.
6
Seamus Deane, “Introduction” to Brian Friel, Brian Friel: Plays (London: Faber and
Faber, 1996), pp. 11-22.
20 Chapter One
victims where the language is so much more vivid and spontaneous. Once again,
in divorcing power from eloquence, Friel is indicating a traditional feature of the
Irish condition. The voice of power tells one kind of fiction – the lie. It has the
purpose of preserving its own interests. The voice of powerlessness tells another
kind of fiction – the illusion. It has the purpose of pretending that its own
interests have been preserved. The contrast between the two becomes
unavoidable at moments of crisis.”7
7
Seamus Deane, “Introduction” (1996), p. 18.
8
Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1969).
9
Humphry Osmond is best known for his research into the treatment of schizophrenia
with psychedelic drugs, but his Weyburn hospital became a design research lab to
examine the functional aspects of architecture and its impact on the mentally ill. Osmond
based his ideas of hospital design on the species-habitat work of German zoologist Heidi
Hediger, and on the research acid trips he took with Izumi. Osmond also coined the terms
sociopetal and sociofugal to describe seating arrangements that encouraged or
discouraged social interaction. His 1957 article “Function as the basis of psychiatric ward
design” is considered a minor classic.
Histories 21
authority and power overlooked by a larger than life Union Jack. The stained-
glass window increases the claustrophobic feeling created in the space of the
room. The paradox of the Mayor’s parlour is that, although it ought to be a
sociopetal space, open to the interaction between people and the figures of
authority, here it appears as a sociofugal fortress, isolating authority from the
reality of the streets. Time and history seem to have stopped as the audience is
presented with a room described as a medieval hall, containing a large
conference table with leather-covered top, an old-fashioned radiogram, a grand
baroque chair for the Mayor and several upright carved chairs for his guests.
The intruders, Michael, Skinner and Lily, find refuge in the Guildhall during a
Civil Rights march, and disrupt the silent but authoritative discourse of the
space. Their entrance in the Mayor’s parlour can be metaphorically read as
unknowingly crossing and disrupting the boundaries of power and bringing
humanity inside the walls. The three characters, blinded by CS gas and water
cannons, the tools of authority, are forced to enter the space of power, a
violation which becomes their doom.
The stern sociofugal space of the Guildhall is destabilised by the
sociopetal language of the characters. The use of this type of language in a space
that denies it, turns the discourse into something out of place which is indeed
capable of destabilising the structures of authority. Even though the characters
represent different and well-defined identities (Skinner-the revolutionary,
Michael-the intellectual and Lily-the housewife), the fact that they belong to the
“world of the people” gives them the position of outsiders within the Guildhall.
Historical characters and events, army tools, Civil Rights Movements, are all
translated into a domestic language performed within a space defined by
institutional language and presence. Lily relates every aspect of the new
environment to her usual surroundings, to her neighbourhood:
“LILY: D’you know what they say? That that CS gas is a sure cure for
stuttering. Would you believe that, young fella? That’s why Celia Cunningham
across from us drags her wee Colm Damien into the thick of every riot from here
to Strabane and him not seven till next May.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 20)
“LILY: Anyways, last Wednesday week, Minnie got hit on the leg with a rubber
bullet and now she pretends she has a limp and the young fellas call her Che
Guevarra. If God hasn’t said it, she’ll be looking for a pension from the Dublin
crowd.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 20)
Michael reacts like a “proper” citizen. He accepts the hierarchies of power and
tries to believe in their justice. He longs for a certain “status” as a petty
functionary and strongly believes that education and learning the way of the
oppressor could be the best way to react against the established power structure,
his position only reinforcing the postcolonial angst for the long forgotten
greatness of a powerful society.
“MICHAEL: I’m going to the tech four nights a week – you know – to improve
myself. I’m doing economics and business administration and computer
science.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 28)
and the security forces have the situation in hand. No further statement will be
issued.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 32)
By mixing temporal sequences and letting the audience know the truth about the
“insiders”, Brian Friel disrupts the truth of the character’s language. From the
very beginning of the speech the cover-up is visible and the discourse turns into
an artificial rendering of information, which proves to be false. The irony of the
passage is that the pressmen attending the release believe every word of the
press officer, so the manipulation of the events by the army causes a chain-
reaction in the media.
The RTÉ commentator, O’Kelly, present at the press release,
builds his own informational discourse on the already corrupted speech of the
army officer. However, having a different agenda, the newsman changes the
tone of the discourse and turns the event into something heroic, worth to be
celebrated by the people from the Bogside.
“O’KELLY: There are no reports of serious casualties but unconfirmed reports
are coming in that a group of about fifty armed gunmen have taken possession of
the Guildhall here below me and have barricaded themselves in. …usually
reliable spokesmen from the Bogside insist that the story is accurate, and already
small groups are gathering at street corners within the ghetto area to celebrate, as
one of them put it to me, ‘the fall of the Bastille’.” (The Freedom of the City, p.
23)
The whole event is covered by Radio Telefís Éireann, creating the impression of
a staged “history”. Even though the language of the reporter should be accurate,
the audience is amazed by his ignorance when commenting on the funeral
procession of the “terrorists”:
“O’KELLY: There is the Cardinal Primate, his head stooped, looking grave and
weary; and indeed he must be weary because he flew in from Rome only this
morning in order to be here today… And lastly the remains of Adrian
Fitzmaurice – I beg your pardon – Adrian Fitzgerald, and his coffin is being
carried by the Knights of Malta… I now hand you over to our unit in the
cemetery.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 78)
Dressed in shirt and trousers; the shirt dirty and hanging over the trousers”. (The
Freedom of the City, p. 23) The spectators are witnessing the birth of myth and
folklore. The balladeer exaggerates both the number of “Irish heroes” and the
importance of their actions.
CHILDREN: Three cheers and then cheers again for Ireland one and free,
For civil rights and unity, Tone, Pearse and Connolly.
The Mayor of Derry City is an Irishman once more.
So let’s celebrate our victory and let Irish whiskey pour.” (The Freedom of the
City, p. 23)
One of the most disturbing voices is that of the priest, Father Brosnan. He first
appears in the “historical” position, crouching and holding a white handkerchief
above his head.11 As a spiritual leader, he has the power to influence the
people’s opinions. Even though the role of the priest should be that of preaching
God’s word, here the audience are presented with a politicised “religious”
discourse ending, in an almost Ian Paisley-like manner, with a “communist”
witch-hunt.
“PRIEST: But although this movement was initially peaceful and dignified, as
you are well aware certain evil elements attached themselves to it and
contaminated it and ultimately poisoned it, with the result that it has long ago
become an instrument for corruption. …but they have one purpose and one
purpose only – to deliver this Christian country into the dark dungeons of
Godless communism.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 65)
10
Raymond McClean, who witnessed the post-mortems on eleven of the dead in Derry,
writes in his book The Road to Bloody Sunday (1997) about the Widgery Report: “I
would be appalled to think that the Widgery Report would be consulted as the
authoritative text in the case of Bloody Sunday. It is imperative that several factual
descriptions of what really happened in Derry will be available to future historians.”
11
This image is present in Irish history from as early as the Battle of Kinsale. In 1602, at
Dunboy Castle, the entire garrison of 143 men was slaughtered, including – and some
people are still a bit miffed about this even 400 years later – the priest who walked out
carrying the white flag. This image is also a reminder of the well known Bloody Sunday
photograph depicting Father Daly.
26 Chapter One
SOLDIER 2: Jesus!
SOLDIER 1: What the fuck am I supposed to do?
SOLDIER 2: How did they get in?
SOLDIER 1: On fucking roller skates – how would I know?
SOLDIER 2: How many of them?
SOLDIER 1: No idea. The side door’s wide open.” (The Freedom of the City, p.
22)
The citizens remain at the level of “voices”. The audience cannot see them but
their language is the authentic language of the street, it is the genuine sociopetal
language of a space that turned sociofugal in the heat of the historical events.
Unfortunately the events related by the people of Derry undermine the historical
“truth” and give support to the Balladeer in creating hi(s)tory.
SKINNER: And my last thought was: if you’re going to decide to take them on
[a total dedication and a solemnity as formal as theirs], Adrian Casimir, you’ve
got to mend your ways. So I died, as I lived, in defensive flippancy.” (The
Freedom of the City, p. 58-9)
In the world created on stage a great deal is said, but the multiplicity of voices
blur understanding. Communication is limited even between characters from the
same social space – which echoes Brian Friel’s later plays Translations and The
Communication Cord – and the audience is involved in the politics of the play
through the extensive monologues used to justify the actions. Notwithstanding
the diversity of the discourses used in the play, the unity of The Freedom of the
Histories 27
City is given especially by the blending of these voices within the same
theatrical space, creating a multifaceted image of history and historiography.
History, in all the forms of its representation can cause spirits to
erupt for or against the cultural piece shown on stage. Even if we accept the
relativity of the “historical truth”, the moment the historical event is turned into
spectacle it is challenged by questions of validity, it is altered and transformed
into a new category. At a recent conference on Irish Theatre on Tour organized
by the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, Seamus Heaney gave one of the most
illuminating descriptions of how an object can become a sign of history, an
entity embodying the essence of a space and time. It is the story of a blue-
flowered mug belonging to the Heaney family and borrowed by a touring
players company to be used as a prop in one of their plays and thus transformed
from a simple household item into a shrine, changed by the spectacle into an
aesthetic object. André Malraux suggested that “the museum turns images into
art by establishing a new category”12 and in the same way theatre or, for that
matter, any representational art changes the status of History as “universal truth”
into his/her story, establishing a new category of cultural existence. The space
of the museum or the institution of the theatre might cause a pause within the
natural relationship between the social, political and the artistic, leading to the
“fossilization” of the images contained in the aesthetic space. The stagnant zone
of the glass box on display or the stage could sometimes prevent the renewal of
the artistic and historical facts that shape culture. As Hugh comments in Brian
Friel’s Translations “we must never cease renewing those images; because once
we do, we fossilise”13. There is, however, one crucial issue that differentiates
between these institutions. Even though some objects are highlighted while
others are positioned in the background, the theatrical production opens up a
polyphonic dialogue between stage and audience focusing on the multiplicity of
meanings existent in the communication process. The static existence of the
object in the museum is challenged in the theatre by the continuously moving
relationship between production and audience in the establishing of meaning, by
what Roland Barthes calls the plural: “To interpret a text [performance text, in
this case] is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning,
but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.”14
12
Quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion – A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1977), p. 34.
13
Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 66.
14
Roland Barthes, quoted in John Rouse, “Textuality and Authority in Theatre and
Drama: Some Contemporary Possibilities” in Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach
(eds.), Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1992), p. 148.
28 Chapter One
Field Day argues that the idea of the mythical origins that
historical writings long for has to be re-analyzed. The continuous focus on the
origins of Irishness arrests the movement towards a future determined by
multiplicity and hybrid identities. Seamus Deane considers that:
“if the Irish could forget about the whole problem of what is essentially Irish, if
they could be persuaded to see that this does nothing but produce an unnecessary
anxiety about a non-existent abstraction they would have recovered some
genuine independence”.17
15
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice – Selected Essays and
Interviews (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977).
16
Michel Foucault, Language... (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 48.
17
Seamus Deane, “Remembering the Irish Future”, Ireland: Dependence and
Independence, The Crane Bag, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1984 (Dublin: Crane Bag, 1984), p. 90.
Histories 29
18
Seamus Deane, “Cannon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland”, in Jean Lundy and
Aodán Mac Póilin (eds.), Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster (Belfast:
Lagan Press, 1992), p. 26.
19
Benedetto Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1933).
20
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p. 65.
30 Chapter One
21
Michel Foucault, Language... (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 60.
22
Michel Foucault quoted in Simon During, Foucault and Literature – Towards a
Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 43.
23
Roland Champagne in Simon During, Foucault and Literature (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 19.
Histories 31
24
Hayden White, The Content of the Form – Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 59.
25
Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting” in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (Eds.),
Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999), p.
7.
26
In John P. Harrington and Elizabeth J. Mitchell (eds.), Politics and Performance in
Contemporary Northern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press in
cooperation with the American Conference for Irish Studies, 1999), p. 63.
32 Chapter One
founding event in one collective memory may be a wound in the memory of the
other”27 and accordingly a common/identical history should not be attempted. It
is vital that elements of the past belonging to different, conflicting communities
are brought into a dialogue trying to achieve what Ricoeur calls “reasonable
disagreements”. In such a framework, what may be seen as specific to theatre in
dealing directly with the historical past is
“its ability to create an awareness of the complex interaction between the
destructiveness and the failures of history, on the one hand, and the efforts to
create a viable and meaningful work of art, trying to confront these painful
failures on the other”28.
27
Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting” (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 9.
28
Freddie Rokem, Performing History (Iowa: Iowa City University, 2000), p. 37.
29
Ariane Mnouchkine interviewed by Eberhard Spreng, Theater Heute, June 1991, p. 9;
quoted in Sarah Bryant-Bertail, “Gender, empire and body politics as mise en scène: Les
Atrides”, Theatre Journal 46: March 1994, p. 1.
Histories 33
nobody goes, it’s awful”30, however, in the case of Northern Ireland, the
“nothing” changes into “the same thing”, with the same “awful” outcome.
Richard Kirkland, in his book Literature and Culture in
Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger, notes while describing the
Ulster Museum, the official “national” museum of Northern Ireland,
(paradoxically, the name of the museum, “the Ulster Museum” claims
allegiance to the old province of Ulster which was part of the mythical space of
old Éire, rather than to the official name of the province, Northern Ireland) that
“the visitor is led directly from 1920 – the year of the formation of the Ulster
Special Constabulary – to an exhibition of dinosaurs followed by the micro-
colonial instant represented by the mummy of Takabuti”31. In the national
museum, history seems to come to an end after 1920, “the narrative of Ulster’s
past is foreclosed just as Ulster is rendered a politically meaningless framework
due to partition”32 Northern Ireland becomes an “exotic” no-man’s land with an
endlessly circular history determined by two groups whose identity is based on
stories and myths. It is interesting to observe the fact that the two communities
(Unionists and Republicans/Catholics and Protestants, whatever one chooses to
use) have a very different approach to a past which they both share. The
Republicans are “experts” in articulating “the myth of sacrificial martyrdom” by
going back to a heroic Ireland and trying to find a justification for their policy
and actions through mythical characters like Cathleen Ní Houlihan or Cú
Chulain. The importance of discourse is overwhelming in the construction of the
Republican myth as it is almost exclusively based on storytelling thus
reinforcing the postcolonial idea of mastering the language of the colonizer. On
the other hand, the Unionist myths focus on their historical right to hegemony.
The Unionist “siege mentality”, which started with the Siege of Derry in 1689,
is continued by a permanent need to reinforce the policy of “no surrender” even
if there is not, historically or actively, the case – if one only remembers the
annual re-staging of the Siege or the theatrical Orange Marches in July.
These elements of ethno-history, the cravings towards a
mythical heroic past of a “united Ireland” (which, in fact, was hardly the case
given the historical evidence of the four provinces always engaged in battles for
supremacy) and the stubborn “no surrender” of the Red Hand, notwithstanding
the fact that they come from the same historical line, are used as “reminders” of
different, conflicting policies in Northern Ireland. This apparent insurmountable
gap between the two communities is satirically solved by Patrick Boyle who
30
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 41.
31
Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of
Danger (London: Longman, 1996), p. 2.
32
Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland (London: Longman,
1996), p. 1.
Histories 35
writes in 1968, just months before the Troubles, in an article published in the
Dublin magazine Hibernia and entitled “Ulster Revisited”:
“Fenian gets, one learned, were heavily built, slow moving people, falling
mostly into paunch at an early age. They had high complexions, bulging blue
eyes and a rotundity of visage that earned them the epithet ‘Bap-face’. Pushed
well back on their foreheads, they wore soft hats. They were quarrelsome in
drink, foul-mouthed, over-fond of the weemen, but still it could be said in their
favour they paid regular and ceremonious visits to their places of worship.
Orange hoors, on the other hand, were lean and light footed. They were pale
faced with fanatical, deep-set eyes and thin lips. Pulled well down over their
foreheads, they wore dunchers. They were quarrelsome in drink, foul-mouthed,
over-fond of the weemen, but still it could be said in their favour they paid
regular and ceremonious visits to their places of worship.”33
33
Quoted in Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland (London:
Longman, 1996), p. 2.
36 Chapter One
construct reflects the historical and political pre-determination of the site; the
viewer almost forgets that the camera represents the prolongation of the artist’s
eye. An urban site which is usually busy and full of life is transformed into a
fossilised relic of the political situation: there seems to be no way out at either
end of the bridge, only darkness and desperation. The bridge, which is supposed
to link the two sides of the river, to connect the two communities, seems to be
walled in, thus preventing dangerous crossings. The disturbing photographs are
taken from both ends of the bridge, the paradox emerging when the viewer
realises that both ends look exactly the same, determined by the same darkness,
gloom and futility. The second photograph seems to offer the hope of two car
lights approaching. However, the political framework inscribed in the work
transforms the hope into danger, the car becoming a sign of violence and terror,
as in other of Doherty’s photographs.
From this fragmented space dominated by Walter Benjamin’s
“Angel of History” sitting on a pile of “accidents” of the past, the artist is
required to construct a narrative that could help the general coming to terms
with history. This can be done in at least two different ways, which have their
antecedents in Irish culture. One, equated with the impossibility of stories, is a
complete amnesia, a “let’s forget that it ever happened” narrative, over-used in
relation with the Irish participation in the First World War (broken by Sean
O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie or more recently by Frank McGuinness’s Observe
the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme; and discussed by Seamus
Heaney’s “whatever you say, say nothing”).
The other, the necessity of telling everything, is met by the Joycean impulse to
fictionally re-create history in its entirety – Ulysses, but most importantly
Finnegan’s Wake. Both possibilities construct identities based on narratives, be
that of presence or absence, of continuous remembering or continuous
forgetting. In such a community of micro-narratives, the role of the artist should
be that of attempting the creation of a macro-structure that should include both
conflicting micro-narratives into a viable dialogue. A narrative in which the Self
and the Other can re-imagine themselves in such a way as to know each other
more, thus being able to bridge the gap between them.
34
Seamus Heaney, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” in Opened Ground: Poems 1966-
1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 132.
Histories 37
35
Michael Longley, Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Arts Council of Northern Ireland,
Belfast, 1971).
36
Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland (London: Longman,
1996), p. 20.
37
In the Preface to Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. viii.
38 Chapter One
This more or less Utopian view, combined with the “sense of exhaustion” was
used in “making” or “re-making” the histories of Northern Ireland and Ireland,
in a general commitment to reshape “the consciousness of the audience in
posterity, if not in the stalls”38.
38
Seamus Heaney, The Irish Times, December 1988.
39
Ronan McDonald, “Between Hope and History: the Drama of the Troubles”, in
Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens, edited by Dermot Bolger (Dublin: New Island, 2001),
pp. 231-249, p. 233.
Histories 39
40
Gerald FitzGibbon, “Historical Obsessions in Recent Irish Drama” in Geert Lernout
(ed.), The Crows Behind the Plough – History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and
Drama (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), pp. 41-59, p. 43.
40 Chapter One
Similarly, Lombard asserts at the beginning of the play: “Maybe when the time
comes my first responsibility will be to tell the best possible narrative. Isn’t that
what history is, a kind of storytelling?”42
The main goal of the playwright is to subvert the master
narrative of Irish history by inventing believable sub-plots that help in the
negotiation of identities in the play. There are two sub-plots in Making History
which were created in order to test the epistemological limits of history: one is
the “happy” marriage between Mabel Bagenal and Hugh – which in the reality
of historical facts was short-lived, politically determined and ended with
Mabel’s escape from Hugh’s home and her public complaints against her
husband. The second invented sub-plot is that of Peter Lombard writing Hugh’s
biography. According to historical data, Peter Lombard never wrote the
biography he is supposedly composing during the course of the play. He is the
acknowledged author of De Regno Hiberniae Sanctorum Insula
Commentarius43 completed in 1600, long before he actually met O’Neill in
Rome for the first time.
41
Programme notes to Making History, see also Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel:
Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999 (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 135.
42
Brian Friel, Making History (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 8. All further
reference will be made to this edition.
43
Peter Lombard, De Regno Hiberniae Sanctorum Insula Commentarius (Louvain: apud
viduam Steph. Martini, 1632).
Histories 41
44
The voice of Sean Connolly could be strongly heard in this respect, criticizing mainly
Friel’s manipulation of historical “truth” in Translations, but also attacking Making
History for the use of O’Neill in order to reinforce the Catholic myth of the hero.
45
R.F.Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen
Lane, 2001).
42 Chapter One
variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, in short all
of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a
play or a novel”46.
46
In Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee:
University Press of Florida, 1986), p. 162.
47
Discussed in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
48
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 55.
49
Although considered to be revisionist, many of Seán O’Faoláin’s writings were biased
by being directed against Eamon De Valera’s policy to recapture a heroic and majestic
past as an example for the newborn Irish nation state.
Histories 43
50
Richard Pine, The Diviner–The Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: U. C. D. Press, 1999), p.
212.
51
Seamus Deane, Preface to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
52
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project 1927 – 1939 (London and Cambridge Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 170.
53
K. Barry, J. Andrews and B. Friel, “Translations and a Paper Landscape: Between
Fiction and History” in The Crane Bag, Vol. VII, No. 2 (1983), pp. 118-124.
44 Chapter One
“In those last years in Rome, the myth was already beginning to emerge, and a
talented dramatist might write an informative, entertaining, ironical play on the
theme of the living man helplessly watching his translation into a star in the face
of all the facts that had reduced him to poverty, exile and defeat.”54
54
Sean O’Faoláin, The Great O’Neill – a Biography of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone,
1550-1616 (Cork: Mercier, 1997). New edition of the original edition The Great O’Neill
(London: Longmans, 1942).
55
Richard Pine, The Diviner (1999), p. 230.
Histories 45
so fondly today’. And this (Bible) is Hilaire Belloc; wedding present to Father
and Mother. And this is Yeats. And –
TOM: What’s Yeats?
CASIMIR: This cushion (on chaise-longue).
TOM: Cushion – Yeats –
CASIMIR: Oh, he was – he was just tremendous, Yeats, with those cold, cold
eyes of his. Oh, yes, I remember Yeats vividly.
TOM: That would have been when you were? –”56
56
Brian Friel, Aristocrats in Brian Friel: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p.
266-67.
57
Kathleen Hohenleitner, “The Book at the Centre of the Stage: Friel’s Making History
and The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing”, in A Century of Irish Drama – Widening
the Stage, ed. by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan and Shakir Mustafa (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 239-255, p. 242.
58
See the articles included in the sub-chapter “The Making of the Reviews”.
46 Chapter One
the play. The reality of Lombard’s Commentarius is the first proof sustaining his
power to manipulate events in order to suit certain political and religious needs:
“Briefly my case is this. Because of her mismanagement England has forfeited
her right to domination over this country. The Irish chieftains have been forced
to take up arms in defence of their religion. And because of your birth, education
and personal attributes, you are the natural leader of that revolt. I’ll go into it in
detail later on.” (Making History, p. 8)
59
Characterized by the binary oppositions traitor/rebel, good/evil presented by court
historians like William Camden and Thomas Gainsford between the years 1610 and
1619.
60
Discussed by Anne Fogarty in “The Romance of History: Renegotiating the Past in
Thomas Kilroy’s The O’Neill and Brian Friel’s Making History”, in The Irish University
Review, 2002, Spring-Summer, Vol. 32, Nr. 1, (Dublin: 2002), pp. 18-32, p. 20.
48 Chapter One
problem of endogamy and exogamy, marrying within or without the tribe, also
discussed in his first play for Field Day, Translations. The general conflict of
the play, that between two cultures, is reduced here to the clash between two
people whose position is hard to define, existing, as Stephen Rea put it “with
one foot in Ireland and the other in England”, as they acknowledge their
connection with both cultures.
Mary belongs to the colonizing faction, her words describing her
father’s “taming” of the “barbarians” from County Down to County Armagh
and bringing prosperity: “almost single-handed he tamed the whole of County
Down and County Armagh and brought order and prosperity to them” (Making
History, p. 22). Mary, who always refers to the Irish as “they”, while Mabel
refers to them as “we” or “us”, cannot grasp the complexity, or even the mere
existence of the Other culture: “their way of life is doomed” (Making History, p.
24). There is no real dialogue between Self and Other from Mary’s point of
view, thus Friel pointing towards the impossibility and unwillingness of
communication between contemporary political factions. Mabel, although she
understands her sister’s point of view, tries to argue the case of the “natives”, a
group she now belongs to, thus creating a real debate on the theme of “civilians”
versus “barbarians”. If at the end of Scene 1 Mabel changes quickly from “we,
the Upstarts” to “we, the O’Neills”, in Scene 2, during her conversation with her
sister, the main opposition is between Mabel as “we, the Irish” and Mary as
“we, the English”. Christopher Murray considers that with the dialogue between
the sisters Friel “is exploring the possibility of transplantation between the two
cultures” and hence his use of “plant and seed imagery”61. Mary brought herbs
from the Bagenal garden and instructs Mabel how to plant them:
“MARY: Don’t plant the fennel near the dill or the two will cross-fertilize.
MABEL: Is that bad?
MARY: You’ll end up with a seed that’s neither one thing or the other.”
(Making History, p. 21-22)
61
Christopher Murray, “Brian Friel’s Making History and the Problem of Historical
Accuracy” in Geert Lernout (ed.), The Crows Behind the Plough – History and Violence
in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), p. 71.
62
Peter Ure refers here to the garden scene from Richard II, also an invented scene,
where a political point is made by reference to horticulture. Christopher Murray
discusses the scene in more detail in the article referred to above.
Histories 49
historical state. Without realizing it, Mary brings the seeds to Mabel’s new
home as signs of a possible change. She acknowledges the fact that these seeds
can be transplanted in the “barbarian” soil of the O’Neills but she does not
accept the cross-fertilization. The seeds open two possible interpretations, just
as the multiple stories in the play bring different possibilities for the creation of
meaning. One of the possible interpretations would be indeed that of future
hope, the seeds being the sign of an exchange between cultures. The second
interpretation, gloomier than the first, could be that of associating the seeds with
the intent to colonize, thus refusing the possibility of cross-fertilization, by
transforming the home soil of the O’Neills into a mirror image of the Bagenal
garden.
O’Neill himself continues the symbolism of the herbs when he
enters later on to find the brief notes that Mary left for Mabel before leaving
(e.g. “The coriander seed. Watch this seed carefully as it ripens suddenly and
will fall without warning.”). Hugh associates this with Maguire, one of his
fellow chieftains: “Sounds like Maguire, doesn’t it? – Coriander Maguire.”
(Making History, p. 29) Christopher Murray observes:
“the seeds of the foreigner serve to define the personalities of the natives.
Transplantation has already taken place linguistically. Friel suggests that such
transplantation is a matter of will. O’Neill remarks that <the formation of the
nations and civilizations is a willed act, not a product of fate or accident> (p. 29).
By means of the seed image, the play suddenly becomes an argument for socio-
political change, a fifth province of the mind, perhaps.”63
63
Christopher Murray, “Brian Friel’s Making History and the Problem of Historical
Accuracy”, p. 72.
50 Chapter One
and Mabel sustains his political openness. The clash between public/private is
apparent once again in the position Mabel occupies in the written “history”. Her
place is central for O’Neill but she is totally marginalized by Lombard both in
O’Neill’s “invented” biography and in his “real” Commentarius. She seems to
encapsulate the voice of reason and reconciliation, which proposes a peaceful
relationship between the two communities. However, being represented by a
woman, this voice is easily discarded by the historical establishment. Friel tries
to introduce a new vision of the English/Irish relationship but, by reflecting this
position in Mabel, he undermines the possibility of this voice being heard
outside the O’Neill household. Society and history decide to overlook Mabel’s
modern, encouraging vision while the playwright “punishes” her with death
during childbirth. The futility of Mabel’s groundbreaking opinions, the fact that
she is forgotten by History underline the hopelessness of the contemporary
situation that Field Day intended to challenge continuously. However, Mabel’s
outsider position also alludes to the flaws of the Field Day policy itself, the fact
that the female voice, notwithstanding its creativeness and accuracy, is “written
out” of the company’s canon, of the new version of history they wanted to
impose.
If the first act has as a central plot the active
“creation”/“making” of history, the second act, after the defeat at Kinsale and
“the flight of the Earls”, is dominated by the dramatic image of the BOOK.
Other histories are being written by Tadhg Ó Cianain who is compiling a Gaelic
history of the past ten years in Ireland while Spenser is writing an English
version on the same subject. The world surrounding O’Neill is being created by
makers of history, while he already ended his active involvement in the events
with his defeat at Kinsale. The “Great” O’Neill becomes a simple spectator to
the rival fabrications of his own mythology.
Scene 2, the first glimpse we have of O’Neill’s apartment in
Rome, opens with the image of a large desk, belonging to Lombard and having
at the center a large book – THE HISTORY. All through the second act O’Neill
is drawn towards the book – he “cannot resist the pull of the open book” –
(Making History, p. 55) with a voyeuristic pleasure to read his own life. While
O’Neill is devoured by an ever-growing sense of guilt and betrayal of his own
nation, the gap between the “real” O’Neill and the hero of Lombard’s history is
getting wider and wider. O’Neill wants the “truth” of his existence to be
revealed in the history:
“I need the truth, Peter. That’s all that’s left. The schemer, the leader, the liar, the
statesman, the lecher, the patriot, the drunk, the soured, bitter émigré – put it all
in, Peter. Record the whole life – that’s what you said yourself.” (Making
History, p. 63)
Histories 51
“O’NEILL: I do with all true and humble penitency prostrate myself at your feet
and absolutely submit myself to your mercy, most sorrowfully imploring your
commiseration and appealing only to your clemency –
LOMBARD: He continued to grow and increase in comeliness and urbanity,
tact and eloquence, wisdom and knowledge, goodly size and noble deeds so that
his name and fame spread throughout the five provinces of Ireland and beyond –
O’NEILL: May it please you to mitigate your just indignation against me for my
betrayal of you which deserves no forgiveness and for which I can make no
satisfaction, even with my life –
LOMBARD: And people reflected in their minds that when he would reach
manhood there would not be one like him of the Irish to avenge their wrongs and
punish the plunderings of his race – ” (Making History, p. 71)
64
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation Second Edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 29. The First Edition was published by the
same publishing house in 1975.
65
Helen Lojek, “Brian Friel’s Plays and George Steiner’s Linguistics: Translating the
Irish” in Contemporary Literature, 35, No. I, 1994, pp. 83-99.
52 Chapter One
the boundaries between two cultures, Making History matches Stephen Rea’s
definition of what a Field Day play should be: “a play of ideas, involved with
language, involved with looking at imperialism, and looking at men who have
one foot in Ireland and one foot in England”66.
Discussing the problem of writing history plays in The Crane
Bag, Brian Friel advocated the necessity to accept the fact that the construction
of history plays is based on imagination and not on the simple rendering of
historical events. The position of History as metanarrative has been challenged
and historiography appears now as a version of literature. Following the
argument between fiction and history, Friel recognizes the importance of the
historical facts for his play, but, at the same time, he traces a well-defined line
between his role as a playwright and his responsibility regarding the facts he
uses in his plays:
“Writing an historical play may bestow certain advantages but it also imposes
particular responsibilities. The apparent advantages are the established historical
facts or at least the received historical ideas in which the work is rooted and
which gives it its apparent familiarity and accessibility. The concomitant
responsibility is to acknowledge those facts or ideas but not to defer to them.
Drama is first a fiction, with the authority of fiction. You don’t go to Macbeth
for history.”67
66
Quoted by Kevin Jackson in “Running Wilde on the Road”, The Independent, 15
September 1989, p. 18.
67
Brian Friel in Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, “Translations and A Paper
Landscape: Between Fiction and History”, in Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard
Kearney(Eds.), The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, Vol. II (1982-1985), p. 123-124.
