"Clearing the Ground"

"Clearing the Ground"

The Field Day Theatre Company and the
Construction of Irish Identities

By

Carmen Szabo

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

 "Clearing the Ground": The Field Day Theatre Company and the Construction of Irish Identities, by
Carmen Szabo

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2007 by Carmen Szabo

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-84718-180-5; ISBN 13: 9781847181800

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE ........................................................................................................1
The Beginnings

CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................18

HISTORIES

CHAPTER TWO ...............................................................................................72

IDENTITIES

CHAPTER THREE..........................................................................................121
LANGUAGES

CHAPTER FOUR............................................................................................159
ADAPTATIONS

EPILOGUE ......................................................................................................220
The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................232

FIELD DAY PRODUCTIONS........................................................................245

 PROLOGUE

THE BEGINNINGS…

The fifth province

The year is 1977. The Editorial to the first volume of The Crane
Bag introduces in the struggling discourse of Irish Studies the concept of the
fifth province. The new publication, edited by Richard Kearney and Mark
Hederman, is created to supply challenging visions on culture, history, tradition
and identity and to fill the gaps between the overused binary oppositions that
dominated previous approaches to the cultural discourse in Ireland. The Crane
Bag intended to solve the paradox of a culture that defined itself both in political
and historical terms based on the colonial binary opposition of Self and Other,
always keeping an eye on the neighbouring island. The fifth province offered the
promise of an almost complete annihilation of the political in the definition of a
new Irish identity, however, still using traces of colonial language:
“This province, this place, this centre, is not a political position. In fact, if it is a
position at all, it would be marked by the absence of any particular political and
geographical delineation, something more like a dis-position [my italics].”1

The apparent idealism of this image sprung from the main

source of the fifth province, the haunting myth of an imagined Ireland “beyond
the beginning of recorded history”2. The main argument of The Crane Bag
editors was that although modern Ireland is made up of four provinces, the
Gaelic word for province is cóiced, which means a “fifth”. This mythical fifth
province has never been geographically pinpointed, which brought about two
different traditions in identifying its position. The first tradition states that “all
five provinces met at the Stone of Divisions on the Hill of Uisnech, which was
believed to be the mid-point of Ireland. The second considers that the fifth
province was Meath (Mide), the ‘middle’”3.

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

Both traditions remained inconclusive, which led to the mythical

creation of a non-political centre, sometimes described as “a secret well, known
only to the druids and the poets”4. The imaginary province was often seen as
“the place where all oppositions were resolved, the primeval unity”5. This
mythical space was created in the minds of poets, seers and magicians and
offered a possible refuge from the historical problems that defined Ireland’s
story during the 1970s and 1980s. As a reaction to the over-politicized reality,
the imaginary space of the fifth province offered a safe haven for artists and
thinkers, for people who wanted to define their own identities beyond the
political.
However, the fifth province seemed to be on shaky grounds from
the very beginning. In the final paragraphs of the Editorial, the space becomes
internalized, being defined as a place “that each person must discover for
himself within himself [my italics]”6. Transformed into a personal region of the
male mind, the fifth province becomes infested with politics and history. The
simple fact that the human being who creates this imaginary province “within
himself” is part of the historical and political structures of reality, brings the fifth
province within the political edifice. In times of crisis, such an ideal construct,
which would build a secure wall between reality and the Self, could provide a
theoretically neutral space for the creation of personal identities. The political
determination of such identities, of any identities for that matter, obscures the
blissful light enveloping this a-political haven. If the fifth province remains on
the level of a mythical construct, which is shaky in itself given the connection
between myth and politics in the creation of meaning, it acquires the Utopian
isolation of the poetic Tower or of an oasis of cultural bliss. However, the
construction of a valid cultural identity within the space of such a Utopian
structure is, in itself, a contradiction in terms.
Twenty years later, Richard Kearney upgrades the image of the
fifth province following the new line of thought characterizing the identity
discourse in Ireland at the end of the 1990s. In Postnationalist Ireland, Kearney
re-considers the term by including the Irish diasporas in the definition of Irish
identity. He defines a contemporary fifth province as
“a network of relations extending from local communities at home to migrant
communities abroad. The fifth province is to be found, if anywhere, at the
swinging door which connects the ‘parish’ with the ‘cosmos’. The fifth province

