Sive

John B. Keane

Money is the best friend a man ever had.

Mike Glavin

SOME KEY MOMENTS

Page numbers refer to the Mercier edition (2009). Menas contempt for education (p.11). Mena regards education as a waste of time and thinks Sive should be out working for a farmer in order to bring in money. Establishes an atmosphere of harshness, poverty emphasis on survival. 2. Nanna taunts Mena with her childlessness (p.14). Nanna has a vicious tongue. She shows little regard for Menas feelings on this delicate issue and regards her inability to have a child as a failing rather than a misfortune. Such harshness establishes an atmosphere of unpleasantness from the outset, one from which we would like to see Sive escape.
1. 3.

We learn that Sive is illegitimate (the status of illegitimacy ceased to have any legal force in 1987 as a result of legislation put forward by Mary Robinson and
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Michael D. Higgins) and that her mother is dead with shame out of her the most of twenty years (p.16). 4. Sen Dota, a man as old as the hills wants to marry Sive. He has the grass of twenty cows, fat cattle and money. Again money and relationships are linked in the minds of the characters (p.17). He is willing to pay 200 to obtain Sive as well as a fee of 100 to Thomaseen Sen Rua, the matchmaker. Thomaseen is prepared to make trouble over Sives illegitimacy and to have Nanna locked away in the county home if she doesnt agree. 5. Mike vows that Sive will never marry that old corpse of a man, Sean Dota (p. 25). 6. Liam Scuab declares his love for Sive (p.28). We learn that he is Sives first cousin once removed. His cousin, Sives father, died in an accident in England while he was trying to set up a home for Sives mother. Because he brought shame on the family, no member of Liams family is welcome in Mikes house. 7. Thomaseen and Sean Dota (aged anywhere between 55 and 70) visit Sives house. The snatch of poetry that Thomaseen recites reveals a cynical view of love promises are made to be broken. An element of black humour is introduced with Sean Dotas recitation as it depicts a man with absolutely no understanding of poetry or romance. Mena and Thomaseen conspire to have Sive leave the house with Sean Dota. 8. Thomaseen is contemptuous of the very notion of love: Love! In the name of God, what do the likes of us know about love? He knows that Mike and Menas relationship is devoid of affection and cynically states that Mike would far prefer a plate of meat and cabbage than whisper his fondness for [Mena] (p. 37). He brings things down to basics: What I say is what business have the likes of us with love? It is enough to have to find the bite to eat. He claims his own father committed suicide out of spite to prevent him from marrying. Now, with the 100 fee, he has a chance of settling down with a widow beyond the village. 9. Sive returns in a state of alarm. Sean Dota has attempted to molest her in some way but she managed to evade him. 10. Pats Bococh and his son, Carthalawn, two tinkers, arrive. They say that the whole neighbourhood is aware of the impending match between Sean Dota and Sive. 11. Thomaseen and Mena bully Nanna, threatening her with the county home. Nanna retaliates by taunting Mena again with her childlessness. 12. Mena tries to persuade Sive that marriage to Sean Dota would be beneficial. She emphasises the money, the creamery cheques and the fine clothes. She paints a picture of Sive driving to church in a car while her peers have to make do with a donkey and cart. You will have no enemy when you have the name of money. She continues by telling Sive about her illegitimacy. Her account differs from Liams in that she says no one knew who her father was and that he just disappeared. She delivers the killer blow when she tells Sive to her face that: You are a bye-child, a common bye-child - a bastard. She tells her in no uncertain terms that her days at school are now over and that she must look to Sean Dota for her future (p.59). 13. Liam pleads with Mike and Mena not to force Sive to marry Sean Dota, that rotting old man with his gloating eyes and trembling hands. He has overheard