Histories 53
The venue, the city itself was (and still is) politically overloaded
and thus many reviewers concentrated on the political allegiance of the audience
rather than on the production per se. Martin Cowley’s report for The Irish Times
focuses almost exclusively on the politically definable audiences:
“Among the audiences last night (the opening) was the SDLP leader, Mr. Hume,
the Bishop of Derry, Dr. Edward Daly, and the Mayor of Derry, Mrs. Anna
Gallagher. Among writers, poets and other artists present were John McGahern,
and Field Day directors Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, David Hammond and
54 Chapter One
Thomas Kilroy. Mr. Adrian Munnelly and Mr. Phelim Donnellan represented the
Arts Council in the Republic and its Northern counterpart was represented by
regional director Ms. Primrose Finnegan, the art director Mr. Brian Ferran and
Mr. Dennis Smyth, drama officer. Among attendance were Sinn Fein politicians
Martin McGuinness and Mitchell McLaughlin.”
Critics writing for Dublin papers were still looking for “politics”
but within the text. Reviewing the production for The Irish Times on 24
September 1988, Fintan O’Toole considered the play to be “a hesitant move into
unknown territory”. Focusing more on the text itself rather than on the staging,
O’Toole pointed out the fact that the language used by the playwright is felt as
inadequate, incapable of comprehending the world of the play, with all the
intricacies of “making history” that Friel intended to reveal. Underlining the
irony of the play and of the production, Fintan O’Toole considers that Making
History:
“…ends up being both about the way the individual personality is lost in history
and an example of the way the individual personality is lost in the argument
about history. The play abjures history, undercuts all political hero worship. By
dealing with the impossibility of ever constructing a narrative which is more than
an acceptable fiction, Friel frees himself from any perceived need to be a
chronicler of his times.”
context perhaps because they lack theatrical experience”; this is contrasted with
the mature criticism of some British critics “who put what we do into a world
context”68. Discussing the performance in London, Gary McKeone wrote for
Theatre Ireland:
“Stephen Rea is outstanding as Hugh O’Neill. Determined, controlled,
passionate, he reveals O’Neill as a man of instinct rather than impulse with none
of the ragged headstrong qualities of his fellow Earl, Hugh O’Donnell – a rowdy,
blustering, impetuous performance from Peter Gowen.”
68
Stephen Rea in an interview with Kevin Jackson, “Running Wilde on the Road”, The
Independent 15 September, 1989, p. 18.
56 Chapter One
69
Seamus Deane, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 14.
70
Discussed in Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 35.
Histories 57
the majority of the plays put on stage by the company discuss the
Catholic/Nationalist version of Irish artistic imagination, providing insufficient
space for the voice of Protestant artistic expression. After refusing to stage
David Rudkin’s The Saxon Shore (a play commissioned by Field Day), the only
playwright who assumed the responsibility of being a spokesperson for the
Protestant imagination within Field Day was Stewart Parker.
Even though the Field Day playwrights used to focus mainly on
Derry as the epitome of the Northern town, Stewart Parker’s play Pentecost
shifts the focus from Derry to Belfast. Gerald Dawe observes that the “exact
place” for the play is East Belfast (Ballyhackamore) during the Ulster Workers’
Strike against the Sunningdale Agreement between the British and Irish
governments. The strike was directed against the Council of Ireland dimension
to the Agreement71, lasted from 14 to 29 May and was successful in that it
brought down the power sharing Executive. The period of the strike was
determined by numerous accounts of sectarian violence. “Homes were burnt
down; people were intimidated from their own houses and squatters moved in
under the protection of one of the various defence communities.”72 Against this
background, Stewart Parker creates a surreal space of claustrophobia and
liminality. Allegory becomes the method by which meaning is constructed and
extended across the diversity of a heterogeneous time. People and landscapes
are allegorized and, like the insider to the labyrinth, this type of mythologized
society can be survived by entering it fully, by becoming part of the “oral state”
and disturbing it from the inside.
The structural change coming from within affects not only the
intellectual spaces but also the physical ones. The landscape becomes a mode of
redemption through which the writer can mediate to his/her community the
politics of identity. Underlining the personal importance of landscape for the
people inhabiting it, Tim Ingold observes:
“The landscape is not, I hold, a picture in the imagination, surveyed by the
mind’s eye; nor however is it an alien and formless substrate awaiting the
imposition of human order… neither is the landscape identical to nature, nor is it
on the side of humanity against nature… it is with us not against us.”73
71
The Conference (December 1973) agreed that a Council of Ireland would be set up. It
would he confined to representatives of the two parts of Ireland, with appropriate
safeguards for the British Government’s financial and other interests.
72
Gerald Dawe, The Rest is History (Belfast: Abbey Press, 1998), p. 64.
73
Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape”, in The Perception of the
Environment. Essays on livelihood, dwelling, skill (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 191.
58 Chapter One
“There is a map of the city which shows the bridge that was
never built.
A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the streets that
never existed.
Ireland’s Entry, Elbow Lane, Weigh-House Lane, Back Lane,
Stone-Cutter’s Entry –
74
Stephen Daniels, “Introduction: Iconography and Landscape”, in Daniels and
Cosgrove (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), p. 1.
75
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 11.
Histories 59
the notion of belonging to a space/country and last but not least, the problem of
sustaining relationships with one another, the co-existence between Catholics
and Protestants. The house becomes not only a liminal political space, placed on
the line of fire between the two communities but, paradoxically, the space inside
becomes one of co-existence between two Catholics (Lenny and Marian) and
two Protestants (Peter and Ruth). The conflict of the exterior space is translated
into the interior conflict between the characters; however, the playwright tries to
give hope to the absurdity of the exterior historical conflict by attempting to
solve the interior struggle. In the fragmented space of the city, the house
becomes a place of refuge and of negotiation, a place where identities and
memories are re-discovered. The historic and political determination of the
exterior space –
“LENNY: Sure, every bloody day in the week’s historic in this place.”
(Pentecost, p. 171)
76
Ciaran Carson, “Turn Again” in Belfast Confetti (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press,
1989).
77
Stewart Parker, Pentecost in Stewart Parker, Three Plays for Ireland (Birmingham:
Oberon Books, 1989), pp. 145-208, p. 185. All further reference will be made to this
edition.
60 Chapter One
The house that Parker creates in the play is not just simply a
physical space that contains the memories of the past; it also opens up to a
thorough topoanalysis79. It becomes a real “being”, releasing a psychology of
warmth and shelter towards the negative outside. The house acquires “the
physical and moral energy of a human body” and thus it clings to its inhabitant
and becomes a “cell of a body with its walls close together”80. The dynamic
relationship between the house and the universe surrounding it brings about
problems of energy and counter-energy, doubled by cultural and personal forces
of centrifugality and centripetality. As the inside space fills up with the energies
of the inhabitants, the house grows outwardly, thus influencing the existence
and the energies of the surrounding space. This is one of the reconciliation
techniques used by the playwright: by creating a space of healing and religious
78
Stewart Parker, “Introduction” to Three Plays for Ireland (London: Oberon Press,
1989), pp. 9-10.
79
Terms defined by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press,
1969), translated by Maria Jolas from the French La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1958).
80
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) p. 53.
Histories 61
enlightenment within the house, by solving the inside conflicts between the
ghosts of the past and the inhabitants of the present, the inside reaches out in an
attempt to offer a solution, a structure for the chaos that rages outside. Memory
and imagination work within the house creating a body of images that link past,
present and future. But, according to Gaston Bachelard, there is a danger that
the inner space faces continuously: that of the external universe invading the
house and thus annihilating it, transforming it into an artificial extension of the
outside space – which may happen if the house is transformed into a museum. In
order to attain its living value, the house must integrate an element of unreality,
which, in the case of Pentecost, is represented by the ghost.
Benedict Anderson observed in his book Imagined Communities
that “communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but
by the style in which they are imagined” 81. By placing the house not only at the
crossroads between cultures but also in a space of conflict between these
cultures, the playwright imagines a community existing on a border, liminal
space, simulated by the house itself.
“LENNY: ...it’s the last house on the road left inhabited! – the very road itself is
scheduled to vanish off the map, it’s the middle of a redevelopment zone, not to
mention the minor detail that it’s slap bang in the firing line, the Prods are all up
in that estate, the Taigs are right in front of us, anyway look at it – it’s reeking of
damp, there’s five different layers of wallpaper hanging off the walls, she was
still using gas lamps in half the rooms, nothing to cook on apart from that ancient
range, brown lino everywhere and rooms bunged up with junk, there’s probably
rats, mice and badgers in the belfry, it’s riddled with rot and it’s dingy, dank and
absolutely freezing!” (Pentecost, p. 154)
81
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 56.
82
Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (London:
62 Chapter One
both politically and economically, the space and its structures tend to become
stiff and unchangeable, reacting only to destruction, to elimination from the
map. Thus, the image of the labyrinth comes back to haunt the play re-creating,
within the house, a closed, never changing space, where the main characters try
to re-imagine their own identities and to include themselves in the bigger picture
of the nation. Marian, for example, is embarking on a quest of memory through
the house. By going through Lily’s things and finding out her secrets, Marian re-
imagines and comes to terms with her own image, with her own “skull” as she
says at one point in the play. The interior image of the house as a stiff Protestant
environment changes, as the play develops, into a space of co-habitation, helped
by common fears and sorrows. The physical image of the labyrinth is doubled
by the psychic image of the self on a quest of self-knowledge within the
labyrinth.
The concentric circles represented by Northern Ireland, Belfast
and finally the house, spatially become smaller but ideologically reflect the
same thing, a place difficult to “humanize” given the “no surrender” of the walls
and of the ideologies. The term “interregnum” becomes complicated given the
multifarious variety of the spaces created in the play. If for Gordimer the
“interregnum” was the liminal space between two ideologies, both inhabiting
the same place and fighting for supremacy, in Stewart Parker’s “house” the
interregnum is enriched with complex elements, giving the impression of much
more than an imagined space locked between patriarchal binary oppositions.
The inflexible physicality of the walls encloses a psychic space that expands
upwards in a mystical flight towards a possible redemption.
Being unable to see the whole of the labyrinth, incapable of
flying above the high walls in order to transform the labyrinth into a map, the
visitor (Marian) and the inhabitant (Lenny), with their positions always
changing, together with the audience, experience a fragmentary and limited
view of the house, the space being reduced to the kitchen, represented as an
untouched space of Protestant godliness and reflecting the grandeur of a lost
Empire.
“MARIAN: Look at this. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the wedding of
Queen Mary, the Coronation of Lizzie the Second, 1953 – that must be the most
modern item in the house. Most of the furniture’s Edwardian, there’s a Regency
dressing table upstairs that must have come down through her grandparents.”
(Pentecost, p. 150)
grandaunt, after Lily Matthews dies leaving no relatives behind. The parallels
between Lily as the representative of the conservative Protestant community and
the decaying existence of the British Empire become apparent in the first part of
the play, her ghost epitomizing the image of the fallen Empire, with “no
relatives and no memory”. Thus, Marian’s quest becomes a memory search for
Lily’s image as well, for the re-imagining of her “real” identity, hidden below
the Protestant stiffness she displays. All through the play, the fragmented space
of the house is determined by clashes between the characters, all the clashes
bringing about ideas of separation and de-construction in a space characterized
by a lack of movement and change: Marian and Lenny quarrel over their
divorce; Ruth and Marian discuss Ruth’s separation from an overtly violent
husband and finally Peter’s development as a character is determined by his
separation from England but his inability to recognize and re-imagine his own
identity in Belfast.
“PETER: ...this teeny weeny wee province of ours and its little people, all the
angry munchkins, with their midget brains, this festering pimple on the vast
white flabby bum of western Europe...” (Pentecost, p. 171)
“LILY: I don’t want you in here, breathing strong drink and profanity, and your
husband deserted.
LILY: ...my beautiful house... every wee thing we’d saved up for ruined in one
night. By a pack of Fenian savages!” (Pentecost, p. 156)
Through the hidden secrets of her life, (the fact that she had an
83
Gerald Dawe, The Rest is History (Belfast: Abbey Press, 1998), p. 67.
64 Chapter One
illegitimate child with an English soldier and that she gave the child up for
adoption without the knowledge of her husband), Lily re-humanizes herself,
returning to the image of a victim, the over-used patriarchal trope of a woman
caught between true love and her responsibility to her husband, complicated
here by religion and the position that Protestants occupied in the troubled
circumstances of Northern Irish history.
“LILY: I sinned against my own flesh in lust and fornication, I had to desert my
own baby, nobody ever knew only the Lord our God knew and His eye was on
me all right, burning into the very soul of me. ...[but I] never cracked. Never
surrendered. Not one inch.” (Pentecost, p. 196)
Lily becomes an alter ego that Marian desperately needs in order to come to
terms with her own tormented past and present. By imagining Lily’s life, by
reading about her secrets in her diary, Marian re-imagines her own existence.
Anthony Roche considers that Lily’s “ghostly manifestation not only challenges
Marian’s reality and her grip on it, but undermines the reality the play is
representing”84. By introducing Lily in the play, Parker challenges the
problematic framework of existence in Northern Ireland, arguing that one of the
possible paths towards reconciliation is represented by a fruitful negotiation
between past and present, a move away from the painful “presence” of the
surrounding “reality” and towards a spiritual regeneration.
Marian is a complex character, shifting between centrifugality
and centripetality as forces that influence both space and time. She is well aware
of the fact that the house is a true representative of the city with all its elements
thus she does not want to change anything in it and wants to offer it to the
National Trust, (“a house eloquent with the history of this city”, Pentecost, p.
84
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama – From Beckett to McGuinness (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 224.
Histories 65
The space is opened up towards light and air in an enterprise to build a new,
hybrid space on the basis of the “old”, historical remains.
In the historical context of Northern Ireland, on a superficial
level, the two women represent the two conflicting powers, Catholic/Protestant,
Irish/English, but united by the same motherly instincts. However, the tropes
used by Parker are not the clear-cut patriarchal tropes of woman and nationality,
woman and identity enforced by the Celtic Revival in Irish culture. What
Stewart Parker tried to do in Pentecost can be related to Gayatri Spivak’s
“tropological deconstruction”, intending to demythologize the fetishized myths
of the Mother and the creation of national identity.
There is a deep link between the significance of the title,
Pentecost, and the whole vision of the play. The story of Pentecost is given the
importance of a guiding line, creating a unifying structure. The mythology of
Pentecost is running through the play, constructing allegorical images supported
by the presence of the characters and the overt possibility of identifying them
with images from the Bible. The first element reminding of the Apostles being
inspired by the Holy Spirit and experiencing “another” reality is Marian and
Lenny’s discussion about the existence of different “realities”:
“MARIAN: - have you ever considered that if one of us needs treatment it might
be you?
LENNY: I never know how you do this, I start off trying to help you, and within
ten minutes I’m a villain, I’m deviant, I’m the one in need of help, in the name
of God just face reality!
66 Chapter One
the beginning of Scene 4, the noise and lights of the army helicopter opening
Scene 5 and Marian’s bruised face after trying to find her car which had now
become the centrepiece of “the barricade at the entrance of the estate”
(Pentecost, p. 189). Essentially, all these attempts to bring the outer space in
contact with the interior were found by critics to be insufficiently convincing.
Shaun Richards writes: “At no point does Parker convincingly translate the
microcosmic level of the domestic onto the violent plane of the political”85. The
“inside” community seems to move towards a redemption which is refused to
the exterior space.
The last scene of the play has provided and still provides the
most controversies. Scene 5 opens on the morning of Pentecost Sunday, 2 June.
The sounds of an Orange band celebrating are combined with the noise of an
army helicopter hovering over the house, blinding the characters with its
searchlight. The symbolism of Pentecost, the inspiration provided to the
Apostles by the presence of the Holy Spirit, is replaced here by the cruel
symbolism of the war-zone exterior, the only light “shining down” being the
searchlight of the army helicopter, while the hymns are exchanged with the
drums of the Orange band. All the characters are on stage, as allegorical images
of the Apostles, sharing moments of individual revelation. Peter is describing
his and Lenny’s attempt to change the outcome of the political unrest in Belfast
by pouring LSD in the city’s main water supply tank; Lenny shares his religious
and sexual revelation, the spiritual pleasure of making love to a gypsy woman
from Sligo on a beach in Kinsale and watching a group of nuns “experiencing
their sex” (Pentecost, p. 203) in the sea. Marian is telling Lily’s passionate love
story with the English pilot Alan Ferris, while Ruth starts telling the Biblical
story of Pentecost.
The storytelling moves towards the moment of redemption
through mystical unity and by opening the widow, the house is invaded by the
“air and light” of the outside space, thus stating the fact that the peace and co-
existence of the interior has to be continuously linked to the exterior space; the
uplifting feeling of hope has to be shared by both spaces. However, after trying
to delineate the interior space and keep it in a spiritual vacuum with the
occasional intrusion from the outside in the form of sounds of war and images
of conflict, this sudden opening comes across as an unconvincing ending for the
play. Gerald Dawe notes that the final scene of the play is not a “self-conscious
break with naturalism”86, simply because the play is not naturalistic from the
very beginning, the final scene being “a metaphorical resolution” completely in
85
Shaun Richards, “To Bind the Northern to the Southern Stars: Field Day in Derry and
Dublin”, in Claire Connolly (ed.) Readers in Cultural Criticism – Theorizing Ireland
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 67.
86
Gerald Dawe, The Rest is History (Belfast: Abbey Press, 1998), p. 68.
68 Chapter One
keeping with the “heightened realism” of Pentecost. The play is not naturalistic
and this is obvious from the very first description of the interior space.
However, the incongruity between the body of the play and the final scene
cannot be masked by a heightened spiritual ending. I would suggest that the
only possible solution to the problems that the text of the play raises is in the
hands of the director and the actors. There has to be a very close partnership
between the text and the production in order to liberate the hidden aspirations of
the text, especially in the final scene of the play. The main problem with the
final image is the apparent lack of balance between the events prior to this scene
and the ending of the play. However, the allegorical constructions that can be
traced all through Pentecost, are, in a way, expected to converge in a final image
of Biblical redemption, thus providing a possibility of healing and
enlightenment through theatre. The stage becomes a space of deliverance where
everything seems to be easier and more logical as far as the solutions to the
historical conflicts are concerned. In his overt intention to create a new type of
theatre, a new type of art altogether, Parker manages to propose an idyllic “fifth
province of imagination” through the theatrical devices he creates in the play.
Notwithstanding, this seems to be an easy way out.
The final space is inhabited by all the characters, chanting
gospels and it is opened up towards light and air but, unfortunately the light is
that of helicopter searchlights and the air is polluted by bombs and the smell of
death. There is no other option given for the outer space. Having in mind the
political situation surrounding even the premiere of the play in Derry’s
Guildhall, it is difficult to imagine that the audience accepted the Biblical
redemption as a real alternative to the political or community talks. From an
imaginative point of view, it is a pleasant but nevertheless utopian image of
salvation, without providing different other options for resolution. Thus, the
production becomes extremely important. Given the fact that the final scene
runs the risk of falling into pathos, the performance remains a determining
feature in rendering the right emphasis. In the initial Field Day staging, Patrick
Mason drew from Eileen Pollock (Marian) an energetic and disciplined
performance which maintained the religious rhetoric with a strict and passionate
delivery87. In 1995, in the Rough Magic production of the play, Lynne Parker
decided to end the play with the image of the ghost on stage alone. This solution
seems to be more at ease with the whole development of the play, thus
providing a balance between the grim surroundings in the outer space and the
interior spiritual elevation. Healing through religious belief is still possible but
there is the hovering presence of the ghost to remind the audience of the
87
Gerald Dawe, The Rest is History, p. 68.
Histories 69
with her head on Marian’s lap. If this is a model of wholeness, then the ending
should show that.”
Talking about the final scene, Shaun Richards considers that Pentecost is “a
frequently moving and often witty dramatization of personal relations” but when
considered as a response to the political situation in Northern Ireland, “its last
twenty minutes lack credibility on any level other than that of the performers’
ability to invest the lines with passionate conviction”.88
After the premiere in Derry, Field Day’s production of Stewart
Parker’s Pentecost moved to Dublin’s John Player Theatre on the South Circular
Road – constructed on the premises of the John Player cigarette factory – as part
of that year’s Dublin Theatre Festival and played to a house-full of excited
audiences. Shaun Richards considers that the warm applause at the end of the
production by both audiences in Derry and Dublin is explainable by the
essentially nostalgic 1960s message of the play. The reaction of the audience
attested the quality of the company “which has survived in a climate which is
both financially and politically fraught with difficulties”. Richards’s comments
on this particular Field Day production seem to suggest at a certain point that
whatever the quality of the play or the production put on stage by the company,
the reaction of the audience would have been positive, if only for the political
and ideological agenda behind the creation of the company. It is true that in
many cases through the cities and towns chosen for the Field Day tours, the
advertisements for the new production focused on the political importance of the
company, that of trying to artistically unite the North and the South. Thus, on
many occasions, the audiences were drawn in not by the title of the play or the
name of the playwright – Brian Friel could have been an exception – but by the
company’s ideologies, reflected in pamphlets, articles and interviews. Spectators
entered the theatre with one essential task, that of finding the usually overt
political statements within the text and the production.
In their vast majority, almost all the documented reactions of the
Field Day audiences are based on political pros and cons. Given the very
explicit policy that underlines all the Field Day productions and the board’s
intention to provide all their audiences with a new perspective on the political
situation in Northern Ireland and to try and offer an artistic way of reconciliation
for all the sides involved, it is justifiable for the reviews and critical writings to
focus on the aesthetic and political good deeds of the company. However, in
order to create a multifarious analysis of the Field Day Company and its artistic
endeavours it is worth juxtaposing texts, productions and reviews with a critical
88
Shaun Richards, “To Bind the Northern to the Southern Stars: Field Day in Derry and
Dublin”, in Claire Connolly (ed.) Readers in Cultural Criticism – Theorizing Ireland
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 67.
Histories 71
overview of the political and aesthetic agenda of the Company. Thus, a focused
analysis may discover new and exciting facets of the continuous mixture
between art and politics even within the Field Day manifesto which tended to
offer, at least in the beginning, an utopian theatrical solution for a world torn by
conflict and on the verge of a civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. Field Day’s
relationship with history is defined by a very strong sense of place. Belfast, but
especially Derry, become epitomes of the spatial determination of History, they
become spaces where histories are in the making, where personal histories
attempt to escape the iron grip of an overwhelming “official” story which exists
in a temporal loop. Field Day’s concerns with the issues of history, space and
reconciliation through artistic representation were not isolated in the cultural
space of Northern Ireland in the 1980s. The same problematic defined other
types of artistic expressions, like photography, performance art or installation
art for example. Artists and ideologists followed the path of Walter Benjamin’s
flâneur, abandoning themselves to the “phantasmagorias” of History, intending
to leave their personal imprints on the spaces and histories they inhabited.
Initially, the Field Day Theatre Company’s vision of history subscribed to the
necessity to change the view of History as Janus who, “whether it looks at the
past or at the present, it sees the same thing”89, into an image that reflected the
contemporary anxiety with re-reading and re-interpreting history and the past.
Field Day’s theories of history intended to underline the importance of
reconciliation through de-mythologization and escape from the “fossilised”
versions of History that defined the existence of Northern Ireland. However,
Field Day’s “flâneurs” often got caught in the labyrinth of the past, and, instead
of succumbing to the pressures of contemporary visions, the “phantasmagorias”
of History left their imprints on the theatrical productions and ideologies of the
company.
89
Maxime Du Camp, Paris, vol. 6, p. 315, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 14.
CHAPTER TWO
IDENTITIES
1
See details of this debate in Edward W. Said’s collection of essays, Culture &
Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994).
2
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea”, in Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 58.
Identities 73
communities in the North had become “stereotyped into their roles of oppressor
and victim to such an extent that the notion of a Protestant or a Catholic
sensibility was assumed to be a fact of nature rather that a product of the
ferocious conditions”3 in the province. The double-coded image of the
“Northerner” appeared in its over-blown self-caricature as both martyr,
continuing the Catholic vision of victimhood, and oppressor, as representative
of the old planter and colonizer. These images were embedded in the
consciousness of the race through history, contemporary media and literature,
thus engendering visions of identity which became part of the established
tradition on both sides of the Irish border. On the surface of the “identity
discourse”, it became an accepted norm that in Northern Ireland Irishness was
associated with Nationalism and the Catholic religion, while Britishness with
Unionism and the Protestant faith. Following the traditional, colonial binary
opposition between Self and Other, the two communities were continuously
defining themselves against each other, never acknowledging the fact that
within this dual structure they cannot exist without the Other, notwithstanding
the point of view from which this Other is defined.
The religious divide was seen as an expression and justification
of the injustices, the two communities being locked in a never-ending loop of
history where any sign of freedom was haunted by an obsession with treachery
and betrayal. Against this background, artists and writers, philosophers and
politicians tried to deconstruct the established identities by challenging them
with a wider, European view and with a multi-layered, hybrid identity that
would replace the hyphenated identities of Northern Ireland. One of the first
steps taken by the Field Day Theatre Company in reacting against the fossilized
visions of identity was to challenge the mythical basis of these convictions. Both
Seamus Deane and Richard Kearney underlined in their Field Day pamphlets
the importance of a critical revision of the mythologies which represented the
foundation of the identity crisis in Northern Ireland.
In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur states that “myth relates
to events that happened at the beginning of time which have the purpose of
providing grounds for the ritual actions of men today”4. According to Ricoeur, it
is only when it is threatened with destruction from without or from within, that a
society is compelled to return to the very roots of its identity, to the mythical
nucleus that grounds and determines it as society. In such moments of crisis, and
also following Michel Foucault’s mistrust of “historical origins”, there is a need
to question these tales of origin which could lead to possibilities of a perversion
of myth.
3
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea” (London: Hutchinson, 1985),
p. 54.
4
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 35.
74 Chapter Two
5
Paul Ricoeur in “Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds”, an interview with Paul
Ricoeur by Richard Kearney in Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney (eds.), The
Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies Vol. 1, 1977-1981, (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982),
pp. 112-120, p. 117.
6
Seamus Deane, “Canon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland”, in Jean Lundy and
Aodán Mac Póilin (eds.), Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster (Belfast:
Lagan Press, 1992), pp. 22-32, p. 30.
Identities 75
7
Seamus Deane, “Canon Fodder”, in Jean Lundy and Aodán Mac Póilin (eds.), Styles of
Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1992), pp. 22-32, p.
32.
8
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979), p.57 Initially published in French by Gallimard, 1975.
76 Chapter Two
and Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar. The reasons for this choice are quite clear in
the morphology of this study. Thomas Kilroy’s characters, be that the
historically determined William Joyce and Brendan Bracken or the
“theatrically” defined Madame MacAdam, Lyle Jones or Rabe, all reflect the
problematic choice between identities born-with, acquired or interpreted. Both
of Kilroy’s plays focus on the problems of representing identity and the almost
futile exercise to pinpoint one, all-encompassing identity. Terry Eagleton’s Saint
Oscar analyses the issue of artistically built identities and the aesthetic of living
within the boundaries of these identities. The character of Oscar Wilde becomes
the epitome of living “in-between”, of continuously trying to elude one identity
by constructing new ones through language and costuming. Regardless of the
historical period they represent, all the characters in these plays struggle with
the same identity issues, connected, in the cases of Bracken, Joyce and Wilde, to
the postcolonial angst of conquering the centre and assuming the identity of the
coloniser, becoming “more British than the British”; while in the case of the
characters in The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, to the tragedy of
getting lost in the labyrinth of theatrical identities and the dangers this ensues.
9
Thomas Kilroy, “A Generation of Playwrights” in Eamonn Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff:
Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), p. 2.
Identities 77
10
Margret Boveri, Treason in the Twentieth Century (London: Macdonald, 1956), p. 57.
11
Margret Boveri, Treason, p. 58.
78 Chapter Two
family which, unlike the majority of the Irish Catholics in Southern Ireland, had
always been almost fanatically Anglophile. This represented the first degree of
estrangement for Joyce. After the Irish Independence, the Joyces were termed
“collaborators” and were dealt with accordingly in an overtly violent fashion.
The family house was burnt down and they lost all their properties. In
consequence, the family moved to England where they encountered a country
completely different from their dream image of it. The Joyce family had loved a
dream England and they found a real England that treated them badly. Boveri
considers that “William Joyce’s love of a romanticized fatherland which never
existed but which he determined to create lies at the root of all his later deeds”12.
He suffered repeatedly the penalty of being an outsider, a man who never
seemed to belong anywhere. Thus, in his final days, during his trial, he preferred
being hanged as a Briton who had committed treason to being acquitted as an
American, given the fact that he was born in Brooklyn, New York, where his
family emigrated before returning to and settling down in the West of Ireland.
Brendan Bracken had a different way of dealing with his origins
but the life journey of both men meet in their continuous strife to deny their
constructed Irishness and invent new and convincing identities which matched
the power structures of the society they wanted to be accepted by. However, all
through their lives, both Bracken and Joyce were faced with the feeling of being
outsiders, of being OTHERS and of not being able to completely conquer the
centre. Brendan Bracken began his “fantasies” in his late teens by declaring
himself Australian – after spending a couple of years in Sidney with his
mother’s cousin who was a priest. Paradoxically for an individual who wanted
so much to belong to the imperialist structures of Britain, Bracken was seen by
his contemporaries as the representative of the colonized OTHER. One of his
fellow teachers recalled:
“My first impression was that I was looking at a Polynesian with dyed hair, for
he had a large red mop that stood out like a kind of halo; his features, almost
Negroid, were like those of a Papuan.”13
Churchill, who met Bracken in the summer of 1923, and who played a
determining part in his life, characterized him as “a brilliant young Australian of
quite exceptional powers and vitality”14; while the Conservative Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin, inspired by his cousin Rudyard Kipling, called Bracken
12
Margret Boveri, Treason, p. 62.
13
Quoted in Charles Edward Lysaght, “Bracken: The Fantasist Whose Dreams Came
True”, read at The 2001 Brendan Bracken Memorial Lecture, Churchill College,
Cambridge.
14
In Charles Edward Lysaght, “Bracken: The Fantasist Whose Dreams Came True”, The
2001 Brendan Bracken Memorial Lecture.
Identities 79
“Winston’s faithful chela” – chela being the Hindustani word for a disciple. For
Kilroy’s characters, the betrayal is not limited to the denial of the national
identity by assuming the symbols of the dominant culture. The act of treason
goes deeper within the self by revealing the conflict of a disintegrating
character, unable to differentiate between reality and the simulacrum created
through the imitation of the imperial images. The image of the disintegrating
character also presupposes the lack of a genuine origin that could provide a
fixed basis for the construction of other identities.
Intending to create an architectural space that would fulfil the
requirements of the perfect prison, Jeremy Bentham created the image of the
Panopticon, an architectural figure which:
“incorporates a tower central to an annular building that is divided into cells,
each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer
windows. The occupants of the cells are thus backlit, isolated from one another
by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an
observer in the tower who remains unseen.”
15
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979), p. 73. Originally published in French by Gallimard, 1975.
80 Chapter Two
16
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama – From Beckett to McGuinness (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 206.
17
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p.
206.
Identities 81
think, has to do with again, kind of forcing the audience to cut loose from easy
solutions.”18
The issues of identity present in Kilroy’s play are problematic not only because
of their challenging of the traditional concepts of Irish identity but also, at a
closer look, because of their undermining of the Field Day principles of identity
discussed in the pamphlets. The Field Day identity discourse is controversial in
itself given the changes that occur within it along the fifteen years of the
company’s theatrical enterprise. At the beginning of the 1980s the Field Day
ideologists were influenced by the emerging postcolonial identity discourse,
advocating the ideological move from the hyphenated identities, determined by
binary structures, towards a more open hybrid identity, determined by the
fragmentation and de-construction generated by the postmodern theoretical
discourse. However, by the end of the 1990s, Seamus Deane, Field Day’s main
ideologist, considered that plurality and multiplicity do not represent a viable
solution to the problem of Irish identity. This continuous balancing between
different, opposing ideas of identity induced a sense of unrest within the
structures of Field Day, making it difficult for the playwrights working with the
company to relate to these complex and controversial theoretical stands. In
Thomas Kilroy’s Double Cross, the two main characters Brendan Bracken and
William Joyce subscribe to this difficulty of grasping any kind of genuine
identity. The only apparent reality of the characters is represented by the
historical data that builds up their biographical identities presented by the
playwright at the beginning of the play. However, keeping in mind the
manipulative tendency of historiography, the historical identities of the
characters are undermined as well, thus creating a vacuum of identity, a lack of
substance that can be traced back to the Field Day discourse on identity and
ultimately to the failure of this discourse to secure a valid vision of Irish
identities.