4
The Crane Bag (1977), p. 4.
5
The Crane Bag (1977), p. 4.
6
The Crane Bag (1977), p. 5.
 The Beginnings 3

can be imagined and re-imagined; but it cannot be occupied. In the fifth

province, it is always a question of thinking otherwise.”7

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

The special focus on the “legislation” of the Ireland built up in

this fifth province of the imagination relates it to the political rather than to a
Utopian space of the mind, to an illusionary Ireland that would not have
matched the Field Day policy. Friel adds in the same interview describing the
fifth province as “a place for dissenters, traitors to the prevailing mythologies in
the other four provinces”15. Ironically, the place itself where these “traitors” and
“dissenters” escape from the “prevailing mythologies” of the other four
provinces is born out of these particular mythologies. One of the paradoxes of
the Field Day policy is that, on the one hand, it strongly advocates the
demythologization of the structures involved in defining Irish identity and
culture – and this appears, to a certain extent, in the ideology of the plays put on
stage by the company. On the other hand, however, the structure chosen as basis
for this revisionist view of Irish culture is based deeply in the mythological past
of the country. Richard Kearney himself, as prime mover of the fifth province,
underlines the importance of the re-interpretation of myths and the de-
fossilization of the country’s culture and history, in one of the pamphlets
included in the Field Day pamphlet collection:

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

On the basis of Kearney’s comments, it can be argued that this is

what Field Day actually did, by adopting the image of the fifth province: they
rescued it from the fossilized mythology of the nation and re-interpreted it
against a political background. However, my main problem is not with the idea
of the fifth province as an ideal, indeed mythological, space of reconciliation,
existing somewhere within the individual. I can accept the existence of such a
space, as I can accept the existence of the Tower as an idyllic space devised by
artists to ensure their isolation from the surrounding political and historical
space. What is worrying, however, is the way in which this space of
reconciliation that one has to discover within oneself is readily manipulated into
becoming a zone of political reasoning.

Irish Identity and a New National Theatre

Both Seamus Deane and Stephen Rea openly recognized the
political involvement of Field Day. In his programme notes to Brian Friel’s
version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters – staged by Field Day in 1981 –
Deane defined the Field Day enterprise as “a political gesture, smacking of
Northerness”, involving a double secession from the “traditional” North and
from the Republic. The political status of the company also incorporates the
creation of a new, politically informed audience. The main focus of the
company is on the “breaking down of the calcification of the theatre audience”
seen as the determining component of the process of meaning-creation. Stephen
Rea also argued that Field Day is “a very political kind of theatre without
sloganizing”, suggesting that its politics are rooted in its actuality, a key part of
which is that “we stress our Northern but also Irish identity”17 and this, he
thinks, bothers a lot of people particularly in Belfast, where the company was
always associated with Sinn Fein and the IRA.
Brian Friel tried to tone down the political discourse that
determined the policy of the company. He declared that “in Ireland everything is
immediately perceived as political and the artist is burdened instantly with

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

politicization”. Within this space of constant political reminders, Field Day

intended, in an initially idyllic manifesto, to create “a cultural state, not a
political state”, and out of that cultural state “a possibility of a political state
follows”18. Friel’s overtly cultural views were further emphasized by his
comparison of the Field Day enterprise with W. B. Yeats’s National Theatre, in
spite of Seamus Deane’s negative perception of the latter. In 1982 Friel
declared: “maybe Field Day is some kind of pretentious attempt to imitate what
Yeats was striving for, but in a Northern context”19. This vision of a traditional
national theatre for the North clashed not only with Seamus Deane’s comments
in his pamphlet “Heroic Styles”, discussed later on in the Introduction, but it
also contradicted the image that Field Day constructed for themselves from the
very beginning.
Defined from the outset as a “travelling company”, Field Day
was reluctant to establish a headquarters and a building for its enterprise. The
theatrical building itself, the institution of that space, provides the social and
political legitimization of a national theatre. However, many of Seamus Deane’s
essays on the problem of a national theatre showed unease about the institution
itself. He wrote in the programme to the Field Day production of Anton
Chekhov’s Three Sisters: “A theatre without a sense of risk is an institution; and
an institution may be a theatre but is never theatre.”20 This mistrust of the
theatrical institution is reflected in the company’s decision to choose Derry’s
Guildhall as venue for their yearly premieres, as a reaction against the
established power structures in the North. The Guildhall, a bleak, Victorian
building just outside the city walls, embodies the essence of the oppressive
colonial structures, containing the Mayor’s parlour and the offices of the city
council21. By entering the space of power and using it as starting point for their
tours, Field Day not only re-enhanced their political status but, in time, they
reacted against the cultural status quo enjoyed at that point by Belfast and
Dublin. Stephen Rea touched upon the problem of Dublin when he declared that
Dublin is “the centre of cultural sophistication which means no sophistication at
all”22. By choosing Derry as their launch-pad, Field Day created unique
circumstances: “the prospect of a theatre company caught up from the beginning