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him talk to himself about Sive in a way that cannot be repeated. He leaves when Mena threatens him with a knife (p.64). 14. Sive asks Mena if Liam had been in the house she thought she heard his voice. Mena lies and says that he just called to wish her well in her marriage and that he was emigrating to a foreign place. 15. Nanna confronts Mike and tells him that Sive is for sale like an animal but Mike is unrepentant. 16. Pats Bocock, Carthalawn and Liam have devised a plan: Sive is to steal away the night before her wedding and marry Liam. Pats gives a note to Nanna to pass on to Sive. Mike arrives and is suspicious. Nanna tells Mike that the note is simply a goodbye note and urges Mike to give it to Sive but makes him promise not to read it. Thomaseen arrives, spots the letter and insists that Mike read it. When he discovers the plan he burns the letter. 17. Mike, Thomaseen and Sean Dota are having a drink. Pats Bococh and Carhalawn arrive to sing a song in honour of the wedding as if unaware of Liams plan to have Sive escape. Pats predicts a change in life in country places: he talks about social mobility and the rise of the status of the farmer. 18. Mena discovers Sive has disappeared from her room, barefoot and without even a coat. She suspects Pats knew something about this but he denies this. Seconds later, Liam enters carrying Sives body in his arms she drowned in a boghole. He accuses Mena of being indirectly responsible for her death. As Liam and Mike leave to fetch a priest, Pats and Carthalawn sing a lament that accuses Mike and Mena: They drowned lovely Sivethey murdered lovely Sive. Theme and Issues Escape Underpinning the entire play is the notion of money as a means of escape. Sive and her family exist not far above the poverty line so the money that marriage to a relatively wealthy man such as Sean Dota would provide could transform everyones lives. However, this is not the escape that Sives mother had planned for her, nor is it the one that Sive would choose for herself. Sives mother made Mike promise that he would always stand by her and this included seeing her through school. She is a full-time student in secondary school with the nuns and is relying on a good education to help her make her way in life. Instead of allowing her to complete her schooling and find a career, what Mena and Mike are proposing is effectively that she sell herself to a man who may be as old as seventy, an act little short of a form of servitude or prostitution. Marriage to the kindly, eloquent Liam Scuab would be another way of escape but Mike will not countenance this for family reasons: Sives father, who has brought shame on the family, was Liams cousin. Mena and Thomaseen allow money to be the deciding factor in choosing a partner for Sive, and Sean Dota is too good an opportunity for them to let slip by as both stand to gain a lot of money. Menas

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money-grabbing nature and meanness can be seen in the final pages of the play. Sean Dota gives Mena 50 to spend on clothes for Sive but Thomaseen has no doubt that she will keep 40 for herself. Mena points out to Sive that she and her sisters had a hard upbringing (p.59). All she ever wanted was to escape from home, to leave the misery of our own house behind us, to make a home with a man, any man that would show four walls to us. As a result, she ended up with Mike in a childless marriage living on a few boggy acres with four cows; this serves as a warning to Sive that she should seize chances when they arise, as they may not present themselves again. The ultimate form of escape occurs in the final episode of the play. Sive steals out of the house and, rather than surrender herself to Sean Dota, commits suicide by throwing herself into a bog hole.

Money/Love The issue of money is central to Sive and it seems to have replaced love in the lives of most of the characters. In ways, this is understandable as they live just above the poverty line in conditions that were difficult even for the time the play was written but now seem intolerable. They have no running water, no electricity and have only four cows and a few acres of bog to provide a living. However, there is an obsession with money that seems unnatural to the point where it is possible to believe that no matter how much money Mena had, she would always want more. When Mike returns from the fair, Menas first question is not about whom he met or what he saw but how much money he made. He shares her regard for money and delights in the fact that the shopkeepers are now forced to pay high prices for pigs and calves: Money is the best friend a man ever had. Although Mike promised his sister that he would stand by Sive and care for her he is a weak man and is quickly persuaded by the bullying Mena and the lure of money to break that promise. Love is an alien concept to most of the characters in the play. When Mena tries to persuade Sive to consider marriage to Sean Dota, at no stage does she mention emotions, feelings or personality. What is uppermost in her mind is creamery cheques, cars and cash. Its as if love is a luxury that the poor cannot afford. Thomaseen puts it concisely: What I say is what business have the likes of us with love? It is enough to have to find the bite to eat. Surviving comes first; love comes a very poor second.

Cultural Context

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Poverty Poverty is established from the outset. The stage directions indicate a poorly furnished kitchen, without running water or electricity. Money is so tight that even tea and sugar are scarce commodities, not to be squandered unnecessarily. Mena was raised in a cabin where they used jam pots when drinking tea because they could not afford cups. Money is an obsession with most of the characters and happiness is conceived only in financial terms. The lure of money is what causes Mike to break his commitment to Sive. View of women and marriage Marriage is reduced to a bargain. The words bargain, fortune, money and reward are all automatically associated with marriage in the minds of most of the characters. At one stage Thomaseen uses an image of a halter going around Sives neck, suggesting that he sees marriage as the controlling of a woman in the same way one would control a horse. Later, he uses the phrase catching hoult of a woman until she is winded, a reference to the breaking of a horse. For him, women need to be broken as one would break a wild horse.