The main characteristic of the play, which defines the stories of
both characters, is the power of language in creating personal stories of
belonging and defining identities. Joyce and Bracken build up their public
images through language in general and English in particular as forms of
salvation, of complete isolation from their Irish origins. The English language is
seen as the language of power that they both appropriate in an attempt to
become “more English than the English”. Noam Chomsky considers that “all
questions of language are basically questions of power”19, underlining the fact
that through the process of history we assume identities by taking up the mask
18
Paul Brennan and Thierry Dubost, Études Irlandaises, Vol. 26-1, Spring 2001, p. 9.
19
Quoted in Carol L. Schmid, The Politics of Language – Conflict, Identity and Cultural
Pluralism in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 35.
82 Chapter Two
of language in order to fit the power structures of the imposing culture. This
view is also outlined by Tom Paulin in one of his pamphlets for the Field Day
collection, where he considers that “the story of a language is often a story of
possession and dispossession, territorial struggle and establishment or
imposition of a culture”20.
Talking about the creation of identity in contemporary times,
Jacques Derrida considered that “the self-affirmation of an identity always
claims to be responding to the call or assignation of the universal, the inscription
of the universal in the singular”21. This view seems to be further complicated in
the case of Joyce and Bracken as they want to be introduced in the globality of
the British Empire or any Empire for that matter, by completely denying the
singularity of their Irish origins. In their development, the two characters seem
to be more and more torn between an identity they desire but which is ultimately
forbidden to them and an identity they possess but which they completely deny.
The structure of the play follows the two apparently separate lifelines. After
presenting the official biographies of both characters, Kilroy divides the play in
two acts or better said two “plays”: The Bracken Play: London and The Joyce
Play: Berlin.
The opening of The Bracken Play builds up the space in which
both identities will be defined. The duality of the play and of the characters is
present in the stage directions proper, where the “larger than life” cardboard
figures of Churchill, King George V and Sir Oswald Mosley hanging above the
stage on a washing line are reversed in The Joyce Play to represent Dr.
Goebbels, Hitler and Mosley again. The image of the interchangeable, two-
dimensional cardboard figures brings to mind the deceitful nature of ready-made
identities, political certainties that can change at a flip of the washing line. The
physical inconsistency of the cardboard figures is translated into the characters
of Bracken and Joyce by having the same actor playing both roles. The
interchangeability of the characters is underlined by placing a video screen on
stage as an integral part of the set and by having the live actor always
confronted by his on-screen mirror image, his hated and despised double.
The Romney portrait of Edmund Burke22 who, as an Irishman,
achieved a determining position in the history of British politics, dominates the
space of The Bracken Play. The portrait is a continuous reminder of the position
Bracken is seeking in his own career. However, the first voice heard on stage is
20
Tom Paulin, “A New Look at the Language Question” in Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 3.
21
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading – Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 73.
22
According to his biography, Brendan Bracken left this portrait for the use of the
Masters’ Lodges in Churchill College, Cambridge.
Identities 83
Joyce’s who, on the radio, comments on the day’s news. The fictional and
physically impossible dialogue between the two, further enhances the intense
duality of the characters. There are different levels of language and
communication involved in the first scene. In the opening image Joyce speaks
on the radio about the great victories of the German Reich and Bracken is
fascinated by his voice. Eventually he turns off the wireless and addresses the
audience only to justify his interest in the broadcast:
“Actually, I only listen to the filthy little traitor as part of my job. As Minister of
Information in His Majesty’s Government I do have to listen to a lot of
tommyrot, I’m afraid.”23
Paradoxically for what we know about Joyce’s life – his involvement with the
Black and Tans as informer in Ireland – Bracken is relating him to Ireland,
characterizing him as “a jumped up little fascist from the Irish Free State”
(Double Cross, p. 17). Bracken cannot deny his fascination with Joyce and turns
on the wireless again just in time to hear Joyce characterizing him as a “well
known poseur and parasite” (Double Cross, p. 18). The characters’ denial of
their origins is reflected in the images they project about each other. They want
to get rid of their own Irishness by imposing it on the OTHER, without realizing
that by doing so they actually impose it on themselves as, in this case, the SELF
and the OTHER are interchangeably the same.
In a combination of physical performance and video technique
the two characters define themselves as the OTHER. Bracken, on stage, sees
Joyce as a “vulgar little shit from Connemara, full of fight, ready to take on
anyone. You know the kind of Paddy.” (Double Cross, p. 18) Joyce is presented
as the epitome Irishman, an outsider, thrown out from Oswald Mosley’s British
Union of Fascists, as “the Irish are always being thrown out of something or
other, aren’t they?” (Double Cross, p. 18); and a “pub fighter”, “coat off,
sleeves up and bejasus we’re off. Dreadful chap, actually.” (Double Cross, p.
18) The response comes from the video screen where Joyce, wearing black shirt
and tie, gives his own description of Bracken’s character. Until this point in the
development of the play, the dialogue is given a parallel structure, with the
characters addressing the audience directly.
The apparent balance of this relationship is disrupted by the
characters starting to react to each other, thus creating an unusual dialogue
between presence and absence, between stage and screen, between SELF and
OTHER. Joyce describes Bracken as “the son of a Tipperary stonemason” who
rose to the top of British politics by being a “trickster” and a clown, a court-
23
Thomas Kilroy, Double Cross (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), pp. 17-18. All further
quotes will refer to this edition.
84 Chapter Two
“BRACKEN: The question is, though: how did this chappie Joyce end up as Dr.
Goebbels’ right-hand man on the wireless?
JOYCE: The question is, what does it say about democracy if such a trickster
can rise to the top?
BRACKEN: The traitor!
JOYCE: The trickster!” (Double Cross, p. 19)
24
Denis Sampson, “The Theatre of Thomas Kilroy: Boxes of Words” in Perspectives of
Irish Drama and Theatre, ed. by Richard Allen Cave and Jacqueline Genet, Irish Literary
Studies 33 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991), pp. 130-139, p. 132.
Identities 85
“ACTRESS: When a man wipes out his past and invents his own future he may
have criminal or artistic tendencies.
ACTOR: On the other hand he may be simply acting out a condition of the
culture from which he is trying so desperately to escape.” (Double Cross, p. 19)
Thus, the condition of the Irish culture, on the brink of its independence from
England, is presented as the main reason for Bracken and Joyce’s fabrication of
“ultra-English” identities. The two men had always been torn between the two
cultures, Irish and English, and, by continuing or standing up against the
tradition of their families, they mimicked the identities of power and created
stories that, at a certain point, they themselves started to believe. While the two
stories unfold narrated by the Actor and the Actress, Bracken and Joyce begin to
interact with them, trying to impose their own facets of the truth upon their
historically created images. In their attempt to impose their invented identities
on the historical discourse, both Bracken and Joyce interrupt the stories of the
two Actors. Thus, an unusual dialogue develops between Joyce and Bracken,
the two characters reacting to their own official stories told by the narrators and
trying to correct them with details from their personal fantasies.
“BRACKEN: Actually, I died of cancer. Before there’s any more nonsense I
simply wanted to say that I suffered one particular libel all my life. That I was
the illegitimate son of Sir Winston… Actually, my father was a bishop…”
(Double Cross, p. 20)
language as vital feature of these mixed worlds determines the Babel of realities.
The power of language as means of colonization is underlined by Bracken’s
opinion that in the future “the whole world will be divided between those who
speak the language [English] and those who don’t” (Double Cross, p. 21).
Winston Churchill observes that England’s power to colonize so many
territories was determined by the use of English and by the imposition of the
language and culture upon the victims rather than by the use of force: “we have
always taken more captives with our dictionaries than with our regiments”.
(Double Cross, p. 21)
The stories of the narrators also raise the question of
postcolonial existence, the tendency of a now independent periphery to
appropriate the language and the image of the oppressor in a conscious or
subconscious intent to dominate or disrupt the centre from the inside. The
centripetal power of the centre is so strong that the periphery feels a permanent
attraction towards it and a need to imitate it so that it can fit within the structures
of power. The new slogan of existence in such a reality is “Imitate that you may
be free.” (Double Cross, p. 22) The narratives of Bracken and Joyce are taken
towards their end by underlining the irony of their deaths. Both characters lived
in worlds constructed on the basis of language and expressed through speech.
Ironically, at the time of their death they are denied the use of their voice and
both die of “speechlessness”: Bracken dies of throat cancer while Joyce is
hanged as a traitor to the British Crown.
The two Actors, as narrators and guides through the play,
introduce the determining question that Double Cross tries to answer or, at least
to discuss with the audience: why does the victim always try to imitate the
oppressor? The play is heralded as challenging the binary oppositions
periphery/centre, victim/oppressor, metropolitan/provincial, in an attempt to
define the psychological and implicitly cultural reasons for the two main
characters to re-invent themselves.
Symbolically for his position as Minister of Information,
Bracken is presented standing on stage and holding, in turn, a variety of
telephone receivers. The telephone conversations give the actor playing Bracken
the opportunity to develop the idea of “double speech”, the two levels of
dialogue on and off the phone, with Bracken’s asides directed towards the
audience. There is a constant doubleness involved in his conversations as, on the
phone, the rules of the colonial society are at work and Bracken uses them for
his purposes, in this case, to purchase The Economist newspaper from Lady
Colefax.
The asides reinforce the duality by presenting another side of the
character, a side that reacts against this society and lifts the mask off an
apparently perfect gentleman to reveal an individual struggling to find his place
Identities 87
not only in the society per se but also in his relationship with Popsie, his lover,
and with his brother who keeps haunting him from a not too distant past. The
image of the brother25 whom we never actually see on stage becomes the
representation of the hidden Irishness that Bracken wants so desperately to
conceal and deny. His dreams of grandeur –
“The Right Honourable Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, MP, Member
for North Paddington... Viscount Bracken of... Pretoria? No. Hobart? Viscount
Bracken of Hobart? No Christchurch. Ah! Viscount Bracken of Christchurch.”
(Double Cross, p. 24)
– are disturbed by the “force of darkness” which is his brother. If the external
conflict, the “terrible war” is fought between “my country” and “my king” and
the forces of darkness represented by Joyce and thus by the OTHER, the
internal conflict is a clash between the public and the private, between the
Bracken of the political stage and the Bracken who fights to erase his origins
which are given a permanent presence through the spectre of an “invisible”
brother and the voice of an “invisible” Joyce. The haunting power of tradition
and belonging creates an interior conflict reflected in Bracken’s relationship
with Popsie.
Subscribing to Kilroy’s engagement to create a continuous
dialogue with the audience, Popsie’s first lines are directed towards the
auditorium in an attempt to explain her position in his world and to justify her
outfit alluding to Bracken’s bisexuality. Thus, Bracken is presented to the
audience as an individual whose life is determined by acting and costuming.
Even the intimate relationship with Popsie is based on costuming, as she has to
wear a Boy Scout uniform underneath her peignoir in order to arouse him
sexually. The costuming, the wearing of masks becomes the key element of the
play, reinforcing both the interior and exterior duality of the characters.
However, Popsie is not a mere actress in Bracken’s play. She knows about his
past, she is aware of his need to be included in the power structures and thus his
perpetual role-playing. Popsie has a double role, that of a player in Bracken’s
story but, at the same time, that of an observer and a facilitator for the audience.
She discusses with Bracken the possible reaction of an imaginary audience: “It’s
simply one of the things which might occur to a casual observer of this delicate
scene.” (Double Cross, p. 26) Popsie is anchored in the present and she is
25
Peter, Bracken’s brother, was a constant thorn in his side. Deeply in debt and
threatened with dismissal from his senior position in the Irish police, Peter once backed
his demands for a loan by burgling the house in Lord North Street and making off with
Brendan’s portrait of Edmund Burke. It should be added that Bracken later helped Peter
and other needy members of his family in Ireland, although he saw little or nothing of
them.
88 Chapter Two
“I am Irish, actually, myself. Earl of Kenmare. Got a bit of a family seat over in
County Kerry. Trying to turn the bloody place into a golf course at present.
Bloody marvellous country for golf courses, Ireland.” (Double Cross, p. 31)
Even though Lord Castlerosse built his public image on the basis of his
Irishness, treating it as an exotic characteristic of his personality, the overall
tone of his speech is still that of distance and criticism. He characterizes the
Irish as “always trying to be something other than Irish”, without
acknowledging the fact that he is describing himself and Bracken, two
characters who wanted to re-invent themselves within the society they so much
desired to be part of.
Bracken is redefined with every dialogue he is involved in. He
always puts on a new mask but behind those masks there is one universal truth
he follows: the complete and utter denial of his Irish origins. Notwithstanding
the fact that we see him in different circumstances and surrounded by different
people, Bracken retains the same worries, ideas and beliefs, all revolving around
the fierce dismissal of his past. When Beaverbrook threatens to reveal his “true”
story, Bracken decides to leave the Lord’s house and refuses to face reality,
even for a moment. His fanaticism in redefining himself as eminently British is
projected against any revolutionary tendency that could disrupt the Empire:
alien races, the riff-raff of Russia or Gandhi, the Indian “who wants to dismantle
the Empire”. (Double Cross, p. 37).
In a world torn apart by different forces and by a World War,
Bracken is facing another, more dangerous enemy, as he himself defines it, “the
enemy within”. The character breaks down in fragmented pieces when, during
an air raid, he remembers his father, a fighter for Irish independence, and his
brother, Peter, who was supposed to continue the family fight for freedom.
Suddenly, Bracken seems to enter another dimension and thus he uses “another”
language, a low, strong Tipperary accent. The image of the brother appears
again, this time not as a beggar who threatens him by asking for money, but as
the traitor, the individual who went over to “the other side”. The idea of treason
and the remembered image of Peter, the lost brother who was supposed to
“stand up for Ireland”, introduce Joyce who reappears at the end of The Bracken
Play to mark the transition towards The Joyce Play and to reinforce the
sameness of the main characters: “We are one. You and I are one”. (Double
Cross, p. 44)
The “invisible” Joyce starts another impossible dialogue with
Bracken. Notwithstanding Bracken’s attempts to silence him by turning off the
wireless, the voice of the despised Other lingers on forcing Bracken to face his
own duality. Joyce’s speech at the end of The Bracken Play gives the first part
of Double Cross a circular structure: Joyce reiterates the ideas of the beginning,
using almost the same words in describing Bracken as a performer, a clown who
90 Chapter Two
as his treason involves a double exile: he left Ireland for England and then
decided to work for the Third Reich against the British government during the
war. His levels of estrangement are deeper and more pronounced than
Bracken’s, thus creating a lack of balance between the two parts of the play. The
Bracken Play is determined by a sometimes-redundant need from the playwright
to show Bracken’s tendency towards acting, pretending and costuming, thus the
play acquiring a cadence rarely interrupted by Joyce’s voice on radio.
The Joyce Play changes the rhythm of Double Cross
dramatically, the audience being confronted with a complex maze of
relationships. In the first part of The Bracken Play, Bracken’s soliloquies are
directed towards an establishment that presents traces of decay because of the
mixtures it displays – the case of Castlerosse, for example – towards his lover,
Popsie or his double, Joyce. The second part of the play provides an insight into
Joyce’s relationships with himself, with Bracken, with his wife Margaret and
with at least two different levels of power structure: the German Reich and the
British Empire.
The image that opens The Joyce Play is intended to mirror the
first scene of The Bracken Play. If the phone determines Bracken’s appearance,
Joyce’s space is determined by the radio, “a battery of different radio stations
over the air” fills the atmosphere created in the first scene. The artificial,
mechanical voices address the audience in an attempt to dramatize the wide
spectrum of “free” radio stations in Britain, all directed against Britain’s
involvement in the war. Even the BBC Home Service expresses the disapproval
of the general public. All these fragmentary voices seem real, genuine reports of
a nation at war. This belief is dismantled by Bracken, who appears on the video
screen – changing places with the Joyce of the first part – and addresses the
nation as Minister of Information in order to discourage the audience from
listening to such broadcasts as they are all “enacted” by people in
Rundfunkhaus, the broadcasting centre in Berlin, led by the Irish traitor Lord
Haw Haw, William Joyce. With the emphasis on the importance of the Voice in
the manipulation of reality, Kilroy, yet again, touches upon the problematics of
the construction, through language, of “invisible” identities often taken for
granted.
The two narrators, the Actor and the Actress appear on stage in
order to set the background for The Joyce Play. The story of William Joyce
unfolds in front of the audience, having as a central moving power the VOICE
and the manipulation of the historical events through the use of different voices
– as the Actor puts it: “our hero sits at the centre of the most extraordinary
factory of voices ever assembled in the history of radio” (Double Cross, p. 52).
By entering the world of William Joyce, the two narrators exist under the spell
of the spoken word and they start manipulating it by miming Churchill, for
92 Chapter Two
example: “Get Brendan on the phone. Something has to be done about this chap
Haw Haw.” (Double Cross, p. 53). Voice and time – the obsession with clocks –
are considered to trigger the imagination of the people in such a multiplying
“Tower of Babel”. Through the radio, Joyce can release “the most potent
subversion of all: the imagination of the people” by manipulating time –
announcing different times for bombings – and voice – putting on/enacting
different voices and languages. On air, time, space and language lose their
boundaries and become slippery notions, the traditional ways of measuring time,
for example, are easily transformed in Dalian flowing clocks, time being in the
speaker’s power to manipulate. In Double Cross history is manipulated through
the mechanical means of radio, telephone and, in general, through utterance.
The relationship between William Joyce and England relies on
invention. Joyce re-invents an England of his desires through his voice on the
radio, while England, through Bracken and the Ministry of Information, re-
invents Joyce into a Nazi traitor and, by considering him a traitor it actually
acknowledges Joyce as part of the British Empire. The Actor presents this
relationship as “the Principle of Circularity” or “the Double Cross Effect”. The
Double Cross effect constitutes the centre of Thomas Kilroy’s play, both parts
being based on the idea of invention and imagination. Acting always one against
the other, the two parts are at the same time identical and opposed, following the
relationship pattern between SELF and OTHER. Thus, Bracken’s Ministry of
Information is doubled by Joyce’s Ministry of Misinformation, a doubling that
seemingly opposed, it is based on the principle of “absolute duplication”.
Paradoxically, in the first part of his play Joyce is faced with
another character who pretends to be English, who is enacting English manners
and is in love with English poetry. One can venture to discuss the relationship
between Margaret, Joyce’s wife, and Erich, the German soldier who quotes
Yeats, as a theoretical example of the colonizer/colonized dyad, given the focus
on problems of language and literature as means of transformation, of creating
new identities. Recognizing in Erich his own strife to be different, and to
appropriate the English culture, Joyce mocks Erich’s interest in English poetry –
and his “ignorance” in considering W. B. Yeats an English poet – describing
him to Margaret: “he, actually, really does believe, you know, that he is in
possession of the mysteries of English poetry, that clown, master of the English
lyric!”
Margaret’s relationship with Joyce is two-sided: as a parallel for
Popsie, Margaret is the insider, the one who understands but at the same time
criticizes Joyce for his continuous obsession with power and violence. She is
aware of the importance of the VOICE in Joyce’s rise to power: “There was
always some gap between what he said and what he really felt. When that gap
widened all that was left to him was speech.” (Double Cross, p. 66). On the
Identities 93
other hand, Margaret is the link with the audience, sometimes taking up the role
of observer and mediator, explaining and justifying Joyce’s actions and his
decisions in life. Compared to the Bracken-Popsie duo, the relationship between
Margaret and Joyce is based on violence and love. It is a source of a continuous
conflict which is transformed into energy and power:
“We must turn our violence into energy. That’s what you said. We must use that
energy to master the world about us. Don’t you remember? Your words, William
Joyce. Personal violence is waste. Violence controlled and directed is power.”
(Double Cross, p. 65).
Joyce’s capture at the end of the war reinforces the paradox of his life: “I had
been shot by a Jew pretending to be a Briton in the woods above Wasserleben.”
(Double Cross, p. 72).
Joyce’s capture is announced by both Bracken and a Lady
Journalist, Kilroy combining the two voices in giving an intended objective
image of the reception of the news within the power structure of the British
Empire. The Minister of Information equals Joyce’s treason against Britain with
the war crimes, with “the spies and saboteurs who tried to bomb our cities and
factories during the war.” (Double Cross, p. 72). His power did not rely on the
range of the weapons but on the way he used words: “I heard him turn speech
into a deadly weapon of hate and destruction.” (Double Cross, p. 72). Bracken’s
hope for Joyce’s death, “there can be no peace while a man like this is allowed
to live”, springs not only from his position as Minister of Information and thus
loyal to the country he serves, but also from his personal hatred of Joyce as his
double, as a mirror image whose existence he does not want to acknowledge.
The Lady Journalist gives the audience the insight into the
treason trial in the Old Bailey in September 1945. Her coverage underlines once
again the paradoxical position that Joyce encounters himself in. In his speech on
his act of treason, Joyce presents his reasons for leaving England and going to
work in the “Ministry of Misinformation” run by Dr. Goebbels as an attempt to
transform England into the ideal, imagined country of his childhood. William
Joyce was condemned to be hanged out of too much love for England, “out of
an inexplicable desire which could only be satisfied by his own destruction”
(Double Cross, p. 73). Everything that Joyce possessed in proving his British
citizenship was false: his British passport was a fake and he was seen by the
newspapers to be an “alien”. However, the importance of the symbol, the fact
that he chose to carry a British passport and to put himself under the protection
of the King gave him the paradoxical “right” to be judged as a traitor to the
Crown. The power of the symbol is underlined as a determining element in the
creation of identity, reinforcing the importance of acting, pretending and
fictionalising in the delineation of the two main characters of the play.
94 Chapter Two
26
Seamus Deane quoted in Marilynn J. Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines – The Field
Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), p. 102.
27
Stewart Parker quoted in Marilynn J. Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines – The Field
Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), p. 67.
96 Chapter Two
28
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p.
209.
Identities 97
This relationship between audience and actors justifies everything the actors do,
even the choice of “rubbish” melodramas just because “the Irish simply adore”
them. In Lyle’s opinion there is no difference between these “Hibernian
melodramas” and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, what is important is that the actors
always offer their best performance to the audience. Theatre itself has the only
role of pleasing the audience and providing aesthetic beauty. This view
expressed by Jones refers back to the justifications given by the Field Day
Theatre Company regarding their decision, in 1983, to refuse David Rudkin’s
commissioned play The Saxon Shore and stage instead Athol Fugard’s play
Boesman and Lena. The reason for this change was shortly explained to Rudkin
in a letter, the board of directors considering the play problematic for the
“ecumenical” audience attending the premiere in Derry’s Guildhall30.
The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, structured in two
parts, opens with a video projection sequence. The titles of the main events in
the first scene are projected on the dark background of the stage, reminding the
viewer of silent film captures, news programmes from the Second World War
and Brechtian “banners”. This technique of creating fragmented tableaux for
each scene continues all through the play. The fragmentation of the titles, –
“The World at War! Enter Madame MacAdam. The lost child. And the
doctoring of a dog.”(The Madame MacAdam…, p. 1) – links the innovative
theatre and film techniques of the early 20th century with the postmodern
tendencies of the late 1980s constructed within the play. Even before the play
begins, the projection builds up a collage of different elements into one unifying
image, marking out the borderline techniques used by the playwright in
29
Thomas Kilroy, The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre (London: Methuen, 1991),
p. 17. All further quotes will refer to this edition.
30
This problematic choice is discussed in more detail in Chapter Four.
98 Chapter Two
31
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). See also Jean
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994), originally published in French by Éditions Galilée, 1981.
32
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p.
209.
Identities 99
play or “the drums of war” beating in Northern Ireland. “The frail salvation of
the final curtain” provides a momentary solution for the distress of the reality
surrounding the performance, thus blurring the boundaries between theatre and
reality. The actors are referred to with their stage names: “We have lost our
indifferent Claudius and obese Gertrude together with a fifth-rate Horatio in a
town called, I believe, Mullingar.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 1), thus
reinforcing the thin line between character and individual, between existing and
pretending. Nothing is well defined within the boundaries. The perceived real
world exists within another world of multiple realities that overlap, creating
stories and thus moving away from a strict historical vision towards the multiple
perspective of the story with an infinite number of interpretations and meanings.
Madame MacAdam underlines this view when she advocates the importance of
exaggeration in the existence of her company: “One needs to exaggerate to keep
banality at bay.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 1)
Pretending and exaggeration define the story of theatre in a
desperate attempt to recover the greatness of past times. Finding themselves at
the crossroads between theatre and anti-theatre, the performers have to create
their own story in order to keep up at least the appearance of theatre. Thus, the
two questions to be answered in the play:
“what compulsion is, to display ourselves nightly as others before others, to
costume ourselves and what are we doing here in this remote, indeed barbaric
corner of Eirer.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 2)
33
Thomas Kilroy in Gerald Dawe, “Thomas Kilroy”, Theatre Ireland 3 (1983).
34
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interest: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (London:
Routledge, 1992).
35
Quoted in Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama, (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1995), p. 203.
36
Thierry Dubost, “Kilroy’s Theatre of the Conflicted Self”, in The Irish University
Review Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring-Summer 2002, p. 16.
Identities 101
“BOURKE: See King! See Majesty Michael, hah? Nice turnout, hah?
SERGEANT: What’s the meaning of this? Gather up them things.
BOURKE: Don’t talk to me like that, mister.
SERGEANT: I’ll talk to you anywhichway I want.
BOURKE: Will ya now? We have your measure, mister, in this town. We see
through ya, boy. We’re just waiting for ya to drop, boy.” (The Madame
MacAdam…, p. 77-78)
(The Madame MacAdam…, p. 75). On the other hand, the relationship between
the actors and costuming shifts from problems of discipline and control towards
more complex and wide-ranging issues of illusion, reality and the place of
theatre within a society in crisis. The general problems faced by the institution
of theatre are discussed both on the real stage and on the one represented by the
van. This doubling and mirroring of the condition of theatre opens up unlimited
possibilities of development within the play.
The generation gap between views on the role of the theatre and
the actor is represented by the continuous discussions between Lyle Jones, an
old, mediocre actor, who knew greatness in his youth and now still lives and
performs inspired by that greatness; and Rabe, a young actor with extraordinary
performance capacities but who wears the stigma of being a Jew and thus an
outsider and a potential danger to the established society. The differences of
ideology are apparent from the very first encounter between the two. If Lyle
Jones considers the theatre as a space where the audience rules, Rabe brings a
completely different image to the role and importance of theatre. As a character,
Rabe’s position is that of the ultimate rebel. He represents the OTHER, the
outsider to the established rules and society not only because he is a Jew but
also because of his radical view on theatre. Traumatized and angry because of
the anti-Semitic attacks he was subject to and which led to the death of his
father, Rabe channels his hate and anger towards theatre, intending to create a
new type of acting and a new vision of the stage. Paradoxically, he blames his
father for everything that happened, only because he did not do anything against
it and just suffered in silence the abuse of history represented here by the
Blackshirts:
“I hate my father. He just stood there while they burned him out. Why didn’t he
do something? A figure in a burning sheet. Dancing. Dance, Israelite!
Dance.”(The Madame MacAdam…, p. 24).
“JO: Maybe we can do without mothers and fathers altogether. …So we can be
ourselves.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 24)
Surrounded by war and hatred within society, Rabe wants to create a theatre that
could give a solution to all the problems. However, his view is not that of
presenting audiences with idyllic visions of the world but, on the contrary, Rabe
proposes a cathartic solution, that of transposing danger and explosion of
passions on stage:
“RABE: What I want, more than anything, is a theatre which can hold – danger.
You see what I mean? Where danger can detonate upon a stage. You see, I
believe if theatre can do that, there will be less – danger left in the world. Our
only hope is that art transform the human animal. Nothing else has worked.”
(The Madame MacAdam…, p. 25)
standing up for his beliefs and acting accordingly: “I’m afraid he has the need to
do it. It’s rather like an appetite. It’s the source of his energy, alas. And of his
creativity. He burns away everything each time to make a clean start.” (The
Madame MacAdam…, p. 65).
Although Rabe accused her of misleading him with visions of
the possibility of creating a theatre of transformation, Madame MacAdam
appears as both director and playwright. She knows everything about the other
characters and, in her prologue she proves to have an insight into the events that
will determine the development of the play. But she is more than an omniscient
narrator. She blends the figure of the playwright who is directing her own
production with that of the actor who becomes a vital character in the play. She
cannot resist sharing her knowledge of the events with the audience and
sometimes with the other characters – Jo for example. Madame MacAdam is a
central character, uniting the two elements that constitute the core of the
majority of Kilroy’s plays: illusion and reality. Like the metatheatrical device of
theatre within theatre, which opens up issues of theatricality and performance,
Madame MacAdam becomes the mouthpiece of two spaces which overlap in the
play: the space of pretending and that of the reality surrounding it. With
Madame MacAdam, Thomas Kilroy creates a viable link between the artistic
experience and the viewer. Having this in mind, the stealing of the costumes by
the LDF men becomes a symbolic act, providing Madame MacAdam with the
possibility of a new beginning. By casting off the old costumes, the company is
casting off an old way of creating theatre and moves on towards new horizons
of performance: “Good God! This is the final rending of the curtain. We have
passed into another dimension!” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 70). However,
the difference between Rabe’s and Madame MacAdam’s visions is that, in the
case of the latter, the passage towards new ideologies is based on surpassing the
existing tradition rather than destroying it.
Madame MacAdam’s view on theatre postulates that there is
always a threat in the art of performing, in the lack of balance between illusion
and reality. Rabe represents one example of this dangerous imbalance. He
would like to project reality on stage and solve the problems of the world within
the space of theatre, which could provide catharsis for the audience but it is far
from truth and reality. Madame MacAdam observes: “I’m afraid he may look on
life as just a larger stage with a larger audience.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p.
57). On the other hand, Lyle Jones, Bourke and the LDF men see the illusion of
theatre everywhere. They apply the same rules of theatrical performance to the
real world around them. They are acting on the great stage of fools without
realizing that there is a determining difference between the illusion of theatre
and reality. Lyle Jones is always acting, making Madame MacAdam see theatre
everywhere around her. For Jones, participating in the farce at the races is as
Identities 105
The representatives of this space use theatre and pretending as a way of life. In
order to reinforce this image Kilroy introduces two other local characters, Jo and
Marie Therese, two girls who live in a world where the borderline between
reality and fantasy becomes blurred. The two characters create adventures for
themselves, projecting upon the surrounding reality stories constructed from
elements belonging to both worlds. They build up simulacra of worlds that exist
only in their imagination.
Jo, a strong, independent girl, takes a child from her house only
because she wants her to be happy, and lives the adventure of taking care of the
little girl while the police are looking for her everywhere. With the arrival of the
theatricals in town, she lives her first love adventure with Rabe, just to be left
alone by a man who is always looking for the perfect performance. On the other
hand, Marie Therese wants desperately to be loved and keeps a diary of all her
illusionary suitors. She lives with the hope that one day she would leave the
town and re-fashion herself in San Francisco, thus following in the footsteps of
her ancestors. Unfortunately, these stories fail in providing the substance that
the characters need. Being based on simulations, they are not backed by a
concrete world and thus tumble down at the slightest touch of the real leaving
the characters in a continuous limbo between reality and fiction, in a desperate
attempt to free themselves from the world of theatre and pretending. Both Jo
and Marie Therese use theatre against theatre with no visible success as, at the
end of the play, they return to the same life of a desperate, perpetual present.
106 Chapter Two
There is no movement towards the future, the small town being locked into a
loop of continuous pretending in a present defined by conflict. Jo’s possible
pregnancy, alluded to by Madame MacAdam, may supply a slight hope for a
future reconciliation given the father, Rabe’s position as the Other. However,
the indeterminacy of the ending points towards insecurity and desperation.