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

in an explosion of civic pride, and a company presenting itself in a physical

sense on the communal frontier”23.
Field Day’s status as touring company moved it away from
Brian Friel’s initial idealism of creating a “national theatre” and towards a sense
of community theatre, of a reactionary company, preoccupied with defining an
anti-national theatre rather than institutionalizing itself into one. In addition, Rea
argued that “there is no great existing canon of Irish plays which we wish to
produce”24, breaking away once again from the established conventions and
rejecting any fixed base for building their theatre. Thus, Field Day began their
fifteen-year journey as a theatre company which, if it still wanted to establish a
new national theatre for the North, advocated a complete severing of the links
with a romantic theatrical past, represented in part by W. B. Yeats’s Abbey
Theatre and by the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. Field Day was moving towards new
definitions of identity, “Northern but also Irish”, and towards new ideas of
origin which they tried to find in their audience. The virtual and inherently
idyllic national theatre imagined by Field Day would have been a theatre for
both communities, increasingly seeking to define new identities for the North
and performing “plays of excellence in a distinctively Irish voice that would be
heard throughout Ireland”25. It may be argued that at the time when Field Day
began their work, the political and historical situation in Ireland, both North and
South of the border, would have considered such a national theatre, given its
pluralism and its fragmentation, as a possible way towards reconciliation. In
such historical and political circumstances Seamus Deane considered that “the
idea of a theatre without a roof over its head is precisely right”26. If the existing
national theatres were already part of the oppressive political structures, then a
new type of national theatre was needed to de-construct those established
structures.
The Romantic tradition of making theatre was fiercely opposed
by Seamus Deane who, as the main ideologist of the company, set out in his
articles, essays and pamphlets to create a critical background for the new
theatre, a background which, in spite of the often underlined need for pluralism,
settled within the already existing structures of binary oppositions. The main
argument of the Field Day policy as devised by Deane and supported by

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.

Deane does not go to the extremes of Patrick Pearse, for

example, who, facing Yeats’s lofty disdain for the 1916 revolutionary
movement, wanted Mr. Yeats “crushed” for his creation of an “Anglo-Irish”
Celtic identity for Ireland. Deane recognizes the cultural importance of the
Celtic Revival led by Yeats and Lady Gregory, but considers that such an
identity is no longer viable in contemporary Ireland and Northern Ireland. The
old Gaelic myths, which were felt to have been constructed by Yeats himself to
offer an acceptable identity for a dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, cannot be
totally discarded but, on the other hand, there is a need to re-read and re-
interpret them along with “everything, including our politics and our literature”.
In the best outcome, this revisionist view would “enable new writing, new
politics, unblemished by Irishness, but securely Irish”28.
The problem of identity, which occupied a determining place in
the Field Day policy, and which will be discussed in depth in Chapter 3,
involves controversial “definitions” of Irishness, which Field Day could not
escape nor solve properly. The issue of identity is entangled in the idea itself of
the Field Day Theatre Company. Deane argues that the identity of a new theatre
should be determined by its audience. Thus, the creation of a new audience to
match the new theatre was intended as soon as the company’s second
production in 1981. Deane considers that theatre has to be “for the people, of the
people and yet not popular in the consumer sense of that term”. Field Day
intended to walk a fine line between the “spurious aestheticism of the Lyric” –
which made the mistake of offering Belfast audiences Yeats’s form of “coterie
drama” instead of creating an original Northern theatre – and the “populism of
community theatre” which he termed “the plebification of drama”. According to
Deane, Field Day “wants to live in the interval between these while recognizing
that it will every so often touch one or other of them”29.
From the very first pamphlets and articles, the “traditional”
definition of Irishness initiated by Yeats and the Revivalist movement was