Place of women Mena has been scarred by her poverty-stricken upbringing. She explains to Sive that marriage can be an escape from poverty, a means of improving ones position in life. She is bitter that she did not make a better match and uses her own predicament to serve as a warning to Sive. Although she has a stronger personality than her husband and taunts him for his timidity, her notion of the role of women is that they are dependent on men and should use men as means to improve their lot. Mena regrets her marriage all she has to show for it is four cows on the side of a mountain and a few acres of bog. Matchmaking was an important feature of life in parts of rural Ireland until the late 1960s. Rural isolation, lack of mobility and poverty meant that opportunities for meeting potential partners were limited. Even if you did manage to meet a suitable partner, the fact that most people relied on a farm for an income meant that sons had to wait until their parents had died before they could inherit the farm and consider marrying. Alternatively, a brides dowry would provide the cash to enable the farm to be signed over to the son but usually on condition that the parents be allowed to remain on until death. As a result, men were often in their forties before they married. However, as marrying a woman in her forties was not an option if a man wanted to start a family the practice developed of older men seeking out young girls who were hoping to improve their economic lot. Farm holdings in many parts of the west and south-west were small holdings of twenty and thirty acres were not unusual. Mikes few acres and four cows would have placed at the bottom of the social ladder. Sons who were not in line to inherit either emigrated, hoped to find a rich widow or, most likely, lived out their lives as lonely bachelors in poor conditions. As a result people married late in life or not at all. In 1926, 72% of Irish men between the ages of 25 and 34 were unmarried as were 53% of women. According to the 1936 census, 25% of Irish

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men were single. The Irish bachelor became a stock figure in the public imagination: sexually repressed, lonely and too fond of alcohol. J.B. Keane often spoke on radio and television of Dan Paddy Andy, the famous matchmaker of Lyrecrompane, near Listowel, credited with making 399 matches. He died in 1966 but his name lives on in an annual festival held near Listowel in August. In rural communities, the matchmaker was a sort of broker, an entrepreneurial type who made it his business to know which girls were available for marriage within a radius of twenty or thirty miles and how much money their family could offer by way of dowry. He was a sort of social worker, encouraging shy men to consider marriage, bringing couples together, thereby helping to keep the community alive. Thomaseen is such a broker, but a particularly unscrupulous one. Superstition Cars are a rarity the locals regarded the doctors car as something supernatural. Superstition still plays a part in their daily lives: there is mention of the pca. The puca is a force of evil to be reckoned with for most people but not Sive. Mixture of religion and superstition - Mike believes that two people are needed to fetch the priest in order to ward off bad luck. Socially conservative A conservative society the stigma of Sives illegitimacy. Ireland in the 1950s was a deeply conservative country, overwhelmingly Catholic and with Sunday Mass attendance rates of almost 100%. There was an illegitimacy rate of about 4% in the late 1940s - today over 40% of births to first-time mothers occur outside marriage. However, it was also a deeply hypocritical society. Despite the core Christian belief that one should love ones neighbour as oneself, unmarried girls who became pregnant were dealt with very harshly: pregnancy outside marriage was not only sinful in a religious sense but unacceptable in a social sense. Girls who were unfortunate enough to become pregnant were frequently abandoned by the babys father and even their own family. They were generally faced with leaving for England where they might procure an abortion. Most had the baby and then handed her over for adoption. The lucky few started a new life in a place where they were unknown. If they chose to stay in Ireland, many ended up working in institutions such as the Magdalen laundries which sheltered girls in return for long hours of labour in very harsh conditions. In nearly every case, girls were forced to hand the baby over for adoption. A recent article in The Sunday Business Post by Mike Milotte (2 September 2012) revealed that in the quarter century after World War II, more than 2,000 illegitimate Irish babies and toddlers were exported to America in a highly secretive adoption scheme. In many cases, babies were given to couples who had been rejected as unsuitable by the vetting procedures in place in the US. One young mother, Patricia Eyers, was forced to sign a document stating that she agreed to relinquish full claim for ever to her baby and she agreed to surrender

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the child to the head nun of the home where she lived. She further promised that she would never make any claim to the said child. The circumstances of Sives birth are slightly different: her father did not abandon her mother but was in the process of making a home for Sive and her mother in England when he was killed in an accident. One of the interesting aspects of the Cultural Context is how twisted the values of Ireland of the 1950s are. Thomaseen considers Sives birth to be shameful and is prepared to use it as leverage in negotiations in the match - yet he sees nothing wrong in reducing marriage to the level of a bargain at a fair. He sees nothing wrong in coercing an eighteen-year-old girl into marriage with a rotting old man who may be forty of fifty years her senior. In the final lines of the play, Mike, having driven Sive to suicide, seems more concerned that she be buried in a proper graveyard (traditionally suicides were buried in unconsecrated ground) than with grieving or acknowledging his part in her death. To have a family member who was not buried in a proper graveyard would bring shame on the family; to have a family member married to Sean Dota would bring wealth.

Margaret Dillon as Sive and Brian Brennan as Liam Scuab in the first production of the play in 1959.