By the collision of these two worlds, that of the travelling
company and that of the local people Thomas Kilroy creates a gigantic stage
where through discussing different views on theatre, he tries to give a possible
solution for the position of theatre in the contemporary world. The insistence on
fragmentation illustrates his belief in the necessary acceptance of diversity and
sums up his vision of the world thus contributing to but also de-stabilizing the
theories of theatre expressed by Field Day. Through the characters of Lyle Jones
and Rabe, Kilroy exposes not only the controversial choices of the company but
also the futility of discussing new theories of theatre without practically
implementing them in Field Day’s performances. Also, by creating the character
of Madame MacAdam as the director of the travelling company, Kilroy
addresses gender issues which represented one of the main causes for the
criticism that Field Day received. The complete lack of female directors on the
board of the company and the “banishing” of female writers from Field Day’s
biggest literary enterprise, the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing ensued a
long row of critical articles on the subject, in addition to the criticism of the
“Nationalistic” orientation of the company. As a response, Field Day announced
the publication of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing. Even
though the idea was welcomed by critics, there still was a lingering
disappointment concerning the fact that female writers were not considered
good enough to be included in the same anthology volumes with their male
counterparts and that Field Day decided to publish a distinct volume only for
female writers. Also, “paradoxically”, the play that could have discussed all
these issues on stage in an innovative and visually challenging way, Thomas
Kilroy’s The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre flopped, being considered
the worst production of the company and determining its playwright to retire
from the Field Day board of directors. Having in mind the incredible theatrical
possibilities that this play can offer to any theatre company, I hope that The
Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre will resurface from the swamps of the
Field Day “canon” and will receive a well-deserved revival after suffering the
unfortunate backlash of politics and ideological views and decisions.
Identities 107
37
Edna Longley, “The Old Myth of Ireland” in The Times Literary Supplement 6-12
October 1989 (This and the following newspaper and magazine articles have been
consulted in the Field Day Theatre Company Archive, Newman House, University
College Dublin.)
38
Stephen Rea in The Irish News, 21 September 1989 (Field Day Archive).
108 Chapter Two
39
Terry Eagleton in The San Francisco Review, Spring, 1990 (Field Day Archive).
40
Joe McMinn, Theatre Ireland, No. 15, 1990, Belfast (Field Day Archive).
41
Terry Eagleton in an interview with Kevin Jackson in The Independent, Friday, 15
September 1989 (Field Day Archive).
42
Terry Eagleton in an interview with Kevin Jackson (Field Day Archive).
Identities 109
to Tom Paulin who suggested that it might be suitable for production by Field
Day. However, it became clear that the text of the play was overtly “aesthetic”,
thus paying tribute to Wilde’s cultural theory but losing in theatricality. The
playwright compared Wilde’s theory to that of Roland Barthes:
“It would be more accurate to say that such theory, for all its excited air of
novelty, represents in some ways little advance on the fin de siècle. Language as
self-referential, truth as a convenient fiction, the human subject as contradictory
and ‘deconstructed’, criticism as a form of ‘creative’ writing, the body and its
pleasures pitted against a pharisaical ideology: in these and several other ways,
Oscar Wilde looms up for us more and more as the Irish Roland Barthes.”43
43
Terry Eagleton, San Francisco Review, Spring, 1990 (Field Day Archive).
44
Declan Kiberd, ‘Anglo-Irish Attitudes’, Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson,
1985), pp. 83-105, p. 90.
45
Paul Hadfield in Theatre Ireland, No. 15, 1990, Belfast (Field Day Archive).
110 Chapter Two
ancient group of citizens and wise men, which, if it had been fully developed by
the playwright, would have rendered a sense of innovation to the play.
However, the Chorus remains an important but indeed
unfinished element of the play. The first song of the Chorus encapsulates in a
comic and sometimes deeply ironic manner the life of Oscar Wilde, a life which
has as determining characteristics duality and multiplicity. Edna Longley
observes that the main issue discussed in the ballad, that of Wilde being “part
Paddy part Brit”46, could be considered the main reason for the choice of Field
Day to stage the play. The Chorus reinforces the image of duality by placing
Wilde within the well-known and ideologically despised binary opposition
structure: Brit/Paddy, man/woman. However, if in the case of Thomas Kilroy’s
Double Cross there was a conflict between the two halves of the oppositions, a
conflict that led to the annihilation of the constructed identities, in Saint Oscar
the two elements of the binary opposition seem to complement each other, thus
changing the oppositions into “compositions”.
The image of Wilde, his constructed identity, combines the
characteristics of both man/woman, Brit/Paddy. Uniting the images that define
the perceived identities of British and Irish – “Like a cross between Byron and
Brian Boru.”47, Wilde left an Ireland which ignored his “masterful wit” for an
England which was defined by the power structure of social classes. After
“hopping off” to Oxford, Wilde’s life in England is determined by his
continuous need to belong to the British higher classes which he tried to achieve
by constructing an image of himself as a dandy, the last word in clothing and
witty talk. However, the quest that he embarked on transformed him into
“jester-in-chief to the governing class” – very similar to the image of Brendan
Bracken – kissing “the fine arses of titled buffoons” just to be accepted by the
British aristocracy. Notwithstanding his endeavour to belong to the British high
society, Wilde was always considered an outsider. Paradoxically, he became a
fashion icon, copied by the rich of London but he continued to be seen as an
intruder. Many could not understand how a “quare Irish bard” (Saint Oscar, p.
5) can give the tone to London fashion when the Irish were far from being
considered “fashionable”. His great success as playwright and “man of mode”
turned many members of the aristocracy against him. Wilde was continuously
scrutinized for the slightest mistake, which ended with him being sentenced for
indecency to Reading Gaol.
The moral of the opening ballad focuses on Wilde’s position in
society and the jealousy he attracted from many people:
46
Edna Longley, “The Old Myth of Ireland” in The Times Literary Supplement, October
6-12 1989.
47
Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar (Derry: Field Day, 1989), p. 5. All further reference will
be made to this edition.
Identities 111
However forced the presence of Chorus might seem on the page, it becomes one
of the main assets of the Field Day production under Trevor Griffiths’s
direction. It combines the vision of ancient tragedy with the Irish folk song
within a deeply imaginative stage design. The songs sung by the Chorus also
reinforce the linguistic anarchy present in the play, combining the visual
grotesque with the linguistic multiplicity in a surreal theatrical exploration.
The play begins in 1895, the year of Wilde’s trial, and the
opening underlines the symbolism which envelopes the whole play. After the
exit of the Chorus, “the stage in darkness. The cry of a newborn child.” The
importance of the birth as a symbol for the genuine creation of identity is
determining in the economy of the play. The “monstrous birth” shapes Wilde’s
future life as the son of “the dirtiest man in Dublin and a poor imitation of
Deirdre of the Sorrows”. Wilde, “gorgeously attired, heavily made up, fat but
sleek” (Saint Oscar, p. 7) begins his monologue centre stage, in a world which
seems to be created with his birth. From the very beginning, the life of the
newborn child is defined by language and the power of language offers Wilde
the possibility to re-imagine himself. His monologue is an attempt to create an
autobiography which becomes a blend of historical data and fictional elements
from his plays:
“No, that’s not true; they called me Oscar. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Others have names; I have a whole sentence. I was born with a sentence hanging
over me.” (Saint Oscar, p. 7)
the playwright into a hothouse parody full of such echoes of the master like:
“I’m Oscar Wilde, don’t you wish you were too?”48 The multiplicity of the
identities constructed within the character lead to Wilde’s success in his attempt
to resist being categorized. The always shifting, slippery territory of the Self
achieves a space in which the character develops within the “illusion of
dramatic action”. (Saint Oscar, p. 7) The confusion between worlds is reflected
in the constant confusion between words – the symbolic confusion between
epigram and epitaph which will lead to a later confession from Wilde that he
sees death as yet another theatrical mask – providing a zone of free play on
words, a space where language is allowed to wander to the limits of creation and
imagination. However, this apparent freedom has obvious repercussions in the
second act, during the trial scene. The freedom of language is used by Wilde to
counteract the “haunting” remains of his Irish origin. The possibility to play
with language proposes a triumph over the static language of history and
tradition. Wilde astutely observes that “maybe that’s what I dislike about
Ireland: too much Nature and too much history” (Saint Oscar, p. 9).
Leaving Ireland for England means not only leaving history for
a freedom of interpretation but, at the same time, it creates the possibility of
subverting the colonial power from within. There is a double-edged sense of the
Self with Wilde. He appears to be obsessed with aestheticism; he cares only for
form, appearance and pleasure. Behind this mask, however, there is something
deeply political which appears under the guise of irony. In comparing himself
with his mother, an active participant in the ongoing historical developments in
Ireland, Wilde observes the theatricality that defines them both, thus reducing an
often grandiosely perceived historicity to a theatricality defined by pretending
and masking:
“We both spend our lives in the theatre, it’s just that mine is called the
Haymarket and hers is called Ireland. I have a cast of ten, she has one of
millions. She’s currently trying to stage-manage the Irish revolution; I’m into
comedy, she’s into farce.” (Saint Oscar, p. 8)
48
Michael Billington, “The man in the ironic mask”, The Guardian, March 12, 1990
(Field Day Archive).
Identities 113
relationship between the insecure colonial soul and the artistic and theoretical
experience help the Self to find some kind of grounding space between the
overtly historical space of Ireland that he left behind and the artificial
aestheticism that he advocates in England.
The first act is dominated by the dialogue between Lady Wilde
and Oscar, the main theme of the conversation being variations on the issues of
art, history and life. Lady Wilde takes up the mask of Mother Ireland in an
attempt to convince Oscar to return to Dublin and to help organize a “theatrical”
revolution. The dialogue is flooded with historical data, Lady Wilde concluding
that there are new ways required to fight against the establishment, given the
force and influential power of Britain: “now we’re fighting with new weapons –
with poetry and drama and music.” (Saint Oscar, p. 11)
The importance of the re-discovered Irish language and its usage
in schools renders the new revolutionary movement a Celtic distinction.
However, when Oscar admits that he does not speak the language, Lady Wilde
reminds him of Yeats who “can’t speak Irish either” but who is still involved in
creating the Celtic Revival. Wilde recognizes the absurdity of the Irish situation,
the fact that every step taken by the leaders of the Celtic Revival is orchestrated
on the basis of an artificial, mythical past. The intellectual revolution that Lady
Wilde is so proud of has very little substance and it is doomed to exist only in
the lofty spaces of the ivory towers, spaces inhabited only by writers, poets,
actors and musicians. As somebody who was brought up to “imitate the
English” (Saint Oscar, p. 13), Wilde prefers to continue his life in England and
not get involved in the farce of the Irish revolution. The dialogue between Oscar
and Lady Wilde touches upon the main issues regarding identity and nationality.
Ireland and Irishness are perpetually associated with history and tradition.
However, paradoxically, the apparent stability of Irish identity, rooted in history
and a mythical Gaelic past, is constructed within the framework of theatre.
Theatricality, costuming and pretending define the proceedings that would lead
to the revolution: “Ireland is a third rate melodrama in an infinite number of
acts: I think I’ll stick to croquet.” (Saint Oscar, p. 15)
The symbolism of dressing and costuming is important as both
Oscar and Lady Wilde express themselves through clothing. For Wilde dressing
up becomes an aesthetic manifesto, thus trying both to fit into and subvert the
power structure of the Empire. Lady Wilde, however, wears her own clothes as
a political manifesto: Oscar: “Three skirts of white silk hooped up by bouquets
of gold flowers and green shamrocks. I suppose you left your rifle in the
cloakroom.” (Saint Oscar, p. 15) The ideas of nation and country are discussed
within the same framework. Both are considered to be illusions, slippery
simulations of non-existing entities, figments of imagination, something that the
Irish vitally need in order to define themselves and to try to separate themselves
114 Chapter Two
from the overpowering influence of Britain. However, their attempts are not
successful as Wilde admits that everything is an illusion, an imitation: “We’re
both illusions, mother; the only difference between us is that I admit it. What
else are the Irish, but imitation Irish?” (Saint Oscar, p. 16) The term “Irishness”
appears continuously related to England. History, identity, tradition are all
defined against Britain, thus, the problematic relationship between Self and
Other is permanently shifting between points of view: the Self needs the Other
to define itself and the other way round. There is nothing stable and permanent
but maybe the illusion itself.
The dialogue between mother and son also reveals Wilde’s
missed opportunity to “escape into innocence” to France before the trial.
Oscar’s reason for not taking this way out reminds of William Joyce’s
preference to be accused and hung as a British traitor rather than being released
as an American citizen. Wilde enjoys too much his linguistic influence to leave
this space where he already managed to become a disturbing power within the
established structures:
“You just have to think up a well-sounding phrase and in a few days you’ll have
half of London believing it. Or repeating it, which comes to the same thing.
(Saint Oscar, p. 19)
49
Anthony Curtis in The Financial Times, 2 March 1990 (Field Day Archive).
Identities 115
demonstrations can also be associated with the Northern Irish Civil Rights
Movement:
“I hit a policeman in the truncheon, that’s all. At the demonstration. ...The police
rode their horses straight into the crowd. I saw one of them bend down and lash a
young girl across the mouth; he was laughing at the time.” (Saint Oscar, p. 21)
50
Edna Longley, “The Old Myth of Ireland” in The Times Literary Supplement October
6-12 1989.
116 Chapter Two
picture, the theme of doubleness, the unity of the opposites, the dialectic. The
audience has to be free, throughout the play, to make its own readings”51. The
world created by Crowley moved away from the naturalistic space and towards
a “surrealistic world of myth and symbol, declaimed by abstracted clouds
floating in a flat blue sky, reminiscent of a Magritte painting”52. The aesthetic
construct of the stage was intimately linked to the image of the main character.
Surrounded by art, Oscar is himself constructed as a work of art.
He only gains substance within such an environment:
“The highest form of art is to be an artist of oneself. I’ve spent a whole lifetime
sculpting myself into shape, chipping away at the old rough patch, erasing the
last traces of Nature. I’m clay in my own hands, awaiting the inspiration of my
own breath. I want them to write on my tombstone: He may not have paid his
bills, but that was because he was a work of art.” (Saint Oscar, p. 25)
51
Paul Hadfield in Theatre Ireland, No. 15, 1990, Belfast (Field Day Archive).
52
Paul Hadfield in Theatre Ireland, No. 15, 1990, Belfast (Field Day Archive).
Identities 117
53
Edna Longley in The Times Literary Supplement, October 6-12 1989.
118 Chapter Two
“Anyway, Ned, you’re not exactly a true-born Brit yourself. Have you forgotten
how we used to stroll arm-in-arm around St. Stephen’s Green when we were
students together?” (Saint Oscar, p. 41)
Wilde does not recognize the legality of the court and continues
to mock both the judge and Carson. However, at the end of the trial scene,
Wilde’s overtly political personality surfaces from under the lofty aestheticism
of before and the audience faces the most politically active monologue Wilde
utters in the play:
“You look about you and can tolerate no image but your own; the very sight of
otherness is intolerable to you. ...You disgust me. You disgust me most of all
because you tempt me into seriousness, a temptation to which I refuse to yield
because to do so would be to play your game. I object to this trial on the grounds
that no Irishman can receive a fair hearing in an English court because the Irish
are figments of the English imagination. I am not really here; I am just one of
your racial fantasies.” (Saint Oscar, p. 46)
After Wilde’s sentence, the play moves rapidly towards its end,
including a conversation between Wilde and Bosie at Reading Gaol, where
Bosie appears as a spoiled young aristocrat, using people for money and
denying Wilde any hope for getting together again. In his downfall, Wilde
becomes a simple “entertainer” and a “minor poet”, Bosie voicing the elusive
future existence of his works: “You’re not a great artist, Oscar; you’re just an
entertainer. Your work won’t survive.” What survives, however, is the image of
the artist, the person as work of art, in a world that lacks the depth of aesthetic
vision.
The last two scenes, Wilde’s exile in Paris and a final, dream-
like encounter with Edward Carson reinforce Wilde’s multilayered identity. His
artistic journey aimed to perform a complex and troubled individuality, having
at the centre the image of the mask. Wilde’s identity is determined by an
overlapping of masks, by a continuous performance which induces a
problematic construction of identity. The “reality” of the individual becomes
slippery and self-fashioning takes over, even death taking up the role of the final
mask, the last scene in the performance of identity. Wilde embodies all the
elements that characterize the Self of the Other within the postcolonial
discourse. In the new space described by Carson at the end of the play there is
no place for the Other: “There’ll be no place for your kind in the new order.”
(Saint Oscar, p. 61) However, Carson’s new world cannot be born out of the
darkness that envelopes it precisely because of the absence of the Other: “We
stand here in darkness, encircled by many foes, surrendered in faith to the God
of Israel our deliverer.” (Saint Oscar, p. 63) This space of darkness determines
the new Ulster, a place of “no surrender” where a God claimed by Carson’s
Identities 119
WORD oversees all aesthetic beauty. The final image of the play renders a
hopeless atmosphere of doom and punishment, with Carson taking up the role of
an Ian Paisley look-alike or, better said, sound-alike:
“You’re an artist, Oscar, which means you’re faithless. …There are no moral
books, there are no immoral books, there is no boss and no worker, there is
neither sexual normality not sexual perversion. There is only loyalty and
betrayal.” (Saint Oscar, p. 62)
The final scene brings chaos in this space of darkness with the
chorus rushing on stage in carnivalesque dress and dancing around “the slumped
figure of Wilde”. The song performed by the chorus enhances the surreal
determination of the image, presenting a world that, at a first glance
encapsulates an ironic but indeed “heavenly” place where Wilde enters “to
chase the cherubim” and “to chat-up Saint Anthony and tempt him into sin”.
However, the image gets darker and darker as the chorus continues the song,
painting a rather grim picture of contemporary politics as a circus where
everything is turned upside down:
“The Germans they’ve turned giddy, the French have jacked in sex,
There’s passion down in Pimlico, desire in Middlesex.
The Japanese don’t show for work, the Russians take the pledge,
Old Santa shoots the kiddies down and smashes up his sledge.
The Brits are emigrating to Cashel and to Cork,
They dig the streets of Dublin though they’re none too keen on work.” (Saint
Oscar, p. 62)
The exuberance of the final scene, however, does not bring the comic
deliverance required by a luminous ending. The darkness prevails even within
the carnivalesque atmosphere, projecting on the audience a sense of unease at
the sight of a grotesque world of puppets driven by the madness of the
contemporary political realities.
In Saint Oscar, Terry Eagleton follows the by now well
established view on identity advocated by the Field Day pamphlets by
constructing, through his play, the image of Oscar Wilde as an individual
struggling between two cultures and therefore two identities, balancing between
Ireland and England. Eagleton’s position as one of the most important names in
Marxist criticism is reflected not only in the character of the socialist “leader”
Richard Wallace but also in the stance he takes up with the final chorus against
the contemporary political situation. By actively engaging with history and
politics, Terry Eagleton responds not only to the Field Day discourse of identity
but also to the company’s need to challenge and de-construct the established
imperial power structures. Saint Oscar, together with Thomas Kilroy’s Double
120 Chapter Two
LANGUAGES
1
Among the most important works of these theorists, one may note Edward Said,
Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), the later collection Culture and
Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), or the pamphlet written for Field Day,
“Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature – Yeats and Decolonization” in Field Day
Pamphlets No. 15 (Derry: Field Day, 1988); Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration
(London: Routledge, 1990); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso,
1983). It is also worth mentioning Edward Said’s involvement in the postcolonial
discourse in Ireland by responding, for example, to Declan Kiberd’s invitation to speak at
the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo in 1985.
122 Chapter Three
the presiding ‘we’ dictate; this is true even if it can be shown that one term
depends for its reality on the other. It is a tight, closed situation, made none the
less so by the revelation that it is produced discursively. We produce alterity; it
does not precede our production of it, even though believing that is the condition
of the operation’s success.”2
However, although Said’s postcolonial criticism found its way into the Field
Day theories of identity, history and language, there is one important feature of
his postcolonialism that would shed a different light upon the theatre company’s
constant need to underline the issue of “reconciliation” that their plays intended
to provide to an “ecumenical” audience. In his works, Said expressed his dislike
of the theories of reconciliation following Theodor Adorno’s influence on his
writing. Dean observes:
“One sign of this [Adorno’s influence] was Said’s characteristically direct
rejection of what he thought of as the Hegelian School’s habit or routine of
reconciling oppositions in a larger synthesis; instead, he thought of his position
as that of bearing witness, like Adorno, to irreconcilability, allowing opposed
positions to be held in a dialectical tension that was not slackened by any wish to
see them coalesce under the impetus of any supposed inner logic of their own or
of any borrowed ritual gesture of completion.”3
2
Seamus Deane, “Edward Said (1935-2003) – A Late Style of Humanism”, in Field Day
Review, 1.2005 (Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2005), p. 199.
3
Seamus Deane (2005), p. 198.
4
See full description of the term in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London:
1978).
Languages 123
see it. The fact that Edward Said’s theory of postcolonialism rejects the
possibility of reconciliation, does not mean certainly that Field Day had the
moral obligation to also reject the term if basing their policy on Said’s view of
postcolonial aesthetic. However, this issue, together with Paul Ricoeur’s
interview, for example, in The Crane Bag5 in which he rejects the possibility of
de-mythologization, which represented a determining part of Field Day’s
discussion of myth and mythology, support the fact that through their theoretical
endeavours the Field Day ideologists did not clarify these conflicting points of
view. The Field Day policies, as presented in the pamphlets and articles,
supported their ideas with the main theoretical tendencies of the time, but often
chose to ignore some of the issues that were present in these theories but would
have complicated the outcome of their doctrines. These omissions opened up
new possibilities for the critics who disliked Field Day’s confidence, sometimes
read as arrogance, that their theatrical and ideological enterprise would create a
groundbreaking cultural vision within the framework of Irish Studies. This
criticism came to light strongly after the first production of the company, Brian
Friel’s Translations, and continued to define the reviews of the plays staged by
Field Day up to 1995. The controversial issues that surrounded the first
production of Translations, discussed later on in this chapter, determined the
critical reception of Field Day and, unfortunately, the critical language
associated with the company. 1980 marked not only the initiation of an
important cultural dialogue oriented towards a reinterpretation of Irishness, but
also the beginning of a long row of critical articles focusing almost exclusively
on the “political agenda” of Field Day, discovered in the subtext of the plays put
on stage by the company.
However, as far as the language question is concerned, Field
Day followed the main lines of postcolonial theory. Following the established
postcolonial structure of centre and margin, theorists observed that, if in colonial
times the movement was oriented from the centre towards the margin, within the
postcolonial frame, the margin, the colonized Other, re-claims a position of
power and uses the tools of the colonizer, including the language of power, to
conquer the centre. Thus, a world view of imperial grandeur and superiority
crumbles to the ground, being replaced by a world characterized by an apparent
tendency towards fragmentation, but secretly hoping to recover the consistency
of a distant past, very often mythical, that had determined the world-view of the
Other before colonization. Against this background, the obsession with history,
myth, language and identity defines the aesthetic credo of many nations freed
from the oppressive power of an empire but still looking for their own way of
5
Paul Ricoeur in an interview with Richard Kearney, “Myth as the Bearer of Possible
Worlds” in The Crane Bag (Vol. 2, No. 1 and 2, 1978).
124 Chapter Three
defining their identity, their history and their language in such a way as to
completely detach themselves from the “negative” influence of the centre but
still to re-imagine a primordial stability provided by a mythical and long-
forgotten past. However, postcolonialism observes that such a tendency towards
the re-claiming of a stable, pre-colonial existence represents a trap devised by
the imperial centre. The luring appeal of a mythical past induces an amnesic
reaction to the present, providing a false refuge from the present problems of the
postcolonial societies.
In his groundbreaking work After Babel, George Steiner – one
of the determining theoretical influences on Brian Friel’s first play for Field
Day, Translations – considered that the main linguistic strategy of the colonial
powers is to undermine the local, “underdeveloped” language and replace it
with the language of power. Thus, the conquered civilization is silenced, the
native tongue being buried under layers of imposed linguistic constructs. Steiner
writes:
“robbed of their language by conquerors and modern civilization, many
underdeveloped cultures have never recovered a vital identity. Languages have
been, throughout human history, zones of silence to other men and razoredges of
division.”6
6
George Steiner, After Babel: aspects of language and translation Second Edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 58. The same publishing house published the
First Edition of this book in 1975.
7
See Jean Baudrillard’s views on these topics in Simulacra and Simulations (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994), originally published in French by Éditions Galilée,
1981, or Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983).
Languages 125
cleared the ground for the partial success of the postcolonial Other by stating
that authenticity has a place within the simulation systems and becomes a sign
of the need for values like reality, truth and origins. The political and social
labyrinth of colonial rules is embedded in the new language that the colonized
has appropriated. However, this maze, mapped within the linguistic structures,
provides no basis for the new identity. The cultural codes that exist in the matrix
of the master language are assimilated but they only mimic the image of the
colonizer and represent an illusion for the rebelling colonized. The new Other,
an identity that intended to break free from the restrictions of the colonial binary
structures, has re-constructed itself as the mirror image of the colonizer.
The Other has conquered the Centre but the price paid for it was
overwhelming: the new identity constitutes an illusory image of the master.
Postcolonial theorists tried to alleviate the identity problems of the Other by
introducing strategies of “mixing”: hybridity and syncretism. The work
undertaken by the postcolonial projects was to split apart the conjunction
provided by language between the nation-state and its history, thus opening the
space for the recovery and articulation of alternative narratives. After going
through the effort of constructing itself in the image of the Self, the Other
started looking for a genuine identity and the postcolonial theories tried to
provide him/her with a suitable definition.
The case of Ireland is further complicated by the fact that the
Irish language, an Gaeilge, slowly disappeared given the pressures of the British
Empire and the signs of a modernity that became to consider English as a lingua
franca. The loss of Gaeilge in pre-Famine Ireland was sealed by the need to
emigrate to the new American democracy. As early as the 1830s parents were
having their children taught English so they might aspire to emigration. The
close vicinity of the powerful centre is also vital in establishing and accepting
Ireland as a colonial space and, ultimately a postcolonial one, given the distrust
expressed by the so-called “proper” colonies, existing at the “real” margin of the
Empire. The island of Ireland was considered to be too close to Britain and its
inhabitants too similar to the British in appearance to be accepted as victims of a
colonizing process by the other colonies of the Empire. Thus, the need to create
a national identity sustained by a national past becomes even more problematic,
as it has to respond to suspicious questions from both centre and margins.
The Field Day Theatre Company intended to move from the
“sacred, magical tongues” of a revered past towards a common language that
could exist beyond words and linguistic structures, a language of feelings and
gestures introduced by Brian Friel in Translations, his masterpiece that opened
Field Day’s theatrical enterprise in 1980, and the only play that is still widely
produced on the major stages of the world. The same language of the “human
condition” is present in The Communication Cord, a play designed to ridicule
126 Chapter Three
8
Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality Nor Dreams (London:
Macmillan, 1995), p. 193.
9
George Steiner, After Babel, p. 21.
Languages 127
10
Tom Paulin, “A New Look at the Language Question”, in Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 3-17, p. 3.
11
Seamus Deane, “Cannon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland”, in Jean Lundy and
Aodán MacPóilin (eds.) Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster (Belfast:
Lagan Press, 1992), pp. 22-32, p. 25.
12
Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber, 1981), p. 2. All subsequent quotes will refer
to this edition of the play.
128 Chapter Three
desperate need for change. The decline of Ballybeg is present long before the
intrusion of the British sappers, and their arrival only enhances the image of
decay.
However, after delineating the physical space of the play, Friel
concentrates on the way language reflects the existence of this society. The
opening scene sees Manus teaching Sarah to say her own name. Her struggle for
utterance as expression of her own identity defines the substance of the whole
play. Naming as creation, as coming into being, determines both people and
landscape in Ballybeg. Places and people are fossilized and need re-naming to
be reborn into reality. This image of cultural stagnation closely refers to
Steiner’s depiction of sanctified civilizations ruled by “sacred and magical
tongues”. Words and myths are overused in a real historical space imagined to
be mythological, and such a space is doomed to extinction. Steiner observes:
“In certain civilizations there come epochs in which syntax stiffens, in which the
available resources of live perception and restatement wither. Words seem to go
dead under the weight of sanctified usage; the frequency and sclerotic force of
clichés, of unexamined similes, of worn tropes increases. Instead of acting as a
living membrane, grammar and vocabulary become a barrier to new feeling. A
civilization is imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches, or
matches only at certain ritual, arbitrary points, the changing landscape of fact.”13
The spiritual and linguistic richness of the people in Ballybeg is not necessarily
a good thing within the dynamic between language and reality. According to
Johann Gottfried Herder, quoted by George Steiner in After Babel, there is a
vital link between national identity and the development of language and thus,
when language retreats towards imaginary spaces of mythological utterance, the
13
George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 22.
Languages 129
14
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea”, in Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 45-58.
15
Richard Kearney on Translations in Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel (London:
Macmillan, 1995), p. 170.
16
Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel (London: Macmillan, 1995) p. 169.
130 Chapter Three
such a level of paralysis that the hedge-school pupils and the master, Hugh,
continuously refer to Latin and Greek texts to find new ways of expression.
Going back to the language-world of ancient Homeric Greece reveals, according
to Steiner, hopes of retracing the national “growth of consciousness”. Jimmy
Jack represents the epitome of the classical language user in the play. In
addition, he is the main reflection of the mythologizing stage in which we
encounter the Irish society: he lives under the safe shield of myth and wants to
marry Pallas Athene. On the other hand, at the beginning of the play, English
fits the image of the colonial language imposed from outside. The English of
Translations meets the anti-colonial role of language in the dramaturgical
construction of the text: all the characters speak English while pretending to
speak Irish and English, without understanding each other. This device
represents the highest degree of mastering of the colonial language and thus the
play meets its postcolonial agenda as far as it strives towards challenging and
de-constructing the centre from the margin through language.
Hugh, who considers English suitable only for the purposes of
commerce, continuously underlines the technological and practical
characteristics of the language, stressing the fact that any translation of Latin or
Greek into English “succeeds in making it [the Classical language] sound…
plebeian” (Translations, p. 41). When Máire reminds him that the Liberator
Daniel O’Connell predicated that everybody should learn English in order to
move towards progress, Hugh discards her with a Latin “Silentium” and with a
belittling remark on O’Connell as “that little Kerry politician” (Translations, p.
25). The “happy conjugation” between the Irish culture and the classical tongues
is yet another example of fossilization, of a society that is looking back towards
a glorious era which, ironically, has much more to do with the development of
the English language than with Irish. Thus, the fact that neither Lancey nor
Yolland speak or understand Latin or Greek is surprising but it is used as a
dramaturgical device to further differentiate the two sides of the binary
opposition. No middle ground is allowed by the playwright and, in the economy
of the play, this is perfectly understandable. The ancient tongues become
exclusively the feature of Irish society reinforcing the mythologizing tendency
of their culture, while the English keep their language as the voice of power and
progress.
However, the importance of mastering the language of the
oppressor retains some negative connotations. Towards the end of the play,
translation is complete and the whole image reflects perfectly Nietzsche’s
dictum: “one conquered when one translated”17. But this view on translation
would ensure a rather simplified approach to the process. According to George
17
In George Steiner, After Babel ((Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 260.
Languages 131
18
George Steiner, After Babel, p. 47.
19
George Steiner, After Babel, p. 31.
20
George Steiner, After Babel, p. 88.