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

considered to have become a stereotype based on the binary opposition of

oppressor and victim. Yeats was considered to have tried to provide a cultural
identity “beyond the colonial and sectarian divisions”30 but, notwithstanding the
noble intentions, this identity was caught in the swamp of colonial relations.
Irishness was always defined as the quality “by which we want to display our
non-Britishness”, which was the sign of dependency. Deane also argued:
“instead of acknowledging their own uniqueness, the Irish have adopted the
‘maverick’ stereotype bestowed upon them by their oppressors”31. Ireland was
seen as a space where Declan Kiberd’s “laboratory theory”32 was working
perfectly. England, as the colonizer and oppressor, was using Ireland as a
laboratory, projecting on it everything which the English did not want to
acknowledge as their own characteristic. Ireland and Irishness were seen as
negative doubles of Britishness, as the “evil” double which, by its simple
existence, can be safely discarded. As a whole, the identity discourse used by
the Irish “as a decolonizing strategy derived from British imperialist
discourse”33. The Irish definitions of identity followed the well-established
colonial discourse observed by Albert Memmi: “The first ambition of the
colonized is to become equal to that splendid model [the colonizer] and to
resemble him to the point of disappearing in him”34.
However, the strategy of becoming more English than the
English was used many times as a subversive deconstruction of the centre. By
fully mastering and appropriating the English language, the Irish created a
“strategy of parody” instead of simple comedy or comic imitation, a strategy
mainly represented by G.B. Shaw and Oscar Wilde. The Irish had to become
“English” to acquire a freedom that would offer the opportunity to construct
another type of national and cultural identity, free from the colonizing discourse.
By using parody, Judith Butler argues, “the repetition of the ‘original’ reveals
the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the
original”35, a copy of a copy, and thus the mirror that creates the Other as the

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

opposing double of the Self becomes James Joyce’s “cracked looking-glass of a

servant”, showing a multiple self instead of a homogeneous Other. Field Day’s
intention was to “clear the ground” of colonial binary oppositions and embrace
the pluralism opened up by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett with their
definitions of a heterogeneous and at the same time European Irish identity.
Moreover, in their policy, Field Day wanted to apply this multiplicity of the Self
on Northern Irish identities, given the fact that Northern Ireland tended to be
overlooked by both the Republic and Britain.
In the context of the continuous attempt at self-definition, Ulster
was seen as an artificial space where identities struggle with a double
oppression: colonial and sectarian. Following the 1921 Partition, the case of
Ulster was characterized by a “double” secession, which increased and re-
enforced the artificiality of the state. Partition created conditions for isolation
and homogeneity, both included within the binary oppositions of Unionism
versus Nationalism. Gerard Delanty observes that in Ulster, “unionism and
nationalism became increasingly counter-factually defined identities, defined
more by opposition to each other rather than by what they stood for”36. In a
context already determined by the Irish-British mirroring process, Ulster
identities could see themselves in a double trap, their binary oppositional
identities being included in yet another binary opposition, that of Irish vs.
British. Against this background, Seamus Deane observes that the two
communities:
“have become stereotyped into their roles of oppressor and victim to such an
extent that the notion of a Protestant or a Catholic sensibility is now assumed to
be a fact of nature rather than a product of these very special and ferocious
conditions”37.

The only foreseeable solution to this situation is the restoration of a sense of

community in the North, a community not separated by sectarianism but one
united by the new pluralism of a heterogeneous identity. The Ulster identity has
to be able to think itself in a European context. The present situation should be
recognized as “post-historical”, that is “the resolution to problems does not
proceed by appeal to the arcane myths of history”38. “The solution to partition is

Routledge, 1990), p. 31.