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Fintan OToole wrote in the Irish Times of 23 October 2012: Forty years ago in Ireland, about the worst thing that could happen to a family was that one of its unmarried daughters became pregnant. It was a hideous disgrace for the girl herself and for her parents. And this shame was enormously effective in making people feel powerless. Under the spell of shame, people did things we now regard as almost inexplicable. They savaged themselves. Fathers drove the daughters they had loved to mother-and-baby homes, dropped them at the gate and told them never to contact home again. Healthy young women gave birth to babies, bonded with them and then signed away all rights to contact with those babies when, as was almost always the case, they were sent for adoption. People put up with pain that wrecked their lives. Why? Because they were convinced that they deserved it. It was the familys fault that it had raised a hussy. It was the girls fault that she had not guarded her virginity. This was the power of malignant shame the power to make people feel powerless. And then, 40 years ago, a small group of young single mothers decided they were, in fact, not ashamed of themselves. Maura Richards, Colette ONeill, Aileen Mulhern, Evelyn Forde, Aileen Kelly, Nuala Feric, Mary Liddy, Mary Kerrigan, Annette Hunter Evans and others came out of the shadows, presented themselves to television and newspapers, held public meetings and founded Cherish (now called One Family). Over the next decade, this simple act of being visible and unashamed revolutionised public attitudes to children born out of wedlock. The vile concept of illegitimacy was formally banished (though it still lurks in odd corners of the law one of the most important reasons to support the childrens rights referendum). Women suddenly realised that they had the power of choice after all including the power to keep their babies. Their parents realised that they didnt have to destroy their own families by cutting off their daughters and ignoring their bastard grandchildren. Family life in Ireland was immensely enriched by the simple realisation that no one should ever be ashamed of a child.

Small community everyone knows everyones business. People are constantly seen entering and leaving neighbours houses. There is a small pool of potential partners and intermarriage is common. Liam and Sive are first cousins once removed.

Literary Genre

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Sive is a play by the Kerry-born playwright, John B. Keane. Written in 1959, the play was submitted to the Abbey Theatre but was rejected. When interviewed in his later years, Keane sometimes indicated that he suspected that the play had been rejected without even being read he claimed that a small piece of paper he had placed between pages towards the end of the manuscript was undisturbed. However, other accounts seem to suggest that was merely a yarn that Keane liked to spin and that the play had indeed been read, and disliked, by people in the Abbey. On the recommendation of Micheal O hAodha, head of drama in Radio Eireann (which had also rejected the play), the Listowel amateur drama group decided to mount a production in a local festival in 1959 where it received an ecstatic reception. When it won Best Play at the all-Ireland Drama Festival, the Abbey Theatre invited the Listowel players to perform it in the national theatre for one week in May 1959. It was not performed again at the Abbey until 1985. In terms of genre, Sive is a mixture of social realism, folk drama and some elements of melodrama. In a realistic and convincing way, it explores the poverty of a family in the south-west of Ireland in the late 1950s and their attempts to escape from it by arranging a marriage between an eighteen-year-old girl and a wealthy rotting old man. The details of their poverty are vividly conveyed and Menas pragmatic attitude to love and life is convincingly rendered. Although the storyline has an element of romance, the main focus is on the predicament of the young girl and through this Keane explores the corrosive effect poverty has on people and their principles. The stage setting of the play is conventional all the action takes place in the Glavins small cottage which the author intended to be rendered as realistically as possible. The language is, for the most part, realistic with occasional heightened passages of lyricism. In moments of crisis, characters speak in rich images and are gifted with unusual eloquence. While the overall story is a convincing one, certain details of the play are open to the accusation of being melodramatic: the manner in which the final catastrophe hinges on an undelivered letter is conventional melodrama; indeed, most of the details concerning the letter written to Sive by Liam are poorly worked out. Sives suicide also could be criticised for seeming slightly forced and disproportionate - another feature of melodrama. Where Sive is unconventional is in the characters of Pats Bacach and Carthalawn, two tinkers. The pair act, to an extent, as a kind of Greek chorus: their songs and music comment on the action; they have an element of the seer about them as they seem aware of all that is going on in the locality; they possess a natural dignity that is lacking in most of the other characters; their values, the positive values of charity, respect and tolerance, stand in stark contrast to those of Mena, Mike and Thomaseen Sean Rua. Sive owes its huge success over the years to a number of factors. Firstly, it explores in a dramatic way social issues that were very topical at the time it was written and that are still accessible to modern audiences: rural isolation, loneliness and loveless marriages. Prior to Sive, it is fair to say that many plays set in rural Ireland tended to romanticise life on the land; the harsh realities that Keane saw around him in Listowel were rarely

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depicted on stage. Secondly, the characters are particularly well drawn: the sharp contrast between the innocence of Sive and the lecherous Sean Dota is guaranteed to work well on stage; Menas cynical view of life and her obvious disdain for Nanna is at the root of some lively and moving dialogue; Menas constant haranguing of her husband is reminiscent of the worst excesses of Lady Macbeth. Finally, the plot contains the necessary element of suspense: how will Sive manage to avoid the clutches of Sean Dota and find happiness with Liam Scuab?