132 Chapter Three
as punishment for the people of Ballybeg. Ironically, after going through the
effort of re-naming and standardizing the Irish place-names for the new maps,
the re-imagined space is bound to be left without people, thus further reinforcing
the lack of connection between landscape and people. The process of naming
referred to in Translations confirms Seamus Heaney’s description of the two
basic aspects of the aesthetics of names:
“I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways
which may be complementary but which are just as likely to be antithetic. One is
lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious. In the
literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist in a conscious and unconscious
tension.”21
At the end of the play, these two aspects, the unconscious, Irish,
and the conscious, English, live side-by-side in a “conscious and unconscious
tension”. After being denied the possibility of becoming the headmaster of the
new national school, Hugh decides that the proper thing to do is “to learn those
new names” from the Name-Book with the overt intention of “making them our
own”, thus, re-appropriating the re-named space of Ballybeg and renewing the
images of the land. He even agrees to teach Máire English but he acknowledges,
once again, that learning the words and the grammar would not help her
“interpret between privacies”. The problem of decoding the intricate meanings
of a language when the individual is not part of the civilization that the language
originates from is recurrent in the play, being discussed by Owen and Yolland
when the latter asserts his interest in learning Irish:
“YOLLAND: I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always
elude me, won’t it? The private core will always be…hermetic, won’t it?
OWEN: You can learn to decode us.” (Translations, p. 40)
21
Seamus Heaney, “The Sense of Place” in Preoccupations – selected prose 1968-1978
(London: Faber, 1984) p. 45.
22
George Steiner, After Babel, p. 207.
Languages 133
However, “if a substantial part of all utterances were not public or, more
precisely, could not be treated as if they were, chaos and autism would
follow”23. This is the main problem that cripples communication in Ballybeg.
Every utterance tends to be private, the balance between public and private is
disrupted and the autism that follows is embodied in the character of Sarah. Her
inability to utter her own name exemplifies Steiner’s image of the autistic child
who seems to choose silence to shield its identity and to defend itself against the
imagined enemy who would attack its “privacies”. Ballybeg is locked in
privacies and the re-naming could provide a healthy opening towards a new
balance between public and private.
At the same time, Sarah’s continuous effort to utter her own
name encapsulates the substance of the play: the continuous attempt to express
oneself. However, this struggle for individual expression does not characterize
only the Gaelic speakers in the play. All the characters, including Yolland and
Lancey, are shaped by attempts to express their own identities. Although Lancey
is presented as the perfect colonial servant, from the point of view of the
colonized, his frustration in connecting with the locals and imposing on them his
identity as the representative of the colonial power, is apparent at the end of the
play when he tries to find out who kidnapped Lieutenant Yolland. The fact that
the only language he speaks is English represents an unsurpassable impediment
in establishing himself as a figure of power. Lancey is a stranger to the tribe, he
is unable to decode the language of the locals and thus, his relationship with the
space of Ballybeg relies exclusively on the new names translated by Yolland
and Owen and introduced in the Name-Book. His focus on names is emphasized
in the interrogation scene, when Lancey comes to the hedge-school and asks the
pupils their names: “I trust they know exactly what they’ve got to do. I know
you, I know where you live. Who are you? Name! What’s your name?”
(Translations, p. 62) The unfamiliar extra-linguistic world of the village is, for
Lancey, built up from linguistic units he imposed on the landscape. The
utterance brings reality into being and the person who pronounces the utterance
is held responsible for the shape of this reality:
23
George Steiner, After Babel, p. 215.
134 Chapter Three
modernity given the fall of the Bastille and the success of the French
Revolution, which brought about new forms of government and social
organization. In his dialogue with Owen, Yolland observes that Lancey was:
“Born in 1789ʊThe very day the Bastille fell. He inherited a new world the day
he was bornʊthe Year One. Ancient time was at an end. The world had cast off
its old skin. There were no longer any frontiers to man’s potential. Possibilities
were endless and exciting.” (Translations, p. 40)
The need for a new language that could open up the ossified
structure of communication in such a space emerges principally from Field
24
Kevin Barry in Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, “Translations and A
Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History”, in Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard
Kearney (Eds.), The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, Vol. II (1982-1985), p. 119.
25
John Andrews in Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, “Translations and A
Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History”, in Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard
Kearney (Eds.), The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, Vol. II (1982-1985), p. 121.
Languages 135
Day’s critique of the political and social situation in Northern Ireland. The main
argument developed in the pamphlets is that in the North, the two communities
Protestant and Catholic, are speaking the same language but they still do not
understand each other. The pattern of communication is flawed because of the
different views of the past that contribute to unbridgeable dissensions. Reality is
constructed through a language that reiterates the past without positively
transforming it, but rather interpreting it according to the chosen ideology of
each community. Against this background, Brian Friel’s Translations reinforces
the pressing need for a new common language so that chaos can be avoided. In
the programme to the first production of the play, the playwright explains:
“I think that the political problem of this island is going to be solved by
language, not only the language of negotiation across the table, but the
recognition of what language means for us on this island.”
Art in general and theatre in particular can be the medium to provide such a
language of reconciliation. Given the vital importance of language in
determining the surrounding social space, it becomes extremely important to
pay close attention to the process of communication. Although in a fragmented
contemporary world this process could be difficult to follow or impose, Brian
Friel considers that this is the modern condition of reality:
“…far from destroying our powers of ethical self-determination, actually offers
them new opportunities, new forms and contexts, new possibilities for reshaping
the world and renegotiating identity.”26
Both Máire and Yolland initiate communication in the language of the Other,
but, because their knowledge is limited, they resort to the primitive, basic
26
Brian Friel in the Programme to the first production of Translations.
136 Chapter Three
“For God’s sake! The first hot summer in fifty years and you think it’s Eden.
Don’t be such a bloody romantic. You wouldn’t survive a mild winter here.”
(Translations, p. 38)
27
Patrick Grant, Breaking Enmities – Religion, Literature and Culture in Northern
Ireland 1967-1997 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), p. 156.
138 Chapter Three
Northern Irish society, it becomes clear that the issue of language, which
provides the thematic basis for the play, relates to a more general movement
from a closed mythical society towards a re-imagined, modernized one.
It is important to discuss the critical reactions that the production
of Translations ensued because, as I have noted before, they defined the critical
reception of the company’s plays and pamphlets for the next 15 years. One of
the first articles that discussed the historical authenticity of the play also
represented the basis for further criticism. “Translations and A Paper
Landscape: Between Fiction and History”28 addressed the so called “historical
inaccuracies” of the play in its depiction of the Ordnance Survey and the
treatment of the local population by the colonial intruders, the soldiers who were
completing the survey. With an introduction by Kevin Barry, the article gave
John Andrews, the author of A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in 19th
Century Ireland29, and Brian Friel, the possibility to discuss Translations from
the point of view of history and fiction. In his introduction, Barry examines the
close relationship between history and fiction, observing that “it is the claim to
objectivity which constitutes history as a discourse and which separates it from
other forms of discourse”30. History’s only way of imposing its authentic
reading of the past is “pretending” to represent a writing that existed before
interpretation, based on documents, research, evidence, archaeological findings.
However, this characteristic of history brings it even closer to fiction, as another
type of narrative, although a narrative, a story, that exists in order to ease the
confusions, the doubts of those turning to it for comfort. In Barry’s view, history
and fiction are complementary writings, fiction giving voice to those written out
of history. He considers that John Andrew’s history of the Ordnance Survey
“maps the domain of those who wrote things down, and in particular of those
who had authority to write. It excludes those who, defeated, are hidden from
written history. It imagines, instead, the official project and the splendid maps
which that project traced”31.
Kevin Barry also discusses Larcom’s pamphlet of the early 1830s, which
inquires about more than “only” history. It wishes to document habits, food,
28
Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, “Translations and A Paper Landscape:
Between Fiction and History”, in Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney (Eds.),
The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, Vol. II (1982-1985), pp. 118-124.
29
John Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in 19th Century Ireland
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
30
Kevin Barry, “Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History”, p.
118.
31
Kevin Barry, “Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History”, p.
119.
Languages 139
dress, customs, games, poems, the issue of emigration and everything that could
create a complete image of the Irish as a culture on the verge of extinction.
These are the issues that appear in Brian Friel’s Translations: the play
“makes use of the ‘unreality’ of fiction in order to imagine answers to Larcom’s
questions, and also to imagine different questions being asked. By imagining an
unwritten past Friel translates a defeated community into the narrative of
history.”32
32
Kevin Barry, p. 119.
33
John Andrews in Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, “Translations and A
Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History”, in Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard
Kearney (Eds.), The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, Vol. II (1982-1985), p. 120-121.
34
John Andrews, p. 122.
35
Brian Friel, “Translations and A Paper Landscape”, p. 112.
140 Chapter Three
procedure that thus comes to light illustrates the trials and tribulations that the
playwright faces in attempting to create a play that relates to the realities of
history but also offers a new way of interpreting the hidden meanings of the
events of the past, giving a voice to those forgotten by History. The process
involves historical documents like Dowling’s The Hedge-Schools of Ireland,
Colonel Corby’s A Memoir of the City and the North-West Liberties of
Londonderry, John O’Donovan’s Letters… concerning the antiquities of the
county of Donegal collected during the progress of the Ordnance Survey36 and
John Andrew’s A Paper Landscape, but also those “half a dozen ideas that drift
in and out of [the playwright’s] awareness”37. The methodology of creating a
historical play becomes quite similar to the writing of history, drawing on the
factual realities of the time but also on the “extraneous and altogether trivial
elements”38 that appear in the consulted material, like the fact, for example, that
Colonel Colby had only one hand. After dealing with so many influences that
ultimately shaped the dramatic frame of the play, Brian Friel decided to pursue
the idea of a play about the loss of Irish in the face of another, more powerful
culture having as a central metaphor the map-making process. The playwright
did not excuse his alleged “misrepresentation” of the historical facts, but
underlined the fact that “the tiny bruises inflicted on history in the play” respond
to the imperatives of fiction, which are “as exacting as the imperatives of
cartography and historiography”39.
The irony that surrounded the reception of Field Day’s first play
subscribed to Declan Kiberd’s characterization of language and implicitly any
artistic form of representation as meaning “whatever you want it to mean”40.
Critics like Lynda Henderson, Edna Longley and Sean Connolly argued that
Translations was carrying within it the danger of re-instating the myths of a past
which led to sectarianism and dissension in the North. In Theatre Ireland
(December 1988), in an article that surveys the tendencies of Irish theatre in the
1980s, Henderson questions some of the preoccupations of modern Irish theatre,
considering that the main focus of this theatre, with implicit reference to
Translations is “the memory of wounds”. She also underlines the fact that
“history provides a sort of memory which is dangerous; and in Ireland our
history tends to be a memory of wounds”. Lynda Henderson was concerned that
the language of change that Field Day intended to create still focused on history
36
John O’Donovan, “Letters… concerning the antiquities of the county of Donegal
collected during the progress of the Ordnance Survey” (Bray, 1927).
37
Brian Friel, “Translations and A Paper Landscape”, p. 122.
38
Brian Friel, p. 123.
39
Brian Friel, p. 123.
40
Declan Kiberd, “Anglo-Irish Attitudes” in Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson,
1985), p. 95.
Languages 141
41
Edna Longley, “Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland”, in Poetry in the Wars
(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986), p. 191. See also Edna Longley, “The
Old Myth of Ireland” in The Times Literary Supplement October 6-12, 1989; Edna
Longley, “Writing, Revisionism and Grass-seed: Literary Mythologies in Ireland”, in
Jean Lundy and Aodán MacPóilin (eds.) Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of
Ulster (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1992), pp. 11-21; Edna Longley, The Living Stream:
Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994). For
further criticism on Translations see also Sean Connolly, “Dreaming History: Brian
Friel’s Translations”, in Theatre Ireland, 13 (1987), pp. 42-44.
42
Sean Connolly, “Dreaming History”, p. 42.
43
Sean Connolly, p. 42.
142 Chapter Three
However, the reader tends to forget Field Day towards the end of the article, the
main issue that powerfully comes through being the critic’s own overpowering
obsession with tradition and the “truth” of history.
Unfortunately, this type of criticism directed against the
company’s directors, mainly against Seamus Deane, and against the ideologies
that Field Day represented, without any solid theoretical and textual backing and
without paying too much attention to the dramatic values of the plays put on
stage by the company, became an overwhelming feature of the critical response
to any cultural or theatrical action initiated by Field Day. The main setback of
this negative criticism was the disappearance of the majority of the so-called
“Field Day plays” from the repertoires of theatre companies. Only a few plays
survived the company’s “canon” and continue to be produced today.
Translations belongs to this group, becoming a “classic Irish drama”
immediately after its first production in 1980. Patrick Lonergan considers that
the success that Translations has known from the year of its first performance is
due to the fact that “it can allow people in such cities as Prague and Barcelona
to explore their own different linguistic histories and their relationships to other
dominant linguistic traditions nearby”45. As far as the people from countries like
England or the United States are concerned, where the problem of language is
less contested, they can respond “to the play’s exploration of the instability and
flexibility of identity”46 which constitute important issues in those countries.
However, Lonergan points out that this international success does not come
from the universality of the situation the play presents but rather from the fact
that it means different things to different people, that the theme allows people to
interpret and appropriate it for themselves, within their own socio-political
background. However, I would suggest, that this aspect of the play, that allows
any audience to identify with the main issues discussed on stage, represents in
itself the epitome of universality.
44
Sean Connolly, p. 44.
45
Patrick Lonergan, “Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism”, in
Modern Drama, Volume XLVII, Number 4, Winter 2004, pp. 636-655.
46
Patrick Lonergan, “Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism”, p.
638.
Languages 143
Among these “dubious performances”, the one that O’Toole mentions is Eamon
Morrissey’s performance of Doalty. The actor chose to play Doalty as an
“idiotic bumpkin”, instead of focusing on the symbolism that Doalty brings to
the play, that of being closer to the knowledge of the land, “the wisdom of the
soil” as O’Toole calls it, than to the Classics and the Greek mythology that
define Jimmy Jack’s life. Although Dowling’s 1983 production of Translations
struggled with interpreting the play somewhat different from the first, and in the
opinion of many critics, the best production of the play in 1980, he decided to
stage it again in 1988, this time moving away from the National Theatre, to the
Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. Coming to Translations after quite a successful
collaboration with Donal McCann in producing Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the
Paycock, Dowling decided to transpose the image of O’Casey’s “desperate and
downbeat” buffoons Joxter Daly and Captain Boyle into the roles of Hugh and
Jimmy Jack. In O’Toole’s opinion, this “translation” worked, thus connecting
both playwrights’ concerns with the existence of the individual and the way
history and politics affect it. Also, by relating the play to the wider space of Irish
theatre, Dowling manages to address the “pieties” connected to Translations
from its first production. This was further helped by Frank Conway’s set,
47
Fintan O’Toole in Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (Eds.), Critical Moments:
Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003).
48
Fintan O’Toole, p. 259.
49
Fintan O’Toole, p. 259.
144 Chapter Three
“which [was] stripped bare of most of the comfortable rustic images that are
meant to adorn it: hay, milking stalls, lobster pots, cartwheels; and [was] instead
grey, cold and somewhat suggestive of a prison yard, making it much less of a
bucolic utopia.”50
The last and most recent production that Fintan O’Toole reviews
in Critical Moments is the Abbey production of Translations in 1996. One of
the ironies that this production brings to the history of the play’s development
from its first staging, is the fact that “this play about the cultural imperialism
practiced by England on Ireland is presented on the stage of the Irish National
Theatre by a British director, designer and leading actor.”51 However, this
paradox could have created a new way of reading the play, a new faze of
entering a “universal” zone of theatre, away from the petty political criticism
that surrounded the play at its premiere. Notwithstanding the possibilities, Robin
Lefevre’s production did not manage to challenge the “fossilised” vision of
Translations. His main actor, Kenneth Haigh tried too hard to convince the
audience that he is a drunken schoolmaster in Donegal in 1833, and the Julian
McGowan’s set does not move away from a “touristic voyage into the past”,
creating “a virtual reality Irish barn”. Lefevre’s Translations becomes an
“intellectual costume drama” which “refuses to acknowledge its own reality,
and tries instead to ignore the heavy British presence in a play that is, in another
sense, an attack on that very presence.”52
Given the intense critical response generated by Translations
after its first production, Brian Friel decided to broach the same issues of
language and communication within the framework of a farce, intended, in
Seamus Deane’s term, as an “antidote” to Translations, namely the 1982 Field
Day production of The Communication Cord. With this play, Friel attempted to
disperse the “pieties” that surrounded the 1980 production of Translations, by
creating almost a parody of the first play, a “translation” of it into the decayed
space of a 20th century Irish cottage.
50
Fintan O’Toole, p. 261.
51
Fintan O’Toole, p. 262.
52
Fintan O’Toole, p. 263.
Languages 145
53
Quoted in Shaun Richards, “Throwing Theory at Ireland? The Field Day Theatre
Company and Postcolonial Theatre Criticism”, in Modern Drama, 47:4 (Winter 2004),
pp. 607-620.
54
Cited in Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality Nor Dreams (London:
Macmillan, 1995), p. 193.
146 Chapter Three
55
Judith Butler in Gerry Smith, “Decolonization and Criticism: Towards a Theory of
Irish Critical Discourse” in Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds.), Ireland and
Cultural Theory – The Mechanics of Authenticity (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 29-49,
pp. 39-40.
56
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles”, in Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985),
pp. 45-58.
57
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles”, p. 55.
Languages 147
that Tim, the only character who openly expresses his dislike of the idyllic
environment re-created in the house, is “devoured” by the collapsing house at
the end of the play. The play is also an ironic depiction of how communication,
dialogue become futile within such a cultural space. The framework of the
farcical satire proves to be the perfect background against which the lofty
spheres of a sanctified past are laid bare.
Seamus Deane observed in the programme notes to the play:
“The Communication Cord is an antidote to Translations. It reminds us that farce
repeats itself as history and that the bogus, the fixed, and the chaotic are features
of our daily lives in the social and the political world. Tragedy gives us
perspective and ennobles our feelings by rendering them subject to forces we can
recognize but never define. Farce shows everything in close-up; it is concerned
to reduce, to expose, to humiliate, and at the same time, to rescue us, via
laughter, from the heroics of failure.”
58
Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 193.
Essentially, this is the theory of the comic developed by Henri Bergson in Laughter: an
essay on the meaning of the comic (New York: Macmillan, 1911).
148 Chapter Three
relationships are going to be built on the path towards reconciliation and which
is illustrated by the dialogue between Máire and Yolland in Translations, is
transposed, in the later play, in the relationship between Tim and Claire in the
final scene of the play. There is one thing that stays the same in the two plays,
and that is the issue of language. Unsurprisingly, both plays offer the same
statement on language, that of its slippery meanings and of the lack of
communication which is re-enacted in the space in which the action takes place.
Brian Friel demonstrates with his two plays that the drama of language remains
fixed notwithstanding the dramatic form that contains it.
The Communication Cord was first presented by Field Day
Theatre Company at the familiar venue of the Guildhall in Derry, on 21
September 1982. The opening image, described in detail by Friel in the initial
stage directions, defines not only the space of the play but, indeed, the whole
meaning of what is to follow. The traditional Irish cottage, with all the
“traditional” and “genuine” furnishings creates a space defined by Jean
Baudrillard’s simulacrum: there is no backbone of reality to sustain this
construction. As Friel himself notes in the stage directions, there is “something
false about the place. It is too pat, too “authentic”. It is in fact a restored house, a
reproduction, an artefact of today making obeisance to a home of yesterday”59.
The two characters inhabiting this space, coming towards it as towards a shrine
of the past from the modern surroundings of the city, are Tim Gallagher, “a
junior lecturer without tenure”, who is doing his doctoral thesis “in an aspect of
linguistics”; and Jack McNeilis, a barrister and, as far as personality is
concerned, a complete opposite to Tim. Both Tim and Jack are reminiscences of
Translations, modern and comically distorted images of Yolland and Owen.
However, the plot of The Communication Cord is strongly based on a comic
farce, with double entendres and characters playing different roles. Tim intends
to impress Senator Donovan, a well-known lover of tradition and of the old Irish
way of living, with a reconstructed old cottage in Ballybeg, in the West of
Ireland. The house belongs to Tim’s friend, Jack, whose father renovated the
cottage to keep its historic authenticity. The “timetable” set out by Jack at the
beginning of the play seems very clear. Tim is supposed to have the house for
one hour, to show it to Senator Donovan and Susan, his daughter and Tim’s
girlfriend, but it becomes more complicated when things do not go the way they
initially should have. Other characters appear, to upset Tim’s plan: Claire, Tim’s
former girlfriend, Evette, Jack’s French flame, Nora Dan, the nosy neighbour.
Jack intends to play his part in the farce as Barney the Bank, a German tourist
who lives in the village. He would offer “a million Deutschmark” for the house,
59
Brian Friel, The Communication Cord (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 11. All
future reference will be made to this edition.
Languages 149
thus raising, in Senator Donovan’s eyes, the traditional and authentic value of
the cottage. However, the real Barney appears and the clearly outlined plan
turns into disaster, engendering some highly comical dialogues and a continuous
movement on/off stage, which is contrasted with the more static dramatic style
of Translations, in the same space of the “traditional” cottage.
The Communication Cord connects space and language in a
dramatic representation that reminds the spectator of Brian Friel’s previous play.
The Baile Beag of Translations was built upon the use of Irish as the language
of national identity, a language that proved to be in decline and needed renewal
through English. The relationship between landscape and language was so close
that the moment the place names were translated into English, the people of the
now re-named Ballybeg had to learn them in order to re-appropriate the space
they were occupying. The Communication Cord ridicules this vital relationship:
the space of the cottage is constructed from artificial elements, put together like
a postmodern pastiche, a patchwork of perfect pieces that build a perfect space.
It may be immediately associated with Michel Foucault’s “heterotopias”,
locations which are used by a culture to create a space “as perfect, as
meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled”60.
This space mirrors an ideal structure that resides in the memory of the nation,
where “the self reconstitutes itself into reality”. There is a continuous nostalgia
for such a space which, theoretically, links the present existence of the nation to
a distant and mythologized past. However, the past that serves as model for this
virtual construct is so remote from the factual determinations of history or,
better said, of historical fact, that it has to be re-created through language based
on the narratives encapsulated in histories and museums.
Thus, the imagined space becomes not only heterotopia, a space
too good to be true, but also a simulacrum and, by becoming a simulacrum it
challenges the truth value of the re-created past. Jean Baudrillard observed that
“the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which
conceals that there is one. The simulacrum is true.”61 The virtual space built on
the basis of a received image of the past becomes the truth that challenges the
existence proper of its basis. In a cultural context where the need for an
authenticity of the past is equated to a need for value and truth, the virtual
authenticity of the fantasy of representation takes the place of the past. Such a
culture feeds off these fragmented images of a remote existence, relying almost
exclusively on the past as basis for its present, overlooking a potential future
identity built on a common, genuine language of the lived present.
60
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979), p. 57. Originally published in French by Gallimard, 1975.
61
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1994), p. 35. Originally published in French by Éditions Galilée, 1981.
150 Chapter Three
but his communication collapses every time he tries to apply his theory to
practice. There is a constant difference highlighted by the playwright, between
appearance and reality. There is no connection between the two levels of
discourse that Tim represents and, similarly, there is no link between the
artificially reconstructed space of the cottage and the reality of the past its
62
Quoted in Colin Graham, “…maybe that’s just Blarney: Irish Culture and the
Persistence of Authenticity” in Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds.), Ireland and
Cultural Theory – The Mechanics of Authenticity (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 14.
63
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), p. 13.
Languages 151
construction was based on. Both communication and space appear to be on the
brink of chaos and destruction. The chaos that results from a lack of a “common
communicational structure” can be redeemed only through another language,
another type of communication based on a common ground.
In The Communication Cord Brian Friel demonstrates that
language and above all communication cannot exist in the lofty spaces of an
artificially constructed discourse: it always has to relate to the social and
political frame that encapsulates it. The farcical structure of the play is built
almost exclusively on double-coding. The gap between signifier and signified is
deepened, as there is no common codifying process, and communication proves
to have no more substance than the cottage in which it takes place. There is a
constant mirroring between space and language. If Translations advocated the
close relationship between language and nation, illustrating George Steiner’s
conclusion, based on Herder’s philosophy, that “where language is corrupted or
bastardised, there will be a corresponding decline in the character and fortunes
of the body politic”64, The Communication Cord dwells on the connection
between language and space. The journey towards the house is marked by
“penance”, the road being battered by the powers of nature. It highlights the
“suffering” that the visitor has to go through in order to enjoy the “authenticity”
of the house. In his/her quest for “tradition”, the traveller faces “water, muck,
slush, bloody cow-manure” before reaching “the soul and authenticity of the
place”. (The Communication Cord, p. 13) This atmosphere is completed by a
“dramatic” beach. According to Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, “a
house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of
stability”65. The artificially re-constructed cottage in the play provides the latter.
The illusions of the past reflect on the house the impression of security and
rootedness, but the audience soon finds out that a single shaky wooden beam
sustains the whole structure. A topoanalytical66 study of the cottage would
indeed prove that the house becomes a “psychic state” and starts to interact with
the characters. A comic and continuous attack he is subject to from the house
increases Tim’s misery:
“TIM: I think this house hates me. I’m convinced that the genii of this house
detest me. …Maybe it’s because I feel no affinity at all with it and it knows that.
In fact I think I hate it and all it represents.” (The Communication Cord, p. 40)
64
George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 82.
65
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 167.
66
Gaston Bachelard’s discusses “topoanalysis” as a psychological study of the house in
The Poetics of Space.
152 Chapter Three
During the course of the play, the house “comes to life” using the smoke of the
recently lit fire in the fireplace to “envelop” Tim in frequent “blow-downs”. The
house reacts not only against Tim’s dislike, even hatred, of the “authentic” past
it represents, but also against the farce that Tim intends to create within its
space. Ironically, the artificially recreated cottage protests against the artificial
plot that Tim directs for Senator Donovan in order to firmly establish the
authenticity of the place. Seemingly aware of its own superficiality, the house
solves, through its collapse in the end of the play, not only its own existence as a
false epitome of historical “truth” but also Tim’s elaborate lie.
Notwithstanding Tim’s negative feelings for the house, there is a
certain ironic parallelism between the two: the gap between their reality and the
illusion of what they are standing for. Tim is a lecturer in linguistics and he
analyses the discourse of each character from a linguistic point of view. For
example, after having a conversation with Senator Donovan about the “true
centre”, Tim observes:
“An interesting discourse phenomenon that. Called statement transference. I
never used the phrase ‘This is the true centre’ but imputing the phrase to me, as
the Doctor [Donovan] has just done, he both seeks confirmation for his own
sentiments and suggests to listeners outside the duologue that he and I are
unanimous in that sentiment… which we’re not… not at all… O my God…
where’s my bowl of vodka?” (The Communication Cord, p. 46)
“The ‘room-down’ – that’s it. One double bed. Fireplace. Usual accountrements.
Tongs. Crook. Pot-iron. Kettle-black. Hob. Recess for clay pipes. Stool. Settle
bed. Curtains for same. Table. Chairs.” (The Communication Cord, p. 32)
“TIM: An extreme example: I speak only English; you speak only German; no
common communicational structure. The result?—chaos.” (The Communication
Cord, p. 19)
“TIM: But let’s stick with the situation where there is a shared context and an
agreed code, and even here we run into complications.
JACK: So soon?
TIM: The complication that perhaps we are both playing roles here, not only for
one another but for ourselves.” (The Communication Cord, p. 19)
“DONOVAN: Jack the Cod! I love that. Call a man Jack the Cod and you tell
me his name and his profession and that he’s not very good at his profession.
Concise, accurate and nicely malicious. Beautiful!” (The Communication Cord,
p. 43)
While Claire, Tim’s former girlfriend, plays willingly the role of the French girl
Evette, to help sustain Tim’s farce, Willie, the German, mistaken by Tim for
Jack, has to be told how to play his role in comically charged asides. Tim is
playing the part of the director and piles different roles upon Barney who finds
himself pushed against the doorframe of the cottage, under the burden of the
multiple parts he has to perform. All at once, Friel keeps up and reinforces the
farcical structure of the play, but also gives an ironic depiction of role-playing
and theatre, providing an insight into the deeper, more problematic issues of
identity and performing beneath the transparent layer of comedy and farce.
During the course of his lengthy monologue, Tim becomes so involved in his
plan that he mistakes “made-up” identities for “real” ones and constructs the
image of the chaos that defines the space of the cottage both physically, through
the characters that inhabit it, and linguistically, through the multiplicity of
languages, genuine or not, which are being spoken within its walls.
“TIM: (Loudly) I beg your pardon, Barney. I’ll slow down. (Softly and very
rapidly) Listen carefully, Jack. You’re a German thug called Barney Munich and
you’re married to Claire Harkin whose real name is Evette Giroux. You drink
like a fish and beat the tar out of her and he’s going to have you arrested.
(Loudly) Yes, yes, this is indeed the true centre. (Softly and very rapidly) In real
life you’re Jack the Cod, a local fisherman, an eejit—he spotted you out
swimming. And I let your wife, Evette Giroux—in real life, Claire—I let her do
her washing here because you have no running water in the caravan and I have
here—even though in fact I haven’t—but I think he hasn’t noticed though sly
puss Susan has. (Loudly) But if not the true centre, perhaps the true off-centre.
Most definitely the true off-centre. (Softly and very rapidly) And I own all the
land you can see around here and if Susan has her way they’ll come back here
tomorrow and spend the weekend here and even if I can talk her out of taking her
scrambling today, she’ll make sure I break my bloody neck at it tomorrow. And
your wife persists in leaving her wet clothes on the line even though the damned
fire smokes although it smokes only on me and nobody else but that’s because it
hates me and I hate it… Oh my God, it’s out of hand, Jack! I can’t go on! It’s all
in pieces.” (The Communication Cord, p. 49)
and German accents, both authentic and imitated, and various forms of Irish-
English”67. Language matches the image of the house-museum as an
accumulation of different languages and accents in an attempt to re-create an
artificial Tower of Babel. However, this reconstructed Tower in Ballybeg has
the same destiny as the mythical Tower of Babel: it tumbles to the ground at the
end of the play, lacking the substance to sustain its existence. The collapse of
the cottage symbolises the collapse of a false myth but indeed the connotations
are various in the economy of the play. The house is destroyed at the very
moment when Claire and Tim – re-enacting the dialogue between Maire and
Yolland in Translations – discover a new language, a new type of
communication that might provide the common ground that the dialogue lacked
before.
67
Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 195.
Languages 157
successive governments since the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, and
advocated by Douglas Hyde, for example, who observed at an address in the
Mansion House in Dublin in 1926 that the Irish peasants: “will save the
historical Irish Nation for they preserve for all time the fountain-source from
which future generations can draw forever”68. Friel’s play ridicules a world
based on illusion and proves that such a world cannot be sustained by physical
or linguistic constructions. Field Day felt the urge to respond critically to such
an illusory world and tried to “clear the ground” for a future based on a genuine
Irish identity, whatever that would mean. The company wanted to assure,
sometimes without success, a link between a past that has to be known and a
future free from “navel gazing”.
Notwithstanding the fact that the play dealt with such issues
back in 1982, similar ideas spring continuously to life in works of contemporary
Irish writers, focusing on the crisis of identity within Irish society. Within the
postmodernity that enveloped the last decades of the 20th century, it is not only
the past that comes under scrutiny, being discarded as both decayed and
artificial, but also the future based on this image of the past. If the foundation
proper of our present existence is based on a simulation, the future is necessarily
“contaminated”, initiating yet another simulation within which identities
become impossible to define. The postmodern Self is lost within the ruins of the
matrix of a simulated present, and it is unable to “find” itself in order to
construct an acceptable future. Dermot Bolger’s novel The Journey Home, for
example, depicts the nostalgia of the Self for something real, palpable, in a
world built on illusion. Bolger’s novel reiterates the image of the cottage,
presenting to the readers his protagonist Hano, sheltering with his girlfriend in a
deserted country cottage, which reads both the rural and the urban as lost to the
dispossessed Irish young:
“I used to think of here as the past, a fossilized rural world I had to fight to be rid
of. I got the conflict wrong, of course. […This] crumbling house in the woods is
our future, is our destination, is nowhere […] soon it will be all that’s left for the
likes of you and I to belong to. City or country, it will make little difference,
ruins, empty lots, wherever they cannot move us from.”69
68
Quoted in Shaun Richards, “Breaking the ‘Cracked Mirror’: Binary Oppositions in the
Culture of Contemporary Ireland”, in Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds.), Ireland
and Cultural Theory – The Mechanics of Authenticity (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp.
99-118, p. 100.