36
Gerard Delanty, “Negotiating Peace in Northern Ireland”, in Journal of Peace
Research (Vol. 32, No. 3, Aug. 1995, pp. 257-264).
37
Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles”, in Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985),
p. 54.
38
Gerard Delanty, “Negotiating Peace in Northern Ireland”, in Journal of Peace
Research (Vol. 32, No. 3, Aug. 1995, pp. 257-264).
 The Beginnings 13

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

However idealistic this may sound, considering the political

realities of the time, it has to be acknowledged that Field Day was the first
group of intellectuals who tried to act against the established power structures in
both the North and the Republic. It is true that sometimes, maybe too often, they
relied on the established “traditions” and canons without managing to dismantle
them in an effective way by the creation of new, challenging frames. On the
other hand, they acknowledged their failures, even though some critics
considered this as a sign of defiance while others saw it as outright modesty.
Seamus Deane wrote:
“I recognize our failures. In fact, we could not but fail, given all the limitations
of the situation with which we started, given the limitations of the individuals in
Field Day. Of course, it can only be an attempt at any given stage, and every
attempt, like the Field Day attempt, is culture bound and time-bound, and
therefore subject to the same limitations other subjects have been”41.

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

Taking into account the importance of the theoretical and

ideological background that shaped the productions of the Field Day Theatre
Company, it is worth mentioning, very briefly, some of the theoretical issues
that defined the Field Day ideology presented mainly in the company’s
pamphlet collections. Thus, the cultural-semiotic theories that determined the
second half of the 20th century enhance, for example, the relevance of Field
Day’s choice to start a theatre company, in addition to the pamphlets and the
ideological writings. Within these theories, the act of communication shifts from
language alone to the visual and, by combining the two, theatre becomes a
determining faction in the dialogue between the company and their main target
audience in Northern Ireland. By opening up the ideological writings through
the playfulness of theatre, the Field Day Theatre Company managed to send
their intended meaning towards an audience which was overlooked by previous
artistic endeavours.
The meaning of the spoken word can be read in the very texture
of the linguistic gesture, and yet every expression always appears as a trace.
Meaning is slippery and it is based on the absence of something that has to be
evoked. The notion of trace becomes a decisive tool in establishing the play of
meanings within the process of artistic communication. The trace provides the
freedom of interpretation, of decoding the message of the artistic phenomenon
because it includes in the ideology of the sign a liminal space, a “free” zone
where the audience and the participants in the production are allowed to apply
their own points of view to the aesthetic object. However, there is a double
determination of this space. On the one hand, it can be considered as a zone of
free interpretation, where the meaning is created and re-created constantly, thus
allowing the basic elements of culture to be renewed and re-interpreted so that
they would not “fossilise”42. On the other hand, this freedom can become
dangerous and it can be infested by manipulated meanings, hidden in the free
zone, and thought by the receivers to be genuine. These booby-trap-like
meanings represent the main tool for a successful ideological propaganda.
Nevertheless, the importance of the trace is overwhelming in any cultural
semiotic analysis given the freedom it provides to the communication process.
Within the Field Day ideology, the notion of trace can be related to the term that
constituted the basis of the Field Day policy, the fifth province. Similar to the
trace, the fifth province provides a pure space “of the mind” where meanings
can be constructed almost ex nihilo, without the “negative” influence of history
and politics. However, by appropriating the term from The Crane Bag editors,
Field Day lowered the fifth province into the “swamp” of politics – a move
theoretically approved by cultural semiotics and especially by Umberto Eco in