SAMPLE ANSWER What do you understand by the term genre? Why is it that two texts from different genres can achieve very different artistic effects and affect their audience differently? In this essay, I will begin by offering a brief definition and explanation of the term 'genre'. Then I will discuss how two genres, namely drama and the novel, present audiences with two radically different kinds of experience. Finally, I will suggest that drama may well be a superior genre to the novel. In order to illustrate in practical terms how different genres can affect audiences differently, I will refer in my answer to Sive by J.B. Keane and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The word 'genre' comes to us from the French: it means simply 'type' or 'kind'. Just as television programmes can be broken down into several distinct types, such as documentaries, sitcoms, and news, so too can literature be sub-divided into its various categories or genres. These include novels, poetry, drama, and essays. The novel and the play are just two of the many distinct art forms, or genres, that literature can offer. The two texts I am discussing are, respectively, a play and a novel. They could further be described as romances, though to different degrees, with sharp and bitter twists. However, although the play and the novel are both literary forms, they operate in very different ways. One fundamental difference between the novel and the play is this: the novel is flexible in the demands it places on time and space; for the play, the elements of time and space are crucial. A book may be stored on a shelf or used to jam open a window. The experience that is The Great Gatsby may, literally, lie hidden beneath a maths textbook at the bottom of a locker for ten months or ten years, awaiting a reader. When a reader takes a novel from the shelf, he is picking up a physical object whose physical and artistic boundaries are fixed. Its length can be determined immediately: if deemed too long, or if the print is too small, it can be immediately replaced. If it is interesting enough, it can be read on the DART, in bed, in the dentist's waiting room, on

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the beach, even, conceivably, in the toilet, according to the reader's whim. Because it is a physical object, it can be put down momentarily while one goes to answer the phone; it can be easily picked up again upon returning from a trip to the supermarket. One can leave a book aside for two or three days and resume reading where one left off without inflicting too much damage on the aesthetic experience of reading. We seem to be able to hold the separate segments of each reading session in our minds and then stitch them all together without harming the artistic fabric of the book. Even though it might take five or six weeks to finish a novel, we will later recall the irregularly spaced reading sessions as an unbroken, seamless continuum. Unlike productions of a play, which can vary in quality, there are no variations in the quality of the text of a novel. The version of The Great Gatsby that I read was identical to that read by everyone else in my class. It was identical to that read by all the other Leaving Cert students who studied the novel this year. Furthermore, it is identical to every version of the novel that has ever been published and that ever will be published from now until the end of time. Because the only ingredients the reader deals with are the words on the page, which never change, the experience available to any reader will always be essentially the same no matter how many times he re-reads the novel. Tom and Daisy will always be careless, expecting others to clean up their mess; Nick will always feel tainted by his contact with the so-called sophisticates of the east coast; Gatsby will always be standing, late at night, reaching out to the green light on Daisys dock. The reason for the novel's fixed nature, of course, is that the main factors in the experience never change. There is the book and there is the reader: reading is essentially a solitary activity. If I were to read The Great Gatsby once a year every year until I die, I might sometimes notice some new detail that had previously escaped me, but the text of the novel has not changed I have. This brings us to one of the problems of the novel: because it is frozen in time, it can eventually become difficult, or impossible, to read. Modern readers in 2012 may struggle with the social customs, the language or the cultural references. Prohibition and the Jazz Age are as remote as the Bronze Age to most teenagers and so there is a bit of work to be done before it makes sense. If I want to understand this novel, then I have to do the work because I need to understand the design of the novel. A play, on the other hand, is designed to be constantly re-designed. Each time a director decides to put on Sive, he brings his own personal interpretation to the play. In two hundred years time, a director might decide to relocate the play in a different country or to perform it in modern dress, as directors frequently do with Shakespeare. One director might decide to emphasise the tragic element of the play: a young girl is sold off to an older man; another director might choose to stress the grinding poverty and Menas realistic approach to life. Sometimes, a production of a play is designed to play to the strengths of two or three of the principal actors; occasionally, a strong actor in a minor part can alter profoundly how a play is interpreted. The text of the play may not change, but all its other ingredients do: actors, director, venue and audience.