69
Dermot Bolger, The Journey Home (London: Viking, 1990), p. 60.
158 Chapter Three
ADAPTATIONS
1
Declan Kiberd, “Introduction” in Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (eds.),
Amid Our Troubles – Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002), pp. vii-
xiii.
2
George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 58.
160 Chapter Four
to de-construct the mythical foundation that also provides validity to the power
structures.
Irish writings return to ancient mythology not necessarily to
disturb the centre but, most importantly, to re-define their own position within
the culture of a contemporary, syncretic Europe, and, by doing that, to try and
bypass the close imperial presence. The almost irresistible attraction of Greek
antiquity responds to the alternative way of negotiating identity within a
postcolonial space, discussed by Luke Gibbons in one of his Field Day essays,
Transformations in Irish Culture. According to Gibbons:
“…another way of negotiating identity through an exchange with the other is to
make provision, not just for ‘vertical’ mobility from the periphery to the centre,
but for ‘lateral’ journeys along the margins which short-circuit the colonial
divide.”3
Thus, Irish writers go back to Greek myths not only as to the cradle of European
culture but also as to a marginal space that could provide the re-creation of a
genuine Irish cultural identity by “overlooking” the determining power of the
neighbouring island. As Declan Kiberd suggested, the power of myth is
enormous: it becomes personal by virtue of its universality, inviting decodings
tied to each new occasion or circumstance4. Myths are signs which are re-
mobilized as tokens of socially and politically charged networks of meaning,
while still managing to retain an air of “naturalness”. Myth represents a system
of communication, a mode of signification that crosses the boundaries of a
culture to live in the infinity beyond, being continuously reinvented and re-
modelled by different cultural groups. Myth takes over language and builds its
own system.
Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act and Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at
Troy, both staged by the Field Day Theatre Company, attempt to re-imagine
classical myth within the framework of contemporary Ireland, voicing the
problematic discourse of Irish identity while placing an universal meaning in a
specific time and space. The locus of myth is controversial within the ideology
laid out by the Field Day theorists in essays and pamphlets. Initially, the
company advocated a tendency towards de-mythologization, towards a re-
thinking of tradition and the established iconography of an idyllic Ireland.
However, Seamus Deane and Richard Kearney always considered that it is vital
to have an in-depth knowledge of the nation’s history and mythology in order to
3
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996),
p. 23.
4
Declan Kiberd, “Introduction” to Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (eds.),
Amid Our Troubles (London: Methuen, 2002), pp. vii-xiii.
Adaptations 161
build a fresh national image, free of parochial limitations but still convincingly
Irish. This necessity to revise the mythological tropes that defined Irish culture
and that were re-instated by W. B. Yeats’s Celtic Revival, critiqued by Field
Day, initiated controversial shifts. The Field Day ideologists had to become
aware of the problems of de-mythologization observed by Paul Ricoeur in a
1978 edition of The Crane Bag: “there are two dimensions to myth: the
symbolic and the pseudo-symbolic or literal dimension. De-mythologization is
only valid for the second dimension”5.
Thus, complete de-mythologization is not possible given the
symbolic dimension of myth that provides grounds for the hidden “mytho-
poetic” nucleus, which exists at the basis of any culture. Field Day’s intentions
shifted from a complete de-mythologization towards a tendency to understand
the possible worlds opened up by myth and include them in the new spectrum of
a modern national image. Field Day’s “mythological enterprise” related to
Greek mythology both from the point of view of including Irish cultural identity
within a wider European and for that matter universal context and also from the
point of view of appropriating the classical myths for the creation of a new,
valid Irish identity.
However, the problems raised by using myth within the Field
Day cultural enterprise did not stop at the issue of a possible, complete or partial
de-mythologization. Northern Ireland was prone to various political mutations
of myth. The political over-determination of the Northern Irish cultural space
induced an inevitable association between mythical elements and feuding
political groups. Remarkable mythological similarities – the images of the Red
Hand of Ulster and that of Cú Chulainn are just two mythical elements that
come immediately to mind – were built into the very texture of the stereotyped
Northerner, be that Republican or Unionist.
Richard Kearney discusses the problems of mythological
interpretation in Ireland both in his article “Myth and Terror”, published in The
Crane Bag6 and later on in his Field Day pamphlet ‘Myth and Motherland’7.
Kearney observed that in Northern Ireland, in addition to other “orthodox”
interpretations of terrorism – constitutional, historical and economic – there is
an interpretation that is used mainly on the Republican side: the mythological
interpretation of terrorism. Paul Ricoeur underlined Kearney’s suggestion in his
book The Symbolism of Evil, where he stated that “myth relates to events that
5
Paul Ricoeur in an interview with Richard Kearney, “Myth as the Bearer of Possible
Worlds” in The Crane Bag (Vol. 2, No. 1 and 2, 1978), p. 116.
6
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Terror”, in The Crane Bag, Vol. 2, No. 1 and 2, 1978, pp.
125-137.
7
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland” in Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson,
1985), pp. 61-80.
162 Chapter Four
happened at the beginning of time which have the purpose of providing grounds
for the ritual actions of men today”8. Thus, men use the power of myth to justify
their contemporary actions and that includes political actions and, sometimes,
terrorist activities. Myth not only justifies the actions but, at the same time, it
represents “the alchemical idiom which transmutes the impotence of man’s
historical existence into the omnipotence of a pre-history”9. The justification of
myth is used mainly when the historical existence of a nation is seen as lacking
the power to stand up against the colonizing forces both within and without the
borders of the country. “Through myth man stands outside the futile flow of
history which no longer seems to offer any possibility of rational reform or
progress.”10 Given the fact that the community cannot find its own voice any
more in the desert of history, it refers to the universality of myth to find a new
voice that could provide justification and a primordial authenticity lacking in the
decaying historical space. Brian Friel’s Translations includes in its discourse the
issues of myth and identity when presenting the pupils of the hedge school
speaking fluent Greek and Latin and immersed in a mythology that almost
consumes them. Friel’s view on the issue of myth is double-edged in
Translations. On the one hand, he presents the inhabitants’ choice to learn Latin
and Greek as a an attempt to return to the grandeur of a Gaelic mythic past that
could be retrieved only through another great but indeed lost civilization. On the
other hand, there is a sense of irony and even sarcasm in introducing a society
on the verge of destruction, which prefers to look back towards an ancient and
alien past rather than accept and appropriate the signs of modernity. The clash
of these two arguments resurface in the theoretical discourse on myth that the
Field Day Theatre Company puts forward in their pamphlets and also in the
reviews of their own productions of the two Sophocles plays Antigone and
Philoctetes in versions by Tom Paulin, The Riot Act and Seamus Heaney, The
Cure at Troy. It is also appropriate to analyse the way in which this view
changes over the years, between 1984, the year that produced The Riot Act and
1990, when The Cure at Troy was staged, taking into consideration the political
and historical issues that influenced the production and reception of these plays.
1984, the year when Field Day decided to stage Tom Paulin’s
version of Antigone entitled The Riot Act, saw the political scene of Northern
Ireland thrown into turmoil by internal problems related to the death of ten
hunger strikers in Long Kesh prison in 1981 and also by external problems
related to the miners’ strikes in England and the Falkland War against
8
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), quoted in Richard
Kearney, “Myth and Terror”, p. 137.
9
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Terror”, in The Crane Bag, Vol. 2, No. 1 and 2, 1978, p.
130.
10
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Terror”, 1978, p. 131.
Adaptations 163
11
In Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks and Russians” in Marianne McDonald and J.
Michael Walton (eds.), Amid Our Troubles (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 152.
12
See Richard Kearney, “Myth and Terror”, in The Crane Bag, Vol. 2, No. 1 and 2,
1978, pp. 125-137.
13
Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780-1980
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 142.
14
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (London: Methuen, 2002), p.
154.
164 Chapter Four
The cultural goal of Field Day represented an attempt, often futile given their
continuous obsession with identity, to “liberate literature from the continuous
preoccupation with identity into the universal concern with language”16. If the
first pamphlets sustained the idea of a complete de-mythologization and a
movement towards plurality, by 1990 Seamus Deane stated that plurality could
not represent a solution for the situation in Northern Ireland. The only viable
solution would be the combination of the mythical and the secular in creating a
dynamic discourse that could ensure a healthy space for the development of a
new identity and a new vision of Ireland that would also include a dialogue
between mythological images and history.
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake17 initiated a new vision of
Irishness, where myth has been revealed as history and history as myth, thus
showing that the national narrative of cultural identity is in itself a fiction. Field
Day’s purpose was to unite the two sides of myth, the one that represents an
opening and freeing from the straitjacket of a fixed identity and the other, that
“draws a magic circle around this identity excluding dialogue with all that is
other than ourselves”18. However, the theoretical grandeur of this “unification”
was often overshadowed by the political problems that the company had to
confront. Thus, Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act enjoys a more open and convincing
political stance while Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy wraps the political
element in a poetic illusion of liberation. Noticeably, this can be immediately
related to the poetic power of the two playwrights but, at the same time, it can
be associated with the political and historical events that influenced the writing
of these plays.
15
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland”, (1985) p. 69.
16
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland”, (1985) p. 70.
17
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939).
18
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland” (1985), p. 80.
Adaptations 165
19
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)”, in Amid Our Troubles (London:
Methuen, 2002), p. 148.
20
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (2002), p. 161.
166 Chapter Four
21
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (2002), pp. 149-150.
22
Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London: Hutchinson, 1972).
23
Tom Paulin’s attack on O’Brien is included in his collection of essays Ireland and the
English Crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1984), initially published as “The
Making of a Loyalist”, Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1980, 1283-5. Quoted
in Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (London: Methuen, 2002), p.
153.
Adaptations 167
Seamus Deane observed the importance of the year when Paulin’s play was
premiered, considering that 1984 brought about a transformation of the political
world “that had been effected by the hunger-strikes of 1981, in which ten
republican prisoners had died, and in which the British and Unionist position
appeared to have redefined itself yet again as one of “No Surrender”, “Not an
Inch” and other such neo-Creonisms”25. The close relationship between the
resurgence of the Antigone myth and the contemporary political framework in
Northern Ireland is also discussed by Richard Kearney, who related the ideas of
martyrdom and mythical victimization, present in the texture of the Greek play,
to the struggle for political expression on the part of Republican prisoners in the
Maze prison at the beginning of the 1980s. Kearney writes:
“In 1980, a Maze prisoner reiterated the sentiment [the idea of dying for ones
country] when he wrote on the wall of his cell: ‘I am one of many who die for
my country… if death is the only way I am prepared to die.’ The many here
refers to a long litany of martyrs whose sacrificial death for Ireland has been
translated into the ‘sacred debt’ of the ‘freedom struggle’.”26
24
George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 138.
25
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (London: Methuen, 2002), p.
152.
26
Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland” in Ireland’s Field Day (London:
Hutchinson, 1985), p. 67.
168 Chapter Four
Minister who always invoked the supremacy of the state above all other ethical
demands. The “daylight gods” of law ruled supreme over a space that was
slipping into the dark and stiff world of a history that preferred to overlook any
element of Otherness that could upset its authority.
In addition, Tom Paulin makes it clear that the theoretical
background that he uses in his own reading of Antigone follows Georg Wilhelm
Hegel’s interpretation of the Greek play27. According to Paulin, Hegel reads the
play as “the perfect exemplar of tragedy”. He argues:
“the sacred laws which Antigone revered, and which made her bury her brother,
are instinctive Powers of Feeling, Love and Kinship, not the daylight gods of
free and self-conscious social and political life. Neither the right of the family
nor the right of the state is denied in the play – what is denied is the absoluteness
of the claim of each.”28
The fundamental difference between the two protagonists of the play, Antigone
and Creon, is their allegiance to opposed forces in the dynamic of culture.
Antigone’s loyalty is to the “dark gods” of tradition and family, gods of
instinctual forces that cannot be stopped by the reason of state and law. Creon’s
“daylight gods” are related to the Apollonian heights of logic, overlooking the
powerful drive of myth and tradition. However, the two positions cannot exist in
isolation, the tragic denouement being caused by the clash between the two,
between family and civic life, between public and private space. Tom Paulin
transfers the two sets of laws present in the Greek original within the space of
contemporary Northern Ireland. The “dark gods” become associated with the
unwritten laws of tradition with mainly republican undertones, while the
“daylight gods” represented by Creon are associated with the authority of a state
which is perceived as imposed and alien. Having in mind the political
background of Northern Ireland, the ideology discussed by Field Day in their
pamphlets and Tom Paulin’s own theoretical and political convictions, it was
inevitable for the new version to relate to Northern Ireland and to the Northern
Irish “troubles”.
Paulin’s play openly addresses the contemporary realities but the
main backlash of this openness is represented by the playwright’s failure to
work towards a resolution, by a lack of confidence that a solution could be
reached, thus determining the presence of an achievement only in the form of
pure desire. The difference between the dramatic text and the Field Day
production were discussed at length by reviewers, many of them reaching the
27
See details of Hegel’s ideas on tragedy in Anne and Henry Paolucci (eds.), Hegel On
Tragedy (Smyrna, Del: Griffon House Publications, 2001).
28
Tom Paulin, “Antigone”, in Amid Our Troubles (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 167.
Adaptations 169
conclusion that the production was more decisive than the play, scoring a
political point against the authorities but leaving some of the problematics of the
play unsolved.
Before delving into the textual maze of Paulin’s play, it might be
useful to introduce Seamus Deane’s recommendations for a “Field Day reading”
of The Riot Act. Deane considers that it is quite easy to see Antigone as a
republican martyr while Creon falls well into the category of a Unionist
intransigent. However, this type of reading “is an unattractive proposition,
certainly from Field Day’s point of view”29. From the point of view of a
company that intended to open up the issues of identity and nation, the “simple”
duality of republican vs. unionist would re-instate the colonial binary
oppositions that the pamphlets try so hard to vanquish. Such a binary reading
would also imply further difficulties of interpretation. Thus, Antigone’s
republicanism could be associated with the traditional image of nationalism,
with its “feminized allegiance to natural feeling and ancestral practice”30which
characterizes the historic inheritance of ethnic nationalism, thus continuing the
established “mythologies” of Irish Republicanism re-enforced by W. B. Yeats’s
“Celtic Twilight”. The same duality between idealism and reason determined
the way in which the hunger strikes and the protests associated with them – the
dirty protest, starvation and pain inflicted on the body – were discussed
especially within the colonial discourse. The power structures of the United
Kingdom as the colonizing force were always seen as the representatives of law,
reason and civilization against the idealistic, primeval instincts that determined
the “Celtic excess”. However, according to Deane, the hunger strikes were not
trying to re-enforce an idealistic vision of nationalism but, on the contrary, they
were about
“the reordering of the symbolic universe that belonged to nationalisms (Irish and
British) and the denial of a space outside that (the space of being a ‘political’
prisoner who refused to consent to or believe in that symbolic universe) by a
state that was itself ethnically nationalist and brutally sectarian while pretending
to be neither – indeed to be the reverse of these.”31
Thus, the hunger strikes were not about re-instating dualities but about de-
constructing these binary oppositions and conquering the space outside them.
29
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” in Amid Our Troubles (London:
Methuen, 2002), p. 154.
30
Joe Cleary, “Domestic Troubles: Tragedy and the Northern Ireland Conflict”, South
Atlantic Quarterly 98 (3) (Summer 1999), pp. 501-37, quoted in Seamus Deane, “Field
Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 154.
31
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (London: Methuen, 2002), p.
155.
170 Chapter Four
However, when studying the republican iconography that relates to the hunger
strikes of 1981, it is almost impossible to overlook the Christian and Celtic
imagery associated with the hunger strikers, and especially with Bobby Sands.
Paradoxically, by attempting to upset the binary “mythologies” of the colonial
discourse, the hunger strikers were raised to the mythical heights that,
theoretically, they wanted so desperately to avoid. Another “problem” observed
by Deane is related to Tom Paulin’s statement about following the reading of
Antigone provided by Hegel. According to Deane, the Hegelian reading is not
quite to the point in The Riot Act, as “it assumes that Creon represents the just
claims of the state”, while part of the problem in Northern Ireland is that the
state “is not felt to have any right on its side at all; it is an imposition, a coercive
entity founded to sustain injustice and exclusiveness for the sake of one group
over another”32.
Thus, the equilibrium of Hegel’s interpretation of the
Sophoclean play as the clash between two valid claims – one belonging to the
daylight gods of the law and state and the other to the dark, primeval gods of
family and tradition – is disturbed by the fact that in The Riot Act Creon
represents a state that is refused validity by the majority of the inhabitants of the
province, and, given the openly political stance that Paulin represents in the
play, it is impossible to overlook the exact reference to Northern Ireland in order
to focus on the “universality” of the issues built in the morphology of the play.
Field Day, through the voice of Seamus Deane, refuse to see the Northern Irish
“problem” as one in which there is “much to be said on both sides”.
A Northern Irish “application” of Sophocles’s play would not be
interested in achieving a “balance” between the two sides but, on the contrary, it
would attempt to challenge one side against the other to prove the lack of
validity of an imposed state power. Thus, with the staging of The Riot Act, Field
Day did not strive towards the multiplicity and hybridity that they advocated in
the pamphlets, towards the creation of a space of the mind where
multiculturalism could prevail, but towards a space where the intrusion of an
imposed power structure becomes painfully visible. However, in commenting
on the play’s achievements, from the Field Day point of view, Deane recognizes
the fact that, if read as an allegory of the political situation in Northern Ireland –
and, as a reader and viewer, it is impossible not to associate the play with
Northern Ireland – “it scarcely attends to the republican position at all”33.
Following Joe Cleary’s observations, Deane asserts that “it is more convincingly
a play about the internal dynamics of a Unionism by which Paulin is repelled
but to which he would like to find reason to be attracted. Antigone might
32
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” (London: Methuen, 2002), p.
154.
33
Seamus Deane (2002), p. 155.
Adaptations 171
represent a Unionist culture to which he could give his allegiance were Creon
not so irrationally unyielding”34.
The Riot Act was first presented in Derry’s Guildhall on 19
September 1984, as part of a double bill together with Derek Mahon’s High
Time, an adaptation of Molière’s The School for Husbands. The problems that
Tom Paulin faced with the production reflect the problematic character of the
text with its openly political echoes. The playwright described the initial set in
his notes on Antigone, published in Amid Our Troubles – Irish Versions of
Greek Tragedy35, as “too ethnic Irish”, “three whitewashed walls splashed with
red paint, a bit like a courtyard after a shoot-out in a spaghetti western”36. After
the dramatic resignation of both director and designer, Stephen Rea, who was
already playing Creon in the play, took over as director and the company asked
designer Brien Vehey to re-create the set. At the playwright’s suggestion Vehey
built a new Enlightenment set based on Paulin’s discovery of a disused
Presbyterian church, “a perfect, neo-classical meeting-house, which represented
more than a daylight god”37. The new set is transposed in the textual opening of
the play where Paulin creates a specific space with “triangles, Masonic symbols,
neo-classical architrave”38. The open space revealed in front of the dark, stern
Theban palace retraces the Sophoclean dynamic of within/without the walls, of
the binary structure modus / apeiron39. However, in The Riot Act, the distinction
between the two spaces is not strictly defined, given the symbols and
architectural elements placed in-between. Thus, the space where Antigone and
Ismene appear for the first time in the play creates a first difficulty in assessing
their “allegiance” and a first obstruction in the way of a “simplistic” binary
reading. Creon’s character, however, leaves no space for speculations: he uses
the political language of a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland mixed with an
34
Joe Cleary, “Domestic Troubles: Tragedy and the Northern Ireland Conflict”, South
Atlantic Quarterly 98 (3) (Summer 1999), pp. 501-37, discussed by Seamus Deane in
“Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)” in Amid Our Troubles (London: Methuen, 2002), p.
154.
35
Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (eds.), Amid Our Troubles (London:
Methuen, 2002), pp. 165-70).
36
Tom Paulin, “Antigone” in Amid Our Troubles (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 167.
37
Tom Paulin, “Antigone” in Amid Our Troubles (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 168.
38
Tom Paulin, The Riot Act (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 9. All further quotes
will refer to this edition of the play.
39
In Greek philosophy, the two spaces defined by the limits of culture were MODUS, the
internal, legal standard of CIVITAS, the boundary of the state and law; and APEIRON,
the infinity beyond the limits, the natural space beyond the Republic. Discussed in
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (London, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976) translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from the French De la
grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967).
172 Chapter Four
40
Tom Paulin, ‘Antigone’ (London: Methuen, 2002), p. 167.
41
Fintan O’Toole, “The Riot Act by Tom Paulin and High Time by Derek Mahon” in
Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (eds.), Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on
Modern Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), p. 30.
Adaptations 173
does not represent the “wildeness” of the primitive Other but, on the contrary, it
“may be transvalued as exuberance, primitive earthiness, an integrity of body
and soul that resists social integration or confinement within limits”42 The
“wildness” is ultimately transposed to Creon at the end of the play through the
external power of the gods:
“CREON: Son, what god was it/that sent me wild?” (The Riot Act, p. 60)
The weakness of the play resides in the fact that Tom Paulin
tries to impose the Hegelian view of Antigone in The Riot Act, but, as Seamus
Deane previously pointed out this view does not seem to work against the
Northern Irish background of the play. This difficulty in grasping the actual
position of the characters obstructs any resolution that might be possible at the
end of the play, but, on the other hand, Deane acknowledges the fact that, from
the very beginning, the achievement, or the possible resolution, exists only in
the form of a desire that will not become reality. While all through the play
Creon keeps up with the parody bestowed on him by the political circumstances
of the play, the “tragic” finale that brings Antigone, Heamon and Eurydice’s
suicides requires the audience to switch from ridicule to sympathy. Suddenly,
Creon changes from a caricature to a tragic character overcome by the guilt of
causing the loss he suffered.
However, it is very difficult for the audience to make the switch
given the contemporary resonances that define the play. The clash between the
contemporary elements featured in The Riot Act and the tragic structure of the
original Greek tragedy reveals the problems that Field Day face in the staging of
classical texts with the overt intention to transpose them within the framework
of the Northern Irish “troubles”. Fintan O’Toole points out the extensive
problematic that defines this phase of the Field Day theatrical enterprise:
“The Riot Act puts the finger on one of the broader problems for the whole Field
Day enterprise. By choosing to do a version of Antigone, Field Day cannot but
have been drawn by the political resonances of the play in modern Ireland. The
area where myths and modern realities meet is the territory Field Day has staked
out for itself. But just as Field Day has entered the political arena without stating
all the political consequences of its stance, Tom Paulin’s version of Antigone
exploits the resonances of the classical text without clarifying them. For the sake
42
Anthony Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones: Tragedy North and South”, in Michael
Kenneally (ed.), Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature
– Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature1 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p.
226.
174 Chapter Four
43
Fintan O’Toole, “The Riot Act by Tom Paulin and High Time by Derek Mahon” in
Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (eds.), Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on
Modern Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), p. 30.
44
Anthony Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones: Tragedy North and South”, in Michael
Kenneally (ed.), Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature
– Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature1 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p.
229.
45
Fintan O’Toole, “Heaney Goes Back to the Roots”, The Irish Times, 10 November
1990 (Field Day Archive).
Adaptations 175
46
Fintan O’Toole, “Heaney Goes Back to the Roots”, The Irish Times, 10 November
1990 (Field Day Archive).
47
Colm Toibin, “Dramatic Seduction of a Premier Poet”, Sunday Independent, 4
November 1990 (Field Day Archive).
48
Quoted in Shaun Richards, “Into That Rising Glare?: Field Day’s Irish Tragedies”, in
Modern Drama, No. 43, Spring 2000, pp. 109-117.
176 Chapter Four
resonance of the tragic conflict and thus offering the director, designer and
actors a wider spectrum of manipulation, the final meaning of the production
being created in the theatrical unit that contains not only the text and the
production itself but also the particular dramatic setting (Derry’s Guildhall),
some of the actors’ particular Northern Irish accents and the special audience
that attended the production on the night of 1 October 1990.
The story that represents the basis of The Cure at Troy is that of
Philoctetes, the Greek warrior and holder of Hercules’ magic bow who, on the
way to the Trojan War, is bitten by a snake at the altar of a god. Because of his
foul smelling wound and his continuous cries of pain, the rest of the Greeks,
including Odysseus, leave him behind on the deserted island of Lemnos. Ten
years on, the Greeks, warned by the oracle at Delphi, realize that they need
Philoctetes’ magic bow if they are going to win the war. In order to persuade
Philoctetes to forget, forgive and help the people who abandoned him, the
Greeks send the crafty Odysseus together with Neoptolemus, the hero Achilles’
son, to Lemnos to win over Philoctetes by using any methods be that violence or
cunning. According to Seamus Heaney, the conflict is
“between the young man [Neoptolemus]’s sense of personal integrity and the
older man [Philoctetes]’s code of loyalty and solidarity that initiates the drama,
which goes on to enact itself in the consciousness of Philoctetes himself: in him
and around him Sophocles locates an argument about the different consequences
of outrage and obligation.”49
49
Seamus Heaney in an interview for the Hampstead and Highgate Express, 31 March
1991 (Field Day Archive).
50
Stephen Rea in Mark Cook’s article “From Troy to Birmingham” in the Hampstead
and Highgate Express, 31 March 1991 (Field Day Archive).
Adaptations 177
51
Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Word and Image” in The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 33.
52
In Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (Eds.), Amid Our Troubles – Irish
Versions of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002), pp. 171-181.
178 Chapter Four
The problematic issue of the “wound” appears frequently in the cultural and
historical discourse on the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. Theorists and
historians consider that the main problem encountered by the Northern Irish
communities on their way towards a possible reconciliation is their own “navel
gazing”, the tendency to passionately show off their suffering and forget about
forgiveness and healing. Field Day itself was accused of encouraging the
reiteration of “dangerous myths”, thus providing the basis for self-contained
anger and need for revenge. Northern Irish history was often perceived – by
Lynda Henderson and Edna Longley for example – as a long row of wounds
that would never heal unless the two communities start looking at each other
rather than gazing at their own “wounds”, showing off their own suffering.
Fintan O’Toole considers that in The Cure at Troy “there is no attempt to hide
53
Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), p. 18.
All further reference will be made to this edition.
Adaptations 179
the fact that the story is used as a metaphor for the North now, for the struggle
between the desire to hold on to your wounds and the need to forgive and be
healed”54.
The importance of the play, within the Field Day enterprise, is
that the needs and loyalties of the community prevail in the end, thus creating a
possibility of healing, notwithstanding the fact that resolution appears here, like
in Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act, as a remote, ideal possibility. Moreover, the final
solution appears blurred by the intervention of a god that, in Heaney’s version
does not appear on stage but expresses his wishes through the voice of the
Chorus. The fact that Philoctetes seems to be hypnotized by the voice of the god
diminishes the possibility of a self-made decision. However, the island will
always exist in the character’s morphology, as a reminder of his suffering.
The physical texture of the island can also be encountered in the bodily
definition of Philoctetes. Living on the island for ten years created an almost
unbreakable bond between the material entity of the island and the living body,
initiating symbolic exchanges between the living and the inert.
“PHILOCTETES: I’m like a fossil that’s being carried away, I’m nothing but
cave stones and damp walls and an old mush of dead leaves.” (The Cure at Troy,
p. 80)
In addition, the fact that Philoctetes has to go to war first in order to achieve a
final resolution subscribes to Seamus Deane’s and ultimately to the company’s
view that catastrophe, and in this case the catastrophe of the Trojan War, cannot
be avoided in order to create the path towards reconciliation.
In the Field Day production, the cave was “enacted” by the
huge, cracked head of a fallen statue representing a Greek god. Philoctetes lives
inside the head. At a certain point, the audience has the feeling that everything
happening on stage is the representation of a mind. Odysseus, for example, has
all the details of his plan in his head:
54
Fintan O’Toole, “Heaney Goes Back to the Roots”, The Irish Times, 10 November
1990.
180 Chapter Four
“PHILOCTETES: Hercules:
I saw him in the fire
Hercules
was shining in the air.
I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.
The drama is concentrated inwards, the focus being displaced from the political
to the personal, from the outward to the inward warfare. Heaney’s play reads the
intervention of the demi-god Hercules as a moment of emancipation. The
supernatural is internalized and the personal cure comes from within. The role
of the Chorus in Heaney’s play is more than a simple liaison between the sacral
and the human. Compared to The Riot Act, where Tom Paulin admitted to the
fact that he cut many of the Choruses following Stephen Rea’s request for a
shortened version of Antigone, given the double bill Field Day embarked upon
in 1984, Seamus Heaney uses the Chorus to include new lines of his own, verses
that emphasise the dilemma of the poet and of poetry placed on the borderline
between “the you and the me and the it of it” (The Cure at Troy, p. 2). The
Chorus, more than Philoctetes, takes up the role of the poet and struggles with
the moral question of his/her position in a society torn apart by violence.
55
Seamus Heaney, “Production Notes in No Particular Order”, in Marianne McDonald
and J. Michael Walton (Eds.), Amid Our Troubles – Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy
(London: Methuen, 2002), pp. 171-181.
Adaptations 181
However, the confusion of the Chorus might arise not only from the fact that the
space of the island is “strange” and alien to them, but also from the fact that the
island represents a paradoxical space of continuous change, but, nevertheless, a
looped change that exists only in the vacuum of that particular space. Lemnos is
a space of the mind, a limbo between reality and illusion, where solutions can be
found but where hopes could be also destroyed. It is a “no-man’s-land” that
provides the proper ground for discussions and solutions related to the conflict
between personal loyalties and public calling.
Having in mind the theatre company that produced Heaney’s
play, it is maybe too easy to identify the island with Northern Ireland, where we
182 Chapter Four
have got two tribes who have done each other great harm. People walk around
with a sense of grievance instead of getting on with the next step in the
development of their society. However, Seamus Heaney sees Philoctetes as
much more than the “simple” representative of both Catholics and Protestants in
the North. As characters, Philoctetes and the Chorus embody not only political
issues that could be traced back to the Northern Irish crisis, but also issues
concerning the role of poetry and the poet, the conflict between private and
public spheres. Undoubtedly, the environment in which the play was premiered
worked towards tracing a parallel between the historical surroundings and the
dramatic space, but the play transcends these comparisons by nurturing “a
common humanity at once more durable and more fundamental than such
political divisions”56.
Although in the classical Greek theatre there were no actresses,
Heaney decreed that the Chorus be made up of three women (played by Zara
Turner, Veronica Duffy and Siobhan Miley in the Field Day production) to
parallel the Fates, the Furies and the three Shakespearean Witches from
Macbeth. The lines of the epilogue were added to place the work in a poetic
context. The female Chorus launches on a poem that contains Heaney’s first
overtly political statement, expressing hope for a great sea change on the far
side of revenge.
56
Terry Eagleton, “Unionism and Utopia: Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy”, in
Eamonn Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre
(Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), pp. 172-175.
Adaptations 183
“NEOPTOLEMUS: Stop just licking your wounds. Start seeing things.” (The Cure
at Troy, p. 74)
“NEOPTOLEMUS: The danger is you’ll break if you don’t bend.” (The Cure at
Troy, p. 75)
57
Seamus Heaney, “The Cure at Troy: Production Notes in No Particular Order” in
Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (Eds.), Amid Our Troubles – Irish Versions
of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002), pp. 171-181.
58
Seamus Heaney published a version of the Irish legend with the title Sweeney Astray
(Derry: Field Day, 1983).
59
Fintan O’Toole’s review of the Field Day production of The Cure at Troy in The Irish
Times, 10 November, 1990.
184 Chapter Four
60
Fintan O’Toole’s review of the Field Day production of The Cure at Troy in The Irish
Times, 10 November, 1990.
61
Seamus Heaney in an interview with Fintan O’Toole, “Heaney Goes Back to the
Roots”, The Irish Times, 10 November 1990.
Adaptations 185
62
Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), pp. 14-15.
186 Chapter Four
63
Presented in a programme note to the Field Day production of Mahon’s High Time in
1984.
64
Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines – The Field Day Theatre Company and
Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 234.
65
Derek Mahon in programme notes to Field Day’s production of High Time in 1984.
66
Derek Mahon, 1984.