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This brings us to the crucial difference between these two genres: theatre is collaborative; reading is autonomous. A programme from any production, amateur or professional, of Sive illustrates the collaborative nature of theatre perfectly. In all, the programme might list anything from twenty to ninety people who combined to bring the play to the stage. In addition, one must also remember the front-of-house people, the management company and, not least, the audience. In a sense, a production of a play has possibly hundreds of authors; a book has one author. In addition, a book has, at each reading, an audience of one; a play, at each performance, can have an audience of thousands, some of them attentive, some bored, some with weak bladders, some unable to switch off mobile phones, some with a talent for laughing maniacally at inappropriate moments. Where the reader is independent, autonomous, free to decide when to lay the book aside and switch off the bedside light, the audience member, on the other hand, surrenders himself to outside agencies. He has entered a public space. He must arrive at a particular time and sit in a particular seat. He is anxious to know if there is an interval, and if there is, will he manage to get a drink at what is sure to be an over-crowded bar. He may not, however pressing the need to go to the bathroom, call out to the actors to 'just hold it there for a minute'. He is a party to an unwritten contract that he will suspend not only his disbelief, but also any inclination to indulge in yawning, belching, rustling of crisps' packets, or any of the other many anti-social activities that when practised in the privacy of one's home may be considered excusable, or even faintly charming, but which are merely annoying in public. A further difference between the two genres concerns the 'individuality' of the experience of theatre. Although I may have seen the play in the company of perhaps eight hundred people, it is probably not much of an exaggeration to say that no two of us saw exactly the same play. In a theatre, especially a Victorian one like The Gaiety, one's view of the stage, and therefore one's understanding and enjoyment of the play, can vary widely depending on where one is sitting. The performance I saw was excellent, but for all I know, performances on subsequent nights may have had lacked a little in sparkle, depending on the mood or health of any one of the actors; perhaps a mobile phone ringing during an important speech destroyed the atmosphere; a noisy school audience may have destroyed the performance altogether. The final, and perhaps most crucial, difference between the novel and the play is this: the text of a novel is the finished product; the text of a play is still only a rough draft. The text of the play allows for an infinite number of possibilities of interpretation: each production is the enactment of just one of those possibilities. A memorable production of Sive that I saw owed much of its impact not just to the skills of the actor playing Sean Dota but also to his physical appearance: he was extremely overweight, balding and appeared constantly short of breath. His laugh was lecherous in the extreme and the overall effect when he leered at Sive was stomach-churning. The thought that he might get his hands on the innocent Sive brought home the inhumanity of Mena and Mikes plan more effectively than ten pages of authorial comment. I may well have a different opinion of Gatsby or Daisy from that formed by my future grandchildren, but we are still reacting to the same text, the same set of words, and any differences of opinion are just that - differences of opinion. However, those same grandchildren will, I hope, witness

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performances of Sive for the centenary in 2059, the production details of which are beyond my, or anyone else's, imaginings. When theatre people claim, as they frequently do, a special place for theatre in the arts, they invariably invoke such vague notions as 'the chemistry between actor and audience' and 'the special magic of live performance'. While it is easy to dismiss such talk as pretentious 'luvvieness', anyone who has witnessed an electrifying stage performance will find it hard to disagree with the suggestion that live theatre, at its best, can raise the hairs on the back of the neck more effectively and more memorably than a novel can. Perhaps its special appeal is that, unlike the novel whose sameness is a function of its form, theatre depends on the combination of so many factors that not only are no two productions identical, no two performances of the same production are identical. Theatre is fleeting, evanescent. More than fiction, it accomplishes what Patrick Kavanagh says is the function of all art: To snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

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LITERARY GENRE No two texts are exactly the same in the manner in which they tell their stories. (a) Compare two of the texts you have studied in your comparative course in the light of the above statement. Support the comparisons you make by reference to the texts. (40) (b) Write a short comparative commentary on a third text from your comparative study in the light of your discussion in part (a) above. (30)

(a) The texts I will refer to in this section are the film Casablanca by Michael Curtiz and Sive by J.B. Keane. While these two texts could be described as stories of thwarted love, they differ enormously in tone and setting. As they also belong to different genres, it is immediately apparent that they tell their respective stories in different ways. Sive is an late 1950s Irish play, whereas Casablanca is an early 1940s Hollywood film. At the most basic level, the main difference is that one tells its story through the medium of film, the other by means of the stage. This fundamental difference accounts for further distinctions that I will explore in this essay. The first of these distinctions is that film is a form of entertainment for the masses whereas theatre has become a slightly elitist art form: plays expect more work of the audience. Theatre cannot compete with cinema in terms of financial resources, special effects or the glamour of its stars and requires effort on the part of the audience that cinema no longer necessarily requires. If you want to see Sive, you simply have to go to the theatre. The practicalities involved are often a deterrent: you must check that tickets are available for a night when youre available, perhaps find a babysitter, get into town, park the car or check the times of the DART. An entire night is required to see a play and by the time everything is totted up you have discovered that theatre-going has become an expensive proposition. By contrast, cinema is easy: not only are films screened several times per day in umpteen cinemas (72 screenings in Dublin cinemas of the James Bond film, Skyfall, on one day in November 2012), you can, if you wish, bring the film home with you on DVD or even download it on Netflix. The DVD of Casablanca costs about 10 (and you have it for ever), takes precisely 98 minutes to watch and it contains only four main characters. The story is uncluttered and the plot hinges on one issue: gaining possession of the precious letters of transit. From the moment Ilsa Lund and Victor Laszlo arrive in Ricks Caf Amricain, it is clear that two of the main characters will be leaving Casablanca on a plane. Wondering which two it will be keeps the audience in suspense.