Adaptations 187
the year 1968 when the student revolt happened in Paris. Derek Mahon
acknowledges the fact that he had written the play for May 1968, for the “gentle
hippies” of that time, when, during the events in Paris “students erupted on to
the streets of Paris and the French police appeared with riot gear”67. This setting
would have had a different effect on the Northern Irish audience, as it was
closely related to the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement of 1969 and the
beginning of the 1970s. However, the company had in mind the Northern Irish
outcome of the Civil Rights Movement especially in Derry with the atrocities of
Bloody Sunday, and decided that it would not be appropriate to set a comedy
against that background. Moreover, Emil Wolk, one of the directors chosen by
Field Day for the production, concluded that, instead of plunging into the
nostalgia of past decades, the play should be allowed to talk to the present and
thus it was decided that the setting should express the present day and the young
characters should be dressed in punk costumes.
High Time is a “free translation” of Molière’s L’École des
Maris, and it was performed for the first time in Derry’s Guildhall on 19
September 1984, as the second part of a double bill that included Tom Paulin’s
The Riot Act. Derek Mahon’s play re-discusses, with a comic stance, the theme
that defined the central conflict of Paulin’s play: the dangers of intransigency
and the problematic of freedom. The main plot is centred round the relationship
between two brothers, Tom (Sganarelle in the original) and Archie (Ariste) and
their two wards, Helen (Léonor) and Isabel (Isabelle). Tom is a strict guardian,
who keeps his ward Isabel under intense observation, locked in her room most
of the time. His open intention is to marry her himself and to keep her away
from any contemporary temptation that might change her “mild manners”.
Archie, on the contrary, treats his ward Helen with great respect and trust,
convinced that what really matters is her happiness. The difference between the
two brothers is enhanced by their costumes, Archie wearing rather “youngish”,
liberal clothes, while Tom’s conservatism being illustrated by his dark suits. In
an elaborate game of deception, Isabel manages to get married to the man she
loves, the young Val, while Archie is rewarded for his trust by wining Helen’s
hand. The act of deception makes possible a highly physical theatre, which,
together with Mahon’s mastery of verse, creates a performance which David
Nowlan for The Irish Times defined as a “pure romp”.
Derek Mahon transfers the action of Molière’s original into
twentieth century Ireland, which accentuates the difference between the
innovative elements he chooses in his translation and the confines of Molière’s
scenario. However, the tension thus created represents an extraordinary source
of comic relief. The beginning of the play is determined by “seventeenth-
67
Derek Mahon, 1984.
188 Chapter Four
Notwithstanding his choice to translate the play into verse and to keep the
guardian-ward relationship, Mahon decided to make some changes that would
resonate with the contemporary take on Molière’s classic.
The updates that Mahon uses refer to details that would also
relate to the Irish audiences: when trying to start a conversation with Tom, Val
asks him “who do you think’ll win the Cup?” (High Time, p. 24); Tom blames
the “ignorance” and improper behaviour of the young on TV, on the cannabis
they smoke and on the alcohol they drink; Isabel produces “an immense,
elaborate Valentine envelope” (High Time, p. 29) that she received from Val;
and Liz, Helen’s flat-mate compares Tom’s strictness and conservatism with the
way women are treated in Iraq:
“You’d think you were in some place like Iraq / to be locked up and let out, by
his grace, / once daily, with a veil over your face.” (High Time, p. 17)
Mahon also changes the position of the servants, turning them in contemporary
flat-mates: Liz, Helen’s flat-mate and Ernie, Val’s. Colloquial constructions are
juxtaposed to “Frenchisms”, resulting in witty combinations:
68
Derek Mahon, High Time (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1985), p. 11. All further
reference will be made to this edition.
69
Baz Luhrmann is the director of the 1996 film version of William Shakespeare’s
Romeo+Juliet, set in contemporary California.
70
Derek Mahon, in programme notes to the Field Day production in 1984.
Adaptations 189
Although this type of alterations are not determining for the whole text, they are
introduced to provide a deliberate comic effect that further enhances the tension
between the dialogue and the contemporary setting.
The Field Day production of High Time proved to be a great
success, elevated by the fact that it followed a dark, rather bleak production of
Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act. The double bill did not do justice to Paulin’s play,
many critics considering that, after a play that reinforced the “navel-gazing” that
Field Day had been accused of since the premiere of Brian Friel’s Translations,
with High Time, the company managed to escape, even if only for a moment,
from the burden of “creating a new identity for Northern Ireland”. They lauded
the physicality of the production and the capacity of the actors to change from
simple “talking heads” in the first play into the riotous clowns of the second.
However, Lynda Henderson observed that the play still manages to deliver the
usual Field Day message “a warning of the destructive consequences of a siege
mentality (Ulster protestants take note)” but it does it in “a highly entertaining
and light handed form.”73
The majority of the reviewers compared the two plays included
in the double bill, considering that the first play was “a near disaster” that would
have been appreciated only by the “northerners” (Harding, Sunday Press, 30
September 1984), while the second play finally rendered a new concept of
theatre that, many hoped, would become a standard for the Derry based
71
David Nowlan, The Irish Times, 20 September 1984.
72
Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 231.
73
Lynda Henderson, in Theatre Ireland, No. 7, Autumn 1984, p. 35.
190 Chapter Four
company. However, David Nowlan, for The Irish Times, astutely observed that
the double bill reflected the inner conflict that defined Field Day: “the built-in
conflicts of the purposes of this fine company. It is a double bill, half sermon
and half frolic, half relevant and half sheer entertainment, all stylish and ever so
slightly out of kilter.”74
Notwithstanding Field Day’s success with Mahon’s comedy,
they did not follow the critics’ recommendations to open up the theatrical
structures that they used towards a more physical, performance-based theatre.
None of their next plays were comedies, while the physicality of High Time was
not matched by either of the plays that could have provided the appropriate
setting for such a production: Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar involved textual
issues of theatricality that the company could not surpass in production and
Thomas Kilroy’s The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre was not given
enough attention by Field Day to realize all the theatrical possibilities that the
play offered.
74
David Nowlan, The Irish Times, 20 September 1984 (Field Day Archive).
75
Marilynn Richtarik discussed this choice in depth in her book on the first years of the
company, Acting Between the Lines – The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish
Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Adaptations 191
and history. The company intended to redefine Irishness within the framework
of a European or even global context, moving beyond the overanalysed
relationship with the British historical experience. Deane discusses the difficulty
surrounding this enterprise from its onset in two of his pamphlets written for
Field Day: “Civilians and Barbarians”, published in 1983, the year that saw the
production of Boesman and Lena, and “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an
Idea”, published the following year. He considered that the choice of the “moral
language”, which should be used in the attempt to de-construct the parochial
Irish cultural discourse, is not as clear-cut as it appears to be. Having in mind
the colonial discourse that Ireland was subject to, and which continues to define
the political language of Northern Ireland, the moral language that could be
chosen by a ground-breaking cultural enterprise is already embedded in the
political discourse:
“The moral and religious idiom, which claims universality, has in fact been
incorporated into the political idiom which appears to be more local in its range.
The moral idiom therefore is no more than a reinforcement of the political while
appearing to be independent of it.”76
76
Seamus Deane, “Civilians and Barbarians”, in Ireland’s Field Day (London:
Hutchinson, 1985), p. 41.
77
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea”, in Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 45.
78
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles”, p. 45.
79
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles”, p. 58.
192 Chapter Four
80
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles”, p. 56.
81
Lynda Henderson’s terms, discussed in “A Fondness for Lament”, Theatre Ireland,
No. 17, December 1988, pp. 18-20. Also see Edna Longley, “Poetry and Politics in
Northern Ireland”, in Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books,
1986), p. 191, or Edna Longely, “The Old Myth of Ireland” in The Times Literary
Supplement October 6-12, 1989; Brian McAvera, “Attuned to the Catholic Experience”,
in Fortnight 3 (March 1985), p. 19 and Sean Connolly, “Dreaming History: Brian Friel’s
Translations”, in Theatre Ireland, 13 (1987), pp. 43-44.
82
In Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines – The Field Day Theatre Company
and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 192.
Adaptations 193
“Friels on Wheels”. To counteract the criticism that Field Day represented only
a frame for Friel to stage his plays, the board decided to illustrate their policy of
openness towards all facets of Northern Irish community by asking Rudkin for a
new, original play for the company. David Rukin was well known for his dislike
of the “journalistic” plays about the Northern Irish “troubles”, considering that
this type of play did not challenge the prejudices of the audience. Thus,
according to David Rudkin himself, the play had been written with the Derry
audience in mind and it followed the policy of “educating” the Northern Irish
audience into over-passing the embedded prejudices of the Northern discourse.
“Given its origins, and its envisaged audience, I considered very carefully and
from many perspectives what this play should be; but when they received it,
Field Day rejected it with very little substantial explanation to myself. …With
my own Ulster background I had sought to engage myself in the Irish discourse
in a way that by-passed spectators’ conditioned responses, and thus to shed some
emotional light on dark places where there is only mythology and prejudice.”83
The story of The Saxon Shore however, matches the requirements of the Field
Day Theatre Company, encompassing issues of history, language and identity,
with possible parallels with the Northern Irish situation. The space that the play
lays out in front of the spectators is Hadrian’s Wall at 410 AD. For a long time
now, Rome has been “importing” Germanic peoples and settling them on
Britain’s “Saxon Shore” to defend the Empire against the neighbouring Celts.
The settlers have developed “a Protestant-like Pelagian ethos, and a culture of
fanatic loyalism to Rome”84. The play focuses on one of these communities,
who unknowingly become werewolves by night, causing murderous havoc
amongst the Celts. Athdark, one of the werewolves, who is a respected young
farmer by day, returns from a bloody raid with a stone axe-head in his side. The
permanently aching wound awakens his awareness to his nightly “other self”.
Ashamed, he accidentally enters a Celtic village where he is healed and cared
for by the women of a pagan shrine. However, when he recognizes the place as
a Celtic village, he immediately returns to his people and leads his werewolves
in a massacre of the Celts, including the women who helped him. The Celts
declare war on the settlers, as Rome announces the withdrawal of her troops
thus leaving the settlers alone to face the anger of the Celts.
The play contains a richly metaphorical texture that the Field
Day directors immediately associated with the situation in Northern Ireland and
decided that the Protestant community that would view the play would not be
83
David Rudkin talks about The Saxon Shore on:
http://www.davidrudkin.com/html/theatre/shore.html, viewed on 6/08/2005.
84
David Rudkin on The Saxon Shore, on:
http://www.davidrudkin.com/html/theatre/shore.html.
194 Chapter Four
very happy to recognize itself in the image of werewolves, nor would such a
bloody plot help in bridging the divides between the two communities. Tom
Paulin, one of the directors, considered that the image painted by Rudkin of the
Protestants in the North was far from what he knew about this community and
implied the fact that the Protestants in The Saxon Shore were still seen as
“settlers”, instead of being encouraged to initiate a dialogue with the Republican
community. However, Paulin concluded that “I just didn’t fancy the idea of
putting werewolves on stage in Magherafelt”85, recognizing that the decisive
point against the play, for him, was the portrayal of the “dark, violent” side of
the characters as werewolves. Marilynn Richtarik, who discusses in depth the
reasons for the Field Day refusal to stage the play, points out that in 1983, the
year of the company’s controversial choice, the touring schedule included
Ballymena, the birthplace of Ian Paisley and the centre of his constituency,
where the cultural committee of the local Council almost refused them
permission to put up posters only because they contained words in Irish: An
Chomhairle Ealaion (the Arts Council of Ireland). Thus, a play that seemed to
depict Protestants as werewolves would probably have caused extreme reactions
in the town. However, considering that the Field Day pamphlets continuously
advocated the need to challenge and sometimes constructively upset the
established visions of identity in Northern Ireland, a play like David Rudkin’s
The Saxon Shore would have fully matched this agenda.
In addition, David Rudkin wrote the play having in mind the
touring and financial capacities of Field Day, as he required for a minimal set
and a cast of only seven. These technical points met the criteria considered by
the Field Day directors in choosing a play. David Hammond, one of the
company’s directors, remarks in a letter sent to Marilynn Richtarik and
published in her book Acting Between the Lines, that:
“whatever plays we had in mind for a production we had to bear in mind the
practical demands of a touring company and a company that never had enough
money–so casts had to be small and stage sets easily handled, for instance.
About the plays themselves we always thought that we should do things
excellently. That we should try to get new plays, that we should be attracting the
best of writers, established and new.”86
However, David Rudkin was not given a convincing explanation for the
rejection, the main reason expressed in the letter sent to the playwright being the
“lack of funds for such a grandiose theatrical project” and the difficulty to tour
the production – which contradicted both the Field Day requirements presented
85
From a personal interview of Marilynn Richtarik with Tom Paulin (26 January 1992),
quoted in Acting Between the Lines (1994), p. 201.
86
Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines (1994), p. 198.
Adaptations 195
above and the way The Saxon Shore responded to these requirements. Rudkin
expressed his disappointment in the Field Day decision to reject his play after
commissioning it, also noting the fact that in the aftermath of the Field Day
rejection, he tried to present it to the Lyric in Belfast, which rejected it as well.
Rudkin observes:
“Obviously the play is a refraction of the ethnic/cultural conflict in the North of
Ireland: but Rome’s ‘Saxon Shore’ is not a metaphor, it’s a solid historical
landscape before which an audience’s existing pre-conceptions could not so
easily slot into place. Culturally loaded names and indicators are here working
the opposite way. ‘Rome’ is not a Paisleyite Babylon, but the focus of a
protestant-like community’s intense allegiance; Latin is not the language of the
Popish Mass, but a living tongue that the Pelagian young farmer toils with
devotion to learn; the ‘Brits’ are not the detested forces of occupation, but the
Celtic natives. So the play’s rejection deeply hurt me, for I felt rejected
politically too. My ‘Irish string’ has been silent since.”87
The mounting controversy about the real reason behind Field Day’s refusal,
turned, almost immediately, towards the political agenda behind the scenes.
David Rudkin was convinced that the rejection had a political undertone,
reflecting the short-sighted views of the Field Day directors. However, Lynda
Henderson, one of the leading Protestant critics of the company and former
editor of Theatre Ireland, did not agree with Rudkin on this. She notes in an
interview with Richtarik:
“had the play been wholly sympathetic towards the Protestant culture I would
have believed him, because I don’t think that Field Day would have been
sympathetic to that… But because the play… showed the Protestant culture as
werewolves with a savage capacity it’s not, it just is not in any way anything
other than objective in terms of the fact that both sides have savaged each
other.”88
It is also Stephen Rea’s position that if there were political considerations that
led to the refusal of the play, they were definitely not his. Rea considers instead
that the play did not meet the dramatic requirements of the company:
“Somehow it didn’t have the same dramatic charge of – his other plays always
seemed intensely personal, and that’s what I liked about his writing, loved about
his writing. And I just didn’t feel that play worked as well as his other work.”89
87
David Rudkin discussing The Saxon Shore on:
http://www.davidrudkin.com/html/theatre/shore.html, viewed on 6/08/2005.
88
Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines (1994), p. 200.
89
Marilynn Richtarik (1994), p. 201.
196 Chapter Four
Rea also points out that, even if Brian Friel might have been more sensitive
about Protestants being referred to as werewolves – “Brian as a Catholic maybe
he felt that he didn’t want to say that about those people”90 – he [Rea] was only
concerned about the fact that the play would not work from a dramatic point of
view.
Considering Seamus Heaney’s previous comments regarding the
way in which the production, the venue (the historical and political importance
of the Guildhall) and the audience contribute to the creation of meaning and
“distort”, in a certain way, the intended meaning of the playwright, this might
have contributed to the rejection of Rudkin’s play by the Field Day board.
However, the main issues contained in the texture of the play certainly
correspond to the issues discussed in the Field Day policy. The problem of
identity is determining for The Saxon Shore, as Athdark struggles with the
realization that he is a beast by night, not being able to fully understand the
overall implications of his “otherness” but, having the continuous “memory of
the wound”, he slowly develops as a character into what, at the end of the play,
is called “the beginnings of a man”91.
The wound that Athdark receives returning from one of his
murderous raids with the other werewolves reminds of Philoctetes’s wound in
Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy. However, in Rudkin’s case, the wound is a
reminder of an otherness that Athdark tries to vanquish from his existence. With
Athdark, the wound represents an awareness of the beast inside him and a need
to overcome that beast in order to become man. The wound is not about self-pity
but about healing and the possibility of a further reconciliation, however remote
that may seem, after Athdark’s return to the village of the Celts and the murder
of the women who had cured him. The tragedy of the Saxons, brought to the
“Saxon Shore” by the mighty Roman Empire, is revealed in the end of the play,
when they become aware of their loneliness in front of a revengeful Celtic army,
and the impossibility of defining their own identity:
“AGNES: Well for you! Well for you, Imperial mighty Power! Set us and
‘native British at each others’ throats: now, forsake us naked to their rage. And
have the gall to preach at us! Pluck us up and plant us in this foreign island
where we have no belonging? Where we must rob and savage to thrive at all?
Then give us no defence? Covenant?! Not even a name. British, and not. Saxon,
and not. Roman, and not. Who shall we say that we are now?” (The Saxon Shore,
p. 46)
90
Marilynn Richtarik (1994), p. 201.
91
David Rudkin, The Saxon Shore (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 49. All further quotes
will refer to this edition of the play.
Adaptations 197
It might have been this exact power of imagination that the Field Day Theatre
Company did not want to unleash, considering that all the associations so
carefully emphasised by the author in his attempt to overcome the prejudices of
the audience could have represented as many points of reference to a still
explosive situation in the North.
However, it seems unfortunate that Field Day did not take the
risk of challenging the stereotypes of the Northern Irish society, with a play that
did not directly refer to any part of the conflict or to the space of Northern
Ireland. Moreover, The Saxon Shore is a historical drama, consistent with the
plays that Field Day were advocating, attempting to discuss the state of mind of
the settler and the realities of a society in crisis. The controversy ended with an
over-politicization of a play that could have changed the already established
opinions of the audience and the critics about the company. However, it could
92
Richard Allen Cave’s review of David Rudkin’s The Saxon Shore in the Times Higher
Education Supplement, 1986.
198 Chapter Four
be argued that such a complex play would have indeed been over the heads of a
likely audience in Ballymena or Magherafelt, as perhaps it does require a more
sophisticated spectator than it would have found in these communities and it
indeed requires a cast that would have been able to cope with the intricacies of
Rudkin’s text. Nevertheless, the rejection of The Saxon Shore intensified the
critical attack directed against the company and marked Field Day as a
politically driven group with definable gaps between its theoretical agenda and
its theatrical enterprise.
Instead of taking up the challenge of producing a play written by
a “fierce, uncompromising, obsessive writer”93, the Field Day Theatre Company
board of directors decided to stage a “milder” play, from the point of view of
Northern Ireland. Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena came as a solution that
would respond to the Field Day policy and its concern with language and
history, but it would also provide the distance needed in discussing these issues,
given the fact that it dealt with life and death in South Africa and thus avoiding
the risks of locating the action nearer to home with the production of David
Rudkin’s play. Rudkin found it ironic that the play chosen by Field Day
belonged to Athol Fugard, a playwright “with whom he felt a certain affinity –
as a white South African, Fugard was the next best thing to an Ulster
Protestant”94.
The story of Boesman and Lena relies on a simplicity that
confers an extraordinary human-ness to the characters. Boesman and his woman
Lena are two Hottentot South Africans, two “coloured” people, whose position
in the South African society is on the very periphery of identity, being neither
black nor white. They are continuously on the move, not being able to find a
place they could call home, and when they find one, the “white man” makes
sure to tear it down with his bulldozers. However, the two eponymous
characters are not only looking for a home, they are also searching for their own
identities and for a humanness that seemingly disappeared from their biological
texture.
The barren space of the stage, which will be populated by boxes,
mattresses, blankets and pieces of corrugated iron from which Boesman is going
to build their new “abode”, implies the no-man’s-land within the borders of
which they are moving, carrying their “mobile lives” on their backs. While
Boesman remains rather static throughout the play, Lena develops into a
character that tries to remember and regain her individual human dignity. The
play does not dwell on ideas of national identity but on principles of human,
individual identity that, once achieved, could provide a stable basis for the
93
In Michael Billington, Review of David Rudkin’s The Saxon Shore in The Guardian
(Field Day Archive).
94
In Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines (1994), p. 203.
Adaptations 199
95
Athol Fugard, Boesman and Lena and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1974), p. 239. All further quotes will refer to this edition.
200 Chapter Four
lights out. Don’t be too late. Do it yourself. Don’t let the old bruises put the rope
around your neck.” (Boesman and Lena, p. 293)
96
The Londonderry Sentinel reported the disappointment of the audience and the critical
reviewers in its issue on 21/09/1983, covering the production of Boesman and Lena.
(Field Day Archive).
Adaptations 201
distrust from critics, mainly Protestant, who had already accused the company
of being one-sided. Instead of opening up the company’s discourse towards
new, challenging themes, the 1983 controversy established Field Day as a group
still immersed in the “gluey” past that they so fiercely opposed.
97
Seamus Deane, “What is Field Day?”, in the programme notes to the 1981 production
of Brian Friel’s translation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
202 Chapter Four
98
Seamus Deane, “What is Field Day?” (1981).
99
Seamus Deane, “What is Field Day?” (1981).
Adaptations 203
providing the Northern Irish audience with “strange but recognizable” plays,
thus attempting to include the Irish cultural discourse within a larger, European
framework. However, the issues that surface in the analysis of the play show the
difficulty of negotiating a stable position for a company determined by an
overtly political framework.
There are at least two problem zones in the analysis of Brian
Friel’s version of Three Sisters, positioned within the borders of the Field Day
policy. The first one relates to Field Day’s open intent towards
“Europeanization”, and the way in which the play meets this requirement. On
the other hand, the problem of “translation” and Friel’s own definition of what
translation was in this particular case, defined the critical reception of the
production and of the text.
More than twenty years after the publication of “What is Field
Day?”, Seamus Deane reflects on the company’s choice to stage Chekhov’s
Three Sisters, in an article included in a collection of essays drawing on the
close relationship between Irish theatre and Greek tragedies100. Deane observed
that referring back to the Russian classics, and especially to Chekhov, was part
of a well-established tradition in Irish literature, “ever since Daniel Corkery
induced his famous students, Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, to look to
the Russians to learn the art of the short story and to find in them an echo of
Irish experience”101. Chekhov depicts an image of Russia that meets the vision
of Ireland against which the Field Day Theatre Company was attempting to set
new standards. By staging Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the Field Day directors
wanted to show the Irish audiences that their feeling of slow decomposition and
“doom” was not singular, it was not restricted to the island they inhabited but,
on the contrary, it represented a general malaise, characterizing any society on
the brink of defining change. The “fascination with stifling provincialism and
slow-motion disintegration”102 relevant for the Russian plays, represented a
model for the Irish experience at the beginning of the 20th century. Given the
wide interest in the Russian vision of provincialism, the slow decay of an old
world at the hands of modernity became a trope that characterized the historical
and literary writings initiated by Corkery and his pupils. According to Deane,
this trope assumed that “Irish civilization had not been put to the sword by a
colonizing and imperial British power. It had failed to survive unstoppable
change; or it had resisted enforced change, and fallen into nationalist
100
Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (eds.), Amid Our Troubles – Irish
Versions of Greek Tragedies (London: Methuen, 2002).
101
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks (and Russians)”, in Marianne McDonald and J.
Michael Walton (Eds.), Amid Our Troubles – Irish Versions of Greek Tragedies
(London: Methuen, 2002), p. 148.
102
Seamus Deane, “Field Day’s Greeks and (Russians)”, (2002), p. 148.
204 Chapter Four
nostalgia.”103 However, given the postcolonial issues that defined the theoretical
atmosphere of the 1980s, Field Day’s purpose in re-visiting the Russian classics
corresponded to their policy of exposing the traditional structures that
determined the formation of the established view of Irish identity. Deane
considers that, for Field Day, the interest of the Irish adaptations of Russian
plays in general and Chekhov in particular, “is that they combined a harsh
realism about the impoverished condition of a very specific community along
with ghostly intimations of a tragic ending that was desired as much as it was
dreaded by its victims”104.
However, the staging of Three Sisters was more about Brian
Friel and about his preoccupations as a playwright105 rather than about Field
Day as a critical, academic voice, dominated by Seamus Deane. The play
represented the aesthetic manifestation of Friel’s firm belief that the European
classics should be made available to the Irish audiences in a recognizably Irish
voice. Brian Friel was not only influenced by the theme of a decadent society on
the brink of extreme change – which he discusses in his play Aristocrats, for
example – but he wanted to provide the Irish audience and the actors with
versions of classics with which they could connect through Irish linguistic and
cultural expressions. Another Irish playwright, Thomas Kilroy, who later
became a Field Day director, and whose version of Chekhov’s The Seagull was
staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1981, the same year that saw the
Field Day production of Brian Friel’s version of Three Sisters, shared this view.
In the Introduction to the published version of the play in 1993, Kilroy describes
his reasons for attempting a re-writing of the Chekhovian classic in an “Irish”
frame. Max Stafford-Clark, then Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre,
asked Kilroy to adapt The Seagull to an Irish setting as he felt, and Kilroy totally
agreed, that “many English versions of Chekhov tended to anglify Chekhov to a
very English gentility, as if the plays were set somewhere in the Home
Counties”106. Both Kilroy and Stafford-Clark considered that Chekhov belonged
to “a rougher theatrical tradition, at once hard-edged and farcical, filled with
large passions and very socially specific”107. This particular social specificity
did not match, in their view, the tendency of the English versions, which
103
Seamus Deane, (2002), p. 149.
104
Seamus Deane, (2002), p. 149.
105
Friel’s interest in Russian theatre and in Chekhov in particular became apparent
earlier, with plays like Living Quarters and Aristocrats. He wanted to reinforce this
preoccupation by translating Chekhov’s Three Sisters and bring it closer to the Irish
audience.
106
Thomas Kilroy in the Introduction to Thomas Kilroy, The Seagull (Loughcrew: The
Gallery Press, 1993), p. 12.
107
Thomas Kilroy in the Introduction to The Seagull, p. 12.
Adaptations 205
108
Brian Friel in programme notes to his version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
109
Brian Friel in programme notes to his version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
110
Quoted in Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality Nor Dreams
(London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 182.
206 Chapter Four
themselves should validate its translation in any language or any dialect for that
matter. Nevertheless, the main problem with the translation arose from the fact
that Friel did not choose to translate Chekhov’s play from the Russian original,
but from the existing English versions, thus underlining the necessity to
“translate” the language of these versions into a more approachable Hiberno-
English dialect. Paradoxically, his position on the necessity to translate the play
from the English versions also undermined Seamus Deane’s opinion, which
constituted a defining element in the Field Day policy, that “Irishness is a
quality by which we want to display our non-Britishness, it is a form of
dependency”111 that has to be counteracted by a definition of Irish identity free
from the binary opposition Irish-British. By expressing the need to “translate”
English versions of Chekhov’s play into an Irish voice, Friel seems to reinstate
binary narratives and the dependency that defined the Irish cultural discourse
and that the Field Day Theatre Company wanted so hard to avoid.
The main problem does not arise from the expressed need of the
playwright to “translate” European classics into an Irish “vision” of the world.
This type of cultural translation was one of the central elements that
characterized the postcolonial theoretical discourse that influenced the Field
Day theoretical agenda. Homi Bhabha, for example, evokes the “agency of
foreignness” in translation, where translation is seen as
“the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu rather
than language in situ. And the sign of translation continually tells the different
112
times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices.”
Thus, if such translations are to engage political change, they have to engage
“the performative, positional, rhetorical dimension of their own cultural
production”113. There is a close relationship established between the translation
itself and the political and social mise-en-scène used by the performance of the
translated play. However, in the case of Friel’s translation, the core problem is
represented by the constant reminder that this particular translation must be
different from the previous English translations. If the primary concern of the
Field Day “translation and language policy” was to “institutionalize” Irish
English114, given its claim of authenticity, this should have been done by
111
Seamus Deane, “Remembering the Irish Future”, The Crane Bag, 8.1, (1984), p. 84.
112
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 228.
113
W. B. Worthen, “Homeless Words: Field Day and the Politics of Translation”, 135-
154, in William Kerwin (ed.), Brian Friel: A Casebook (London: Garland Publishing,
1997), p. 137.
114
Discussed by Tom Paulin in his Field Day pamphlet “A New Look at the Language
Question”, Field Day Pamphlet No. 1 (Derry: Field Day, 1983), pp. 1-18.
Adaptations 207
115
Quoted in Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), p. 120.
208 Chapter Four
116
Seamus Deane, “Remembering the Irish Future”, in The Crane Bag, 8.1, (1984), pp.
83-84.
117
The same dramatic choices can be observed in Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act, a version
of Sophocles’s Antigone and in Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a version of
Sophocles’s Philoctetes.
118
Thomas Kilroy, in programme notes to Three Sisters, 1981.
Adaptations 209
striking twelve: “OLGA: The clock struck twelve then too.”119 The apparent
stagnation of the space determined by the passing time is further enhanced by
the accidental breaking of the china clock by Chebutykin in Act Three: “Maybe
it’s not smashed. Maybe it only seems to be smashed. Maybe we don’t exist.
Maybe we’re not here at all.” (Three Sisters, p. 75) This temporal and spatial
suspension impels the characters to concentrate on their inner conflicts, without
paying much attention to the others. Brian Friel changes the original rhythm by
making sure that the characters are listening to each other, technique which
weakens, in a way, the powerful insight that Chekhov presents his audience.
However, the silent tension that exists between the characters is
not totally “muted” in Friel’s Three Sisters. Reviewers and critics unanimously
considered the “dance scene” in Act Two to be the hallmark of Friel’s great
dramatic mastery. The reviewer for The Times described the scene as being a
“genuine addition to the Chekhov heritage”120. The dance scene, which remains
undeveloped in Three Sisters, but which will become the symbol of Friel’s later
play Dancing at Lughnasa, focuses on the unreleased energies in the play. Irina,
Masha, Vershinin, Fedotik and the Baron are locked in a moment that might
break the linearity, the monotony of their world. The rhythm of the song creates:
“a sense that this moment could blossom, an expectancy that suddenly
everybody might join in the chorus – and dance – and that the room might be
quickened with music and laughter. Everyone is alert to this expectation; it is
almost palpable, if some means of realizing it could be found.” (Three Sisters,
Stage directions, p. 50)
However, the moment is lost, the dance does not happen – neither in the text nor
in the production – and the atmosphere of boredom and angst is reinstated in the
house. Another scene that bears the recognizable touch of Friel and could be
related to the historical and social surrounding of the production space and to
Ireland in general as the island of saints and scholars, focuses on Andrey’s inner
struggle, his frustration and anger against the reality of his existence:
“Look at this town. One hundred thousand people – all indistinguishable. In the
two hundred years this town has been in existence, it hasn’t produced one person
of any distinction – not one saint, not one scholar, not one artist.” (Three Sisters,
p. 103).
The deep alienation of the characters, which could have been theoretically
diminished by Brian Friel’s choice to eliminate some of the silences that
119
Brian Friel, translation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (Dublin: The Gallery Press,
1981), p. 9. All further reference will be made to this edition.
120
In The Times, 5 October 1981, “Seeking a Sense of Ireland”. (Field Day Archive).
210 Chapter Four
The doctor and Andrey’s frustration and rage are juxtaposed to Vershinin’s
optimism. All through the play, Vershinin expresses his belief in the evolution
of humanity through revolution:
“Until finally in two or three hundred years time the quality of life on this earth
will be transformed and beautiful and marvellous beyond our imagining.
Because that’s the life man longs for and aspires to. And even though he hasn’t
achieved it yet, he must fashion it in his imagination, look forward to it, dream
about it, prepare for it.” (Three Sisters, p. 27)
121
In Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality Nor Dreams (London:
Macmillan, 1995), pp. 181-191.