Conall Hamill

St Andrew's College

14

A second example of how the play is more challenging than the film can be seen in the areas of language and cultural references. Although Sive is set in the south-west of Ireland at the end of the 1950s, in many ways it is more foreign to us than the more distant world of Casablanca. Ireland has changed enormously since the play was written and many customs, phrases and terms that were once understood by all now require explanation. For example, at the very start of the play there is some tension between Mena and Nanna over the fact that Nanna smokes her pipe indoors pipe-smoking grannies are thin on the ground nowadays. The very practice of matchmaking, upon which the action hinges, has disappeared from Ireland altogether. The status of illegitimacy, the shame that hangs over Sive, ceased to have any validity in Irish law in 1987. The characters use a language heavily influenced by Irish, a feature which is less common today than in the 1950s: doodeen (a pipe), amadawn (a fool), mar dhea (supposedly). There are references to the pca and other superstitions. Cars were so exotic that the locals thought the headlights were the eyes of the devil. Pats Bacach and Carthalawn especially seem to belong to a long-passed era: few travellers nowadays expect to be extended hospitality in the way they do. The notion of a matchmaker being able to force a plan such as Thomaseens on Mike and Mena seems beyond belief. By contrast, once the surface details of the exodus from war-torn Europe are explained, there is little in Casablanca that is difficult to grasp. The film has dialogue that everyone can understand and the best lines are even quoted by people who have never seen the film: Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks in to mine; Heres looking at you, kid; Well always have Paris; Round up the usual suspects; Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Bizarrely, the most quoted of all is a line that doesnt actually appear in the film: Play it again, Sam. These famous lines from the film bring me to another important difference between the play and the film as genres: plays have actors; films have stars. Studios will pay eyewateringly large sums of money in order to secure the services of particular actors (in 1978 Marlon Brando received a fee of $4 million dollars plus a percentage of profits a total of $16 million - for his ten minutes in Superman). It is probably fair to say that a large measure of the cult status attaching to Casablanca is due to the charisma of its main stars, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. For anyone who has seen the film, Rick Blaine is Humphrey Bogart and vice versa. To put it crudely, a big difference between the two genres is that Sive is a vehicle for J.B. Keanes ideas on poverty and loveless marriages; Casablanca is a vehicle for Bogart and Bergman. Bogarts tough-exteriorconcealing-a-heart-of-gold image was perfect for this film and came to be his trademark; Bergmans foreign intonation and wholesome looks were her passport to success. How different would Heres looking at you, kid sound if the line had been spoken by the other actor who, according to Hollywood folklore, was under consideration for the part Ronald Reagan? There is no film version of Sive but another play by J.B. Keane, The Field, was filmed in 1990 by Jim Sheridan. The main character, Bull McCabe, was played by Richard Harris, an Irish actor who had enjoyed considerable success in Hollywood. As a result, when most people think of Bull McCabe nowadays, they think not of the hundreds of stage actors who have played him down through the years but of Harris. What this shows is that that people respond to screen actors more readily than

Conall Hamill

St Andrew's College

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stage actors and this gives film as a genre more mass-appeal than a play. When a new film is released, we tend to ask Whos in it? rather than Who wrote the screenplay? or What are the characters like? Ireland has the highest rate of cinema attendance per capita in the world, according to The Economist magazine. According to an article on the BBC website entitled The Evolution of Irish Cinema, Thirty-eight percent of residents aged 15 to 35 reported going to the movies at least once a month in 2010, and the year prior saw a total of 28.8 million visits to the movies, impressive for a population of just 4.5 million . Theatre, on the other hand, is very much a middle-class, a middle-aged and, increasingly, a female pursuit. It is no longer mass entertainment as it was in Shakespeares day and has become the preserve of the intellectual. Many serious writers turn up their nose at writing for the screen and prefer to tackle challenging material in plays that, by and large, no film studio would dare to touch for financial reasons. In films there is so much money at stake that studios cant afford to let them fail. Studio bosses go out of their way to make several endings to mainstream productions and try them all on test audiences before deciding which one appeals to the highest number of people. Yet another difference between the play and the film concerns the matter of technique. It may seem blindingly obvious to say that a film is made using cameras while a play is on stage, but it is also slightly misleading. Film uses directors, actors, light, shadow, music to put a spin on a storyline; a play can use all of these too. The one thing a film uses that a play does not is a screen. Constantly moving camera angles and editing bring to the giant screen images that engross the audience. In Casablanca, when Rick is telling Ilsa how he felt when she dumped him in Paris, his desire for revenge and her fragility are conveyed in seconds by a full screen close-up of Bergman. One sees the tears welling up in her eyes and then a tear rolls down her cheek. In a cinema, on a screen fifty feet high, the effect could be heart-rending. Such an effect is not possible on stage so dramatists tend to use words to do the work that is being done so effectively by a camera. The range of resources available to a film director is considerable and this is very evident when selecting actors. In Casablanca, the viewer is nudged towards a certain view of particular characters by such elementary factors as casting. When one considers the choice of the German-born, and exceedingly thin-lipped, Conrad Veidt to play the role of Major Strasser, it is hard to believe this choice was not influenced by the directors desire to make the German officer seem as menacing as possible. In most productions of plays, directors are limited by financial restraints as well as by the basic question of availability. When the Listowel local drama group or the Abbey decides to mount a production of Sive they have to make do with whoever happens to be around. While Nathalie Portman might be your first choice to portray the frailty and innocence of Sive, she probably wont return your calls. In Listowel, you are probably going to make do with the girl from the local Spar whos going out with the guy whos building the set for you; in the Abbey, you make do with a young and relatively inexperienced actress whos starting out in her career.

Conall Hamill

St Andrew's College

16

A striking difference between the ways the two texts tell their stories can also be seen by looking at the films elaborate and constant use of music, something that is obviously not available to a dramatist. Much of the appeal of a film is often bound up with its soundtrack; few dramatists have the luxury of a full orchestra every night. So potent is the effect of music and song in a film that the marketing people now demand that film releases be closely followed by the CD release of the films soundtrack. The original score for Casablanca was composed by Max Steiner but he also incorporated a number of existing songs. The music at different moments creates a certain atmosphere or conveys information, as in the use of La Marseillaise in the opening shots or its use in the scene in Ricks Caf where the French drown out the Germans as they sing Die Wacht am Rhein. It is beyond doubt that a significant portion of the magic in Casablanca is due to the song As Time Goes By which, as sung by Sam (Dooley Wilson), adds a sad, wistful feel to the story. It is a song about the triumph of love, written in 1931 by Herman Hupfeld. The lyrics suggest that no matter what the future brings, despite future inventions and advances in science, lovers will always find a way to express their love. Not only does the song appear at a crucial moment in the story, Ilsas appearance in Ricks caf, but its melody is used as a motif, as is La Marseillaise, throughout the film and subliminally affects the audience. Sive uses music in a much less elaborate, but no less effective, way: Carthalawn has only one melody and accompanies himself with only a bodhran; Pats drums the floor with his blackthorn stick; the song is more of an incantation or charm, like the Witches incantations in Macbeth. It can bless, curse or lament, as the occasion demands, or it can simply relate the news, as when Carthalawn sings about the man from Abbeyfeale who told him the old man have the money for the child. The effect of the bodhran, the blackthorn stick and the solo voice can be very powerful. They pause the action momentarily, create a different atmosphere and allow the audience a few minutes to reflect. The music in the play has a primeval quality to it that is entirely in keeping with the primitive nature of the lives of the characters. The final difference between these two genres arises from the fact that films have massive financial resources while plays usually operate on shoestring budgets. According to imdb.com, the Bible of film buffs, Casablanca had one director, seven assistant directors, six writers, well over one hundred actors, an unknown number of extras and over fifty assorted technical experts, not to mention the financial input from Warner Bros.: $878,000, to be exact. Because of these resources, directors can go to extraordinary lengths to get the right effect. Most people who have read about Casablanca know that in the final scene Curtiz used a reduced scale model of a plane on the tarmac. In order to make it appear full-size he also used the services of little people or dwarves, if you prefer, who walked around it dressed as mechanics. In theatre, on the other hand, especially in amateur productions, audiences are used to seeing directors making do and audiences make allowances for a less than convincing set or a less than convincing accent. In other words, theatre audiences practise what the English poet Coleridge called, in 1817, the willing suspension of disbelief every time they take their seats. Even though they can hear the faint rumble of the Luas trains passing the Abbey, even though the set is not entirely authentic, audiences agree to pretend that they are

Conall Hamill

St Andrew's College

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watching the events in a small farmhouse in a remote mountainy part of southern Ireland; they agree to pretend that the actor who last month was a Shakespearean villain is now a Kerry matchmaker. Modern cinema has now developed special effects to such a level that very little suspension of disbelief is required: everything seems real. In a recent TED talk, Robert Legato, the special effects wizard behind Titanic, Hugo and Avatar, admitted that he was now unable to tell which sections of Titanic were actual underwater sequences and which were studio effects. Perhaps this is why theatre at its best still has the edge on cinema: cinema is too polished. When a play works on stage, its rough magic creates a special effect that cinema can rarely match. (b) Off you go!

Conall Hamill

St Andrew's College

18