Adaptations 211
The difference in language between the Prozorov family and the other
characters is visible especially in the case of Natasha, who uses the language of
an Irish peasant and whose first entrance defines her future development in the
play: “Sweet mother of God, I’m late – they’re at the dinner already! And look
at the crowd of guests! Goodness gracious I could never face in there!” (Three
Sisters, p. 33) Natasha, on the other hand, is the only character who achieves her
goal in the end of the play: she gets married to Andrey and becomes the mistress
of the house. She is also the character whose first appearance offers some
humorous political connotations, especially for the audience present at the
premiere. Natasha is wearing a green sash, which Olga immediately observes
because of the distinctive pink of her dress:
While the play alludes to the lack of taste that characterizes Natasha, as the
representative of a lower class, the Irish audience would have immediately
associated the green sash with the colour of Republicanism and it would have
also enjoyed the political joke of Natasha’s “not greeny green”, but “a sort of
neutral green”.
Some of the reviews did not consider that Brian Friel achieved
his goal of providing the Irish audience with an “Irish version” of the Russian
play. John Keyes, the reviewer for the Belfast Newsletter, agreed, however, that
Brian Friel’s version helped the audience to understand better the Russian
classic, which, ultimately, was one of the playwright’s initial intentions:
212 Chapter Four
“An Irish company, and dialogue in places colloquially Irish, does not make the
play an Irish play. What it does is to enlarge our understanding of Russian mores
by making us recognise those which we share with them and by exhibiting those
aspects of mankind which remain universal and unchanged by time or place.”122
The reviewer for the Sunday Journal believed that “Friel has made his
characters Irish to the extreme and, in my opinion, overstated their every
move”123, while the critic for The Times, reviewing the play while on tour at the
Dublin Theatre Festival, considered that the play was “a coarsely reductive
exercise in Irish Chekhov, which comes as a crushing disappointment from the
group that created Translations”124.
Discussing the achievements of the Field Day Theatre Company
in Theatre Ireland in 1983, Paul Hadfield and Lynda Henderson observe that
“by Field Day’s standards Three Sisters was their most complex undertaking. Its
lack of success at the box-office imposed a strain on the touring company – a
strain as much psychic as physical.”125 This became obvious when the
production reached Dublin, where, given the play’s length, many of the
audience members left before the interval. However, Friel did not even consider
shortening the play, his question – Can you cut a symphony? – remained
unanswered. In Dublin, Three Sisters was also compared unfavourably with
Thomas Kilroy’s successful version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Stephen Rea’s
direction was criticised and, once again, the Field Day production of Three
Sisters ensued discussions that moved beyond the company’s production: there
were questions about the position of the Irish theatre practitioners, about the
need to provide training for stage designers and directors. Critics felt that Field
Day became a hermetic company, controlled by Friel, and their productions felt
the burden of this situation. However, Henderson supports Friel’s concern that
existing directors and stage designers in Ireland could not live up to the
company’s expectations. She writes:
“There are good reasons for Friel’s position. The most telling of these is the lack
of directors in Ireland who are competent and sensitive enough to be trusted
either to have a creative contribution to make or to make an appropriate one.
122
John Keyes, “Major Playwright sets the Scene for a Russian Classic”, Belfast
Newsletter, 10 September 1981. (Field Day Archive).
123
“Three Sisters”, Sunday Journal, 4 October 1981 (Field Day Archive).
124
“Seeking a Sense of Ireland”, The Times, 5 October 1981.
125
Lynda Henderson and Paul Hadfield, “Field Day – The magical mystery”, in Theatre
Ireland, No. 2, January 1983, pp.63-66, p. 64.
Adaptations 213
Friel feels that he cannot entrust his work to any imagination other than his own
and it is hard to deny the validity of his position.”126
After three years of staging plays written or “translated” by Brian Friel, Field
Day was considered to be a success from the point of view of providing new
audiences with their first glimpse of the world of theatre, but, on the other hand,
it was considered that the lack of challenge for Friel within the company ensued
a lowering of the theatrical standards set by their first production, Friel’s
Translations.
“There are ways in which Field Day has been bad for Irish theatre, in that after
Translations, a lot of attention has been given to and hopes raised by an
enterprise which has promised more than it has been able to deliver. There are
ways in which Field Day has not been good to Brian Friel – it has largely
removed him from the productive abrasion of challenge and resistance. It would
be a pity if he preferred it that way. There are ways in which Field Day has done
much that has been good for Irish theatre. It has generated an interest in Derry
and has focused attention on the inadequacy of the provision for theatre in that
city. This has been a central contribution to the success of the Theatre-for
Derry campaign.”127
126
Lynda Henderson and Paul Hadfield, ‘Field Day – The magical mystery’, in Theatre
Ireland, No. 2, January 1983, p. 64.
127
Paul Hadfield and Lynda Henderson in Theatre Ireland, No. 2, January 1983, p. 64.
214 Chapter Four
versions known to the Irish audience, but, notwithstanding this achievement, the
text proves that he sometimes tries too hard, focusing more on the differences
that could be established between versions rather than on the cultural translation
of the social and humane issues of the play into an Irish cultural space.
The second Chekhov adaptation that Field Day staged in 1995,
proved to be their last theatrical production, thus ending the fifteen years of the
company’s theatrical enterprise. Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, in a version by
Frank McGuinness, continued, theoretically, Field Day’s policy of staging
classics of European theatre, in order to provide the Irish audience with “other”
views of themselves. Nevertheless, by 1995, the cultural and political agenda of
the Derry based company had changed and the board of directors was not seen
as a driving force for the theatrical development of the group. Brian Friel, the
founding member of the company was no longer part of Field Day. He had
given the Abbey his new play of 1990, Dancing at Lughnasa, which had led to
strained relationships between himself and Stephen Rea and ultimately led to his
decision to leave the company in 1994. Thus, the control that Friel had over
Field Day, criticised by some commentators, was finally over. The theatre
company decided to end its theatrical venture in 1995, invoking a lack of
financial support and deciding to focus on the enormous project of publishing
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. The final years were determined by
the premiere of only one original play, Thomas Kilroy’s The Madame
MacAdam Travelling Theatre in 1991, and two adaptations, Seamus Heaney’s
The Cure at Troy, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes in 1990 and Frank
McGuinness’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1995. In 1992, the
company organized a reading of David Rudkin’s radio play Cries from
Casement as His Bones are Brought to Dublin, in Derry, Belfast and Dublin.
Frank McGuinness had a controversial relationship with Field
Day. One of his plays, Carthaginians, was intended for production by Field Day
in 1987, as part of a double-bill with Stewart Parker’s Pentecost. However,
recognising the problems that the company might have faced given the
requirements for staging two full-length plays, McGuinness withdrew his play,
and thus, the year 1987 saw only the production and touring of Parker’s
Pentecost. Frank McGuinness also had reservations about the policy of the
company, his reservations springing not only from concern about the Northern
Republican position, practice and actions in the early 1980s, but also from the
wider reserves and scepticism about postcolonial analysis that represented the
main theoretical outlook of Field Day’s academic voice. In an interview in the
Crane Bag in 1985, McGuinness expressed his suspicion about the alleged
openness of the company, considering that Field Day was associated too much
Adaptations 215
with “the colour green”: “Don’t you think art is more colours than green?”128 He
noted that a company like Field Day, which advocates the need to provide a
possible reconciliation through the language of theatre, should include different
forms of “otherness” in its stage expression, moving away from the binary
oppositions that still determined its policy. The common view that Field Day
should become more than a collection of “Field Day plays”, becomes apparent
in the plays put on stage by the company after 1990. Although Brian Friel
remained part of the directorial board until 1994, his role in determining the
direction of the plays chosen by the company was diminished. With the likely
exception of Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, the other plays, Thomas
Kilroy’s The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre and Frank McGuinness’s
Uncle Vanya, move away from what Stephen Rea had earlier described as a
“Field Day play”. Thomas Kilroy’s play, which attempted to criticize the policy
of the touring company, was a flop at the box-office albeit its genuine theatrical
value discussed in a previous chapter, but Frank McGuinness’s version of Uncle
Vanya managed to achieve a life of its own, breaking free from the canonizing
tendency of Field Day. The critics reviewing the production directed by Peter
Gill saw the play as Frank McGuinness’s great adaptation and not necessarily as
a Field Day production. For the first time, the play, the production and the
playwright became more important than the fame of the hosting theatre
company. The fact that McGuinness did not try to write a version of Uncle
Vanya specifically for Field Day becomes apparent in the text of his translation
which, compared to the previous Field Day production of Chekhov’s Three
Sisters, in a translation by Brian Friel, is less anxious to be perceived as
rendering the Russian classic in an “Irish voice”.
However, the connections between Chekhov’s world-view and
Irish realities showed the same appeal to playwrights and theatre companies as
in the 1980s and before. Thomas Kilroy discussed the relationship between
Chekhov and Ireland in an article entitled “Chekhov and the Irish”, published in
1995, the same year that saw the staging of Frank McGuinness’s Uncle Vanya.
Kilroy points out:
“There is a view abroad that the Irish have a particular affinity with Chekhov’s
work. This might be just another form of Irish self-flattery. Nevertheless, there
are some facts that might be mentioned. There are the recent adaptations and
versions of the plays that have given the originals a fresh voice in the English
128
In Jennifer Fitzgerald in an interview with Seamus Deane, Joan Fowler and Frank
McGuinness, Crane Bag, 1985, Vol. 9, No. 2, p. 63.
216 Chapter Four
language. We see very few foreign classics in the Irish theatre; Chekhov is the
exception.”129
129
Thomas Kilory, “Chekhov and the Irish”, included in Peter Gill’s website,
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/abj76/PG/pieces/chekhov_and_the_irish.shtml,
viewed on 6 September 2005, 10:39 AM.
130
Frank McGuinness, Uncle Vanya, unpublished version of Anton Chekhov’s play,
rehearsal script, available in the James Joyce Library Special Collection at University
College Dublin. All further reference will be made to this version. pp. 1-2.
Adaptations 217
also as the sign of its imminent ending: “For fifty years now we’ve talked and
talked – and read pamphlets. It’s time we stopped.” (Uncle Vanya, p. 9)
While Vanya, Elena and the professor echo the stasis of Russian
society, Astrov recognizes the need for radical change that might revitalise the
possibility of a future revolution: “But we live in this country, this provincial,
limited place, and I can no longer stand it. My soul is sick of it.” (Uncle Vanya,
p. 29) However, the expressed need for change remains only a desire, a longed-
for dream that acquires no reality in the play. The sense of deep alienation is
presented through continuous distortions in the texture of the established laws
and spatial order. Elena and Astrov express their unease about the house, which
becomes the epitome of a past world:
“ELENA: Things are not well in this house.” (Uncle Vanya, p. 24)
“ASTROV: This house has a mind of its own. The master’s mind has turned to
stone.” (Uncle Vanya, p. 28)
131
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 24.
218 Chapter Four
“SONIA: Fate waits to send us trials. We’ll have patience, we’ll get through
them. So, we work for other people. Work hard, work harder, and we grow old.
Then, come the day and hour, we die quietly. Look up into its face, death, and
there it is, the grave. When we rise from it, we’ll tell how we suffered – how we
sorrow. God will show us mercy. Full of mercy, God. Uncle Vanya, you and me,
we will see a life that is full of beauty, full of light, of grace. Rejoice. We will.
The days of our misfortune we will look upon with tender eyes. We will smile.
And we will rest. Angels, we’ll hear them. The sky will be lit by lovely fire.
We’ll see that. And all the evil of the earth, we’ll see them all, we who suffered,
and they will all pass, for mercy will fill the earth. Freedom. Our life will calm.
It will be gentle.” (Uncle Vanya, p. 89)
Sonia’s words enlighten the space of doom and desperation that characterized
the play, but, nevertheless, it provides only a glimpse of a possible deliverance,
which would come in another life, for those who are working and suffering
under the oppression of “others”.
With Frank McGuinness’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya,
the “magic mystery” of the Field Day Theatre Company ended after fifteen
years of plays, pamphlets and controversies. The final five years suggest that
Brian Friel represented a moving force within the company and his departure
generated new questions regarding the position of Field Day as a theatre
company. The first ten years showed that Field Day needed a strong personality
both in the field of theory, Seamus Deane, and in that of theatre, Brian Friel.
After the latter left the company, the theatrical side found itself on shaky
grounds. This is not to say that the remaining directors were not capable of
running a theatre company, choose plays and organize the yearly tours, but
Friel’s powerful personality and beliefs seemed to be necessary in shaping Field
Day’s theatrical enterprise. Many critics hoped that the period after Friel would
be beneficial for Field Day, in that they would finally be free from under his
control and that they could enrich the existing cluster of plays with new,
challenging theatrical expressions, in their attempt to give a possible definition
to a contemporary, postmodern Irish identity. However, notwithstanding the
exciting possibilities that seemed to open up, the plays staged by Field Day after
1990 failed to become representative of the company.
Frank McGuinness’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya did not
deliberately react against the company, but the quality of the translation and the
obvious lack of the playwright’s intention to write his version especially for
Field Day, determined the production’s individuality and freedom from the
company’s canon. This was not “Field Day’s Chekhov” anymore, but Frank
McGuinness’s Chekhov. And, without plays that could be characterized as
“Field Day plays”, the theatrical enterprise was slowly but surely coming to an
end. The directors argued that some of them were engaged in other activities
that prevented them from fully focusing on the company – it was the case of
Adaptations 219
Stephen Rea, for example, who was concentrating on his big-screen career and
felt the touring extremely tiring. However, the theoretical wing of Field Day, led
from the very beginning by Seamus Deane, who became the main theoretician
of the company, continued to grow and it embarked on multiple projects, the
most important being the creation of a comprehensive anthology of Irish
writing, which, in its turn, generated extensive debate.
EPILOGUE
1
Thomas Kilroy, “From Farquhar to Parker”, in Programme Notes to the Field Day
Theatre Company and Tinderbox Theatre Company production of Stewart Parker’s
Northern Star, 1998.
2
Stewart Parker, “Introduction”, in Three Plays for Ireland (Birmingham: Oberon
Books, 1989), p. 9.
222 Epilogue
Through its plot and dramatic structure, Northern Star responds to this problem
of identity, connecting past and present, ensuring that the audience is aware of
the present-ness of the issues discussed in the play. The analysis of the play
reveals a conglomerate of ideas that represent the basis of the Field Day
ideology and establish Northern Star as the epitome of what one might call a
“Field Day play”. This does not mean that Stewart Parker’s play blends into the
“canon” created by the company during its fifteen years of theatrical activity,
but quite on the contrary, it contains, much like Frank McGuinness’s version of
Uncle Vanya in certain instances or Thomas Kilroy’s play The Madame
McAdam Travelling Theatre, the dramatization of what Field Day attempted to
be with more or less success. In its subject matter Northern Star touches upon
all the main critical issues – history, identity, language, myth – that Field Day
was so keen on debating both through the plays that they put on stage, the
pamphlets and the critical writings that they published. In its dramatic structure,
Parker’s play reflects the theatrical and ideological framework that Field Day
intended to use in order to create a new type of National Theatre for Northern
Ireland, a theatre that combines the history of Irish drama with the
contemporary need of a Northern Irish audience to identify with the “present-
ness” of the issues discussed on stage. This view of creating theatre as a
postmodern pastiche, re-thinking, re-interpreting previous dramatic forms by
connecting them to present problems is also the driving force behind Stewart
Parker’s view on theatre.
In an interview with Ciaran Carty for the Sunday Tribune in
September 19854, Parker talks about his vision on theatre as magic, as a way of
connecting with the audiences, and, as Seamus Heaney put it, as a means of
influencing “the consciousness of the audience in posterity, if not in the stalls”5.
Parker sees theatre as “playing with an audience’s attention so that he can get
away with saying the things he wants to say without appearing to say them”.
The idea of “doing magic” in theatre and the combination of various theatrical
forms towards the expression of a contemporary reality lie at the basis of
Parker’s dictum: “manipulating form as a vehicle for content”. Northern Star
provides him with such an opportunity of developing what he calls “theatrical
ventriloquism” in order to re-examine Irish history and the creation of historical
mythologies that crippled the modern development of Irish history. This
3
Stewart Parker quoted in Marilyn Richtarik, “Stewart Parker and Northern Star” in
Programme Notes to the 1998 performance of the play.
4
Ciaran Carty, “Northern star rising on the tide”, in Sunday Tribune, 29 September 1985.
5
Seamus Heaney, The Irish Times, December 1988.
The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On… 223
Discussing the structure of the play with Ciaran Carty, Stewart Parker points
out that, paradoxically, the use of different styles allowed for the creation of a
comprehensive image that blended the sentimental comedy of plays like She
Stoops to Conquer and The Good Natured Man with the wit of The Importance
of Being Earnest and “the final bleak despair and disillusionment” of Waiting
for Godot. All these styles were considered appropriate for the event presented
on stage:
“I found I could make each style appropriate to the situation. I could write a play
set in 1798 which was speaking directly to people today. If I’d written it in a
purely 18th century style it would have seemed remote and artificial. If I’d
written it in a completely colloquial idiom of today it would have seemed
unhistorical: people dressed up in fancy clothes talking as if they should be in
jeans and T-shirts. The technique allowed me to march the play throughout the
decades towards the present day and say to the audience, forget about historical
veracity, forget about realism, I’m going to tell you a story about the origins of
Republicanism and I’m going to offer you a point of view on what’s gone wrong
with it and why it’s become corrupt and why it’s now serving the opposite ends
to what it set out to serve, and I’m going to demonstrate this like a ventriloquist,
using a variety of voices.”6
The cottage is inhabited by the fugitive Henry Joy McCracken and his mistress
Mary who is nursing their child. The continuous changes in style are apparent
6
Stewart Parker in Ciaran Carty, “Northern star rising on the tide”, Sunday Tribune, 29
September 1985.
7
Stewart Parker, Northern Star, in Three Plays for Ireland (Birmingham: Oberon Books,
1989), p. 13. All further reference will be made to this edition.
The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On… 225
from the very beginning, the stage directions requiring that the members of the
company who also play the lambeg drum and respectively the bodhran, may
each play several roles in the action, and signal the changes in roles by
costuming on stage, in front of the audience: “a change of role may be
accomplished merely by a change of hat, coat or wig, in a style which reflect
the deliberate anachronisms and historical shifts of the successive scenes”
(Northern Star, p. 13). From the first scene, Northern Star combines
McCracken’s flashbacks, his public scenes where he tells the story of his life
directly addressing the audience, with the private scenes between him and his
mistress. The story of McCracken’s involvement in the United Irishmen
movement, the story of his political and historical existence follow the seven
ages of man, from innocence to shame. The story is openly delivered to the
audience in the form of a public speech, with McCracken apologising to the
citizens of Belfast for “nurturing a brotherhood of affection between the
Catholics of this town and my fellow Protestants” (Northern Star, p. 14). The
space of the cottage is determined by death: Mary’s cousin, O’Keefe, left the
house half-built because he was murdered for having taken stones from “the
fairy fort on the hill” (Northern Star, p. 16).
The allusion to the mytho-popular image of the “fairy folk”
relates to Parker’s view on the “ancestral voices” and “ghosts from the past”,
linking the “reality” of McCracken’s existence with the mythical features that
determine the history and culture of Ireland. Ghostly voices and mythical
images define the way in which history and politics are perceived, and thus the
need to re-interpret and re-read the past for the purpose of a partial
demythologization – as the total is not possible, following Paul Ricoeur’s
discussion on myth in Chapter 4. The spectral figures are not only voices of a
“fossilised” past but also of a spiritual level impossible to attain otherwise. The
symbolic dimension of myth defines the core of the society, and indeed, the
ghostly images in Stewart Parker’s plays establish a much deeper connection
between reality and spirituality, usually providing or opening up a path towards
a possible reconciliation. In Northern Star, the “resident” ghost and protector of
the space is the Ghost Bride, O’Keefe’s former betrothed, who, finding her
lover dead in the cottage hung herself from the rope that is still coiled around
the roof beam. Parker’s use of ghosts as protectors of spaces and containers of
energy is apparent in Northern Star. However, while his plays intend to achieve
resolution, his ghosts seem to be stuck “in the quest for vengeance”8. The
Phantom Bride is such a character that provides the balance between the Age of
Reason and the spiritual spaces exist beyond it.
8
Stewart Parker, “Introduction”, in Four Plays for Ireland (Birmingham: Oberon Books,
1989), p. 9.
226 Epilogue
The idea of life as theatre defines the whole play, providing the structural
backbone for McCracken’s story. After he announces that man’s existence is a
stage play, he is free to perform the story of his life that thus fits perfectly
within the larger framework of history. Like a director, McCracken instructs the
players that act out his life and provides the audience with an explanation for
each scene. The scenes of open performance that follow, according to
McCracken, the “seven ages of Harry” (Northern Star, p. 27), are regularly
followed by a glimpse of Harry’s private life, his private conversations with
Mary, with himself and with the audience. If the “political tale” of the seven
ages of man takes place within historical time, following different dramatic
styles and moving forward in time, the private conversations between
McCracken and Mary are removed from the flow of history: “No future. No
past. Just you and me. This night, Mary. Out of time.” (Northern Star, p. 19)
The first age, the Age of Innocence, the Age of Childhood, that
describes the naïvete of the first instances of the revolutionary movement, is
followed by the melodrama of the second age, the Idealism of adolescence,
introduced by McCracken himself as yet another scene in his own history and
that of theatre in general.
“McCracken: Harry Steps In. A popular melodrama. Scene – the country of
Armagh. Nature has lavished its bounty. But civil strife rends asunder the
peaceful rustic Eden. Enter the noble and fearless young McCracken – uniting
the rabble in a common love for his shining youthful ardour. Music, please.”
(Northern Star, p. 29)
used to support and highlight McCracken’s role in the historical events of 1798.
They are recalled by McCracken’s mastery of theatre, and appear as ghostly
presences within the space of the cottage that continuously changes shape in the
imagination of the audience. The various spaces that played a determining role
in the 1798 uprising are brought to life, together with the historical characters
populating them, within the half-built cottage, symbolising the futility of the
historical construction, the “stillborn child” of their mind, as McCracken
concludes at the end of the play.
“McCracken: It’s a ghost town now and always will be, angry and implacable
ghosts. Me condemned to be one of their number. We never made a nation. Our
brainchild. Stillborn. Our own fault. We botched the birth. So what if the English
do bequeath us to one another some day? What then? When there’s nobody else
to blame except ourselves?” (Northern Star, p. 75)
There is a constant, close relationship between theatricality and history, the play
focusing “not so much on the historical McCracken, as on the images of
McCracken which have come down to us through history”9. The balance
between past and present is determined by McCracken’s position as a character
in the play. Although the play is his story, Harry is given the possibility to
direct his life and the people who participated in it historically. He raises from
the position of a character in the story to that of the story-teller and
manipulator, director of history, revealing to the audiences the manifold
character of historical meaning and the continuous need for re-interpretation
through re-reading, or, in this case, re-performing. McCracken’s existence in
the cottage is overseen by the Phantom Bride who becomes both the protector
of the space and that of the story, her actions of driving away the soldiers who
come to arrest McCracken ensuring the safety of the cottage and the completion
of the events put on stage by McCracken. The flashbacks provide a circular
structure that starts and ends within the same space, that of the cottage, and
with almost the same words, a direct address to the citizens of Belfast, but this
time from the gallows.
“McCracken: There is of course another walk through the town still to be taken.
From Castle Place to Cornmarket, and down to the Artillery Barracks in Ann
Street. And from thence back up Cornmarket to the scaffold. So what am I to say
to the swarm of faces?
9
Fintan O’Toole, in his review of the play’s premiere in Sunday Tribune, 2 December
1984. Also available in Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (eds.), Critical Moments:
Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), pp. 32-34.
228 Epilogue
Staged by Field Day and Tinderbox in the year of the Good Friday Agreement
and the Omagh bombing, and during the bi-centenary of the 1798 rebellion,
Northern Star was performed at Belfast’s historic First Presbyterian Church.
Such resonances gave the play, with its theme of history as potential liberator or
captor, an urgent topicality. This topicality and the playwright’s dramatic style
that intended to free the historical perception of the United Irishmen movement
from the continuous past of Irish history find their echo in the ideologies and
discussions that Field Day encouraged after they irrevocably moved from
theatre to the “higher pastures” of criticism and academic writing.
In 2005, at a conference entitled Revivals and Histories: Irish
Criticism – its Past and its Futures, focusing on issues of history, revival and
postcolonialism in Irish cultural studies, Irish critics and academics, concerned
with the development of criticism in contemporary Ireland, came together to
celebrate twenty years since the publication of Seamus Deane’s Celtic Revivals:
Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-198010 and Terence Brown’s Ireland: a
Social and Cultural History 1922-198511. Both works were considered to have
become cornerstones of Irish literary and cultural criticism, defining the “fiery”
decade of the 1980s.
As I was searching for ideas for a conclusion to this book, I was
intrigued to listen to Seamus Deane, Christopher Morash and Joe Cleary
discuss the 1980s as a defining moment in the initiation of a new type of
criticism, engaged with the theoretical ideas appearing on the wider
international stage but also concerned with the local characteristics that defined
the discourse of Irish studies. The majority of the essays presented at the
conference examined the main paradox of Irish criticism: notwithstanding the
extensive body of literary works written by Irish writers – Joyce, Beckett and
Yeats being just three names that kept popping up in the discussion – Irish
critics did not leave a remarkable impression on the texture of international
criticism. While the above mentioned writers entered the canon of English
literature, becoming compulsory readings in schools and universities, the work
of Irish critics remains interesting only for scholars involved in Irish studies.
Thus, yet another binary opposition appears in the morphology of Irish cultural
discourse: national versus trans-national criticism. This new binarism replaces
the established dual structures that defined colonialism and postcolonialism,
10
Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980
(London: Faber, 1985).
11
Terence Brown, Ireland: a Social and Cultural History 1922-1985 (London: Fontana,
1985), Second Edition.
The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On… 229
12
Conor Cruise O’Brien, Camus (London: Fontana, 1970).
230 Epilogue
opening, through their works, new paths in the definition of the identities of
emerging nations. Notwithstanding the fact that the present critical discourse
considers the works of these critics as a partial reinforcement of colonial
structures, reinstating a Britain – India or Christian – Muslim axis, the
innovative ways of re-thinking the position of the Other and of the nation
provided challenging, new possibilities for critics and writers living and creating
in postcolonial spaces. The main problem observed by the current critical
discourse in relation with the Christian – Muslim axis relates to the fact that the
majority of the postcolonial critics still discussed in their works the established
literary works of the colonial canon, instead of introducing local writers within
the morphology of international criticism. However, this relates to what Seamus
Deane termed the “Camus syndrome”, and also ties in with the cultural agenda
of the Field Day enterprise. The critical works of the postcolonial period were
so obsessed with revealing the grammar of the established structures and literary
works, that they ignored almost completely the local literary and cultural trends
developing within the emerging nations.
Against this background, the Field Day Theatre Company
attempted to reconcile the local with the international by introducing a new type
of critical language within the existing texture of the Irish cultural discourse. By
inviting critics like Edward Said or Fredric Jameson to write pamphlets for the
company, Field Day challenged existing critical structures and opened up new
fields in the discussion of identity, history and language. The creation of a visual
counterpart to the critical discourse provided an opportunity to open up towards
the audience the often-hermetic fabric of literary and cultural criticism. The
plays put on stage by the company responded to this requirement by discussing
the issues that represented the basis of the critical discourse – language, history,
myth, identity – and re-thinking them in a language that made them available for
any type of audience. The touring character of the company re-enforced this
tendency, the plays being performed in unconventional spaces – like school
sports halls or community halls – thus also reacting against the cultural status
quo enjoyed by theatre institutions in Belfast and Dublin.
The position of the Field Day Theatre Company within the
morphology of Irish culture was also complicated by the fact that it emerged
from Northern Ireland and had to react not only against the colonial ghost of
Britain – which, as a province, it was officially part of – but also against the
critical responses from Belfast and Dublin, which expressed an often open
mistrust of the company’s activities. The Field Day enterprise was, from the
very beginning, struggling to break free from the received moulds of tradition,
by re-thinking both the critical discourse of Irish studies and the traditional
theatrical representations of Irish issues. The literary pedestals and the
traditional tropes were displaced as metanarratives and were superseded by
The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On… 231
constructs that had at their basis new Irish writing and challenging new
representations of Irish culture and identity.
However, the innovative tendencies that the company wanted to
intertwine in the fabric of Irish culture slowly turned into obsessions and blurred
the theoretical perspectives of the company’s aesthetic agenda. The continuous
need to reconsider tradition, history and myth, to de-construct the stereotypical
binary oppositions that determined Northern Irish society and to attempt a new
definition of Irish identity, “free of Irishness” but securely Irish, changed utterly
the internal morphology of the company. Starting out as a cultural enterprise
that in moments of danger wanted to provide the Irish public with moments of
opening towards an international space, moved, by the end of the 1980s,
towards an almost exclusively critical, theoretical group, focusing on pamphlets
and on the completion of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. The
theatrical side of the company was pushed more and more into the background,
and this tendency also became visible within the texts of the plays put on stage
by the company after 1990, reflecting the reactions of the playwrights against
the shift within the company. Brian Friel’s decision to “rescue” his 1990 play
Dancing at Lughnasa from the Field Day “canon” brought about a rift that could
not be mended, notwithstanding Friel’s continuing contribution within the board
of directors. Friel’s choice, however, mirrored the position of the company at
the beginning of the 1990s. In 1980, Field Day started as both a theatre
company led by Brian Friel as the major playwright and Stephen Rea as the
main actor, and as a critical and theoretical enterprise determined by Seamus
Deane’s influential work. By 1990 and up to the present the critical and
academic voice of the company took over, determining the transformation of
Field Day from a theatre company into a critical label.
Twenty-seven years passed since the first production of the
Field Day Theatre Company, Brian Friel’s Translations, was set to change the
theatrical and cultural perceptions of representation. The continuous past, the
almost impossible attempt to create a past tense in the present of the
performance, determined the vision of the plays the company put on stage,
placing history and the past at the centre of the critical discourse. The binary
oppositions started to be discussed and de-constructed, if still not completely
annihilated. The central issues of language, identity and history were shaken
from the calcified frameworks that defined them, and challenged by new voices
representing a new critical language. With a combination of successes and
failures, Field Day prepared the discourse of Irish studies for a new millennium
that slowly starts seeing the dissolution of traditional binary structures and the
movement out of the continuous past.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Texts
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, Three Sisters, translated by Brian Friel (Dublin:
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Eagleton, Terry, Saint Oscar (Derry: Field Day, 1989)
Friel, Brian, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981)
—. The Communication Cord (London: Faber and Faber, 1983)
—. Making History (London: Faber and Faber, 1988)
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Fugard, Athol, Boesman and Lena, and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University
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Heaney, Seamus, The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
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Kilroy, Thomas, Double Cross (London: Faber and Faber, 1986)
—. The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre (London: Methuen, 1991)
Mahon, Derek, High Time (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1985)
McGuinness, Frank, Uncle Vanya, a Version after Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
(Library Special Collection, University College Dublin)
Parker, Stewart, Northern Star, Heavenly Bodies, Pentecost: Three Plays for
Ireland (London: Oberon Books, 1989)
Paulin, Tom, The Riot Act (London: Faber and Faber, 1985)
Rudkin, David, The Saxon Shore (London: Methuen, 1986)
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Beckerman, Bernard, Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience and Act
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Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1957)
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—. “Caliban Speaks to Prospero: Cultural Identity and the Crisis of
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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
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*Note: Interviews with Brian Friel and his reviews of plays put on stage by the
Field Day Theatre Company can also be found in the collection of essays and
interviews: Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1999, Edited by
Christopher Murray, (London: Faber, 1999).
FIELD DAY PRODUCTIONS
1980-1998
1980 – Brian Friel, Translations, directed by Art O’Briain
1983 – Athol Fugard, Boesman and Lena, directed by Clare Davidson; Fugard’s
play was preferred to the initially commissioned play, David Rudkin’s The
Saxon Shore
1984 – Field Day’s double bill: Tom Paulin, The Riot Act, directed by Stephen
Rea and Derek Mahon, High Time, directed by Emil Wolk and Mark Long
1992 – Play reading of David Rudkin’s radio play, Cries from Casement as His
Bones are Brought to Dublin, directed by Judy Friel