42
Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 66
 The Beginnings 15

his groundbreaking work A Theory of Semiotics43 – and recognized, from the

very beginning of their ideological enterprise the importance of the notion in
their attempt to provide a new space for the creation of a contemporary Irish
identity, freed from the traditional binary discourse that characterized previous
definitions of Irish identities, but still securely Irish.
The postcolonial discourse, which became so familiar in the
majority of the theoretical analysis of Irish culture, provides an appropriate
ground for the issues defined by cultural semiotics. However, Northern Ireland
and Northern Irish culture render the semiotic terms problematic. The master
culture that dictates the cultural codes is considered to be both the British
culture of the once viable Empire and the Irish culture of the Republic. Field
Day reacts against both by establishing their virtual headquarters in
Derry/Londonderry, the “slash” city that embodies the duality itself of the whole
province. In relation to these master cultures, Field Day can be seen both as
anti-cultural, thus advocating the Irish cultural codes against the British cultural
codes, and as alternative culture, intending to re-think another type of Irish
culture than that established by the Republic. The choice of Derry further
reinforces Field Day as sub-cultural from a cultural semiotic point of view,
given the peripheral space occupied by the company. However, these varying
positions of the company within the cultural semiotic spectrum, change utterly
with the transformation of Field Day into a master culture, or at least very close
to what a master culture means in cultural semiotic terms. At the end of its
theatrical enterprise, the company was considered to be one of the most
important cultural and ideological movements in Ireland, on both sides of the
border, dictating the cultural codes used in the study of Irish culture in the 1980s
and 1990s. From a cultural semiotic point of view, the development of the Field
Day Theatre Company is particularly interesting in that it illustrates the cultural
processes that define cultural semiotics itself.
In order to have a proper reading of an artistic product, the
audience has to understand the logic of its construction and the particular
aesthetic codes involved in its formation, all these being filtered through the
social, political and cultural conventions that pre-determine any audience. Thus,
politics becomes central both to production and reception. Susan Bennett states
in her book Theatre Audiences – A Theory of Production and Reception that:
“the horizon(s) of expectations brought by an audience to the theatre are bound
to interact with every aspect of the theatrical event, and, for this reason, it is

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

In the case of Northern Irish theatre in general, and the

beginnings of Field Day in particular, the event was very much related to
community theatre. The event of community theatre is able to enact social or
political affirmations of a particular group of people. Even though Field Day
denied a straightforward connection between the company and the idea of
community theatre, their productions remained focused on a special community
represented by the people of Derry. However, the company’s main intention was
to transform that audience into the representative of the new Northern Irish
audience. The Field Day premieres in Derry functioned as a type of laboratory
which had as main target the “breaking down of the calcification of the
theatrical audience”45 and the definition of their own identity in the process.
Field Day was perfecting the colonial binary structure of colonizer/colonized by
trying to define its own identity through the mirror-image identity of the
audience. Susan Bennett comments:
“To look at itself, a society must cut out a piece of itself for inspection. To do
this it must set up a frame within which images and symbols of what has been
sectioned off can be scrutinized, and, if need be, remodeled and rearranged.”46

Theatrical performances are deliberately structured in such a

way as to probe the weaknesses of a community, call its leaders to account, de-
sacralize its most well-established values and beliefs, portray its characteristic
conflicts and, if possible, suggest remedies for them. In such politically over-
determined theatre, it is not only the performance itself which impacts on the
audience: the geographical location and the milieu which surrounds the theatre
also play important roles in the interpretation.
The place itself where the production is set is always
ideologically encoded and in the case of Field Day it could not have been more
politically determined: the Guildhall, the Mayor’s “fortress” in Derry, the
symbol of Protestant power in a city with a determining Catholic “minority”.
This was the place transformed into a theatre by a group of people, who initially
considered themselves politically neutral – if a political neutrality can exist –
but who were sharing mainly Catholic/Nationalist views on Northern Irish

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

The following chapters attempt to reveal, hopefully in a new, challenging light,

both the failures and the successes of a company which, in a period of social and
political unrest, was determined to re-consider the Irish dramatic tradition and
the established structures of thought within the discourse of Irish studies.

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

Derry/Londonderry – Towards The Freedom of the City

In the postcolonial space that the Field Day Theatre Company
intended to inhabit, the relationship between theatre and history has been
continuously problematized. There is a mixture, on the one hand, between
theatre’s dependence on the past and its structural dependence on the current
institutions and conventions of representation and, on the other hand, the
tendency to fracture and destabilize the existing structures, to re-think history
implying the idea of the “end of history”. Contemporary theatre exists within the
confluence of political neoconservatism and the phenomenon of
postmodernism1. Theatre artists are viewed as historians, archaeologists, time-
travellers and at the same time disruptors of established power structures, or,
taking up a Shakespearean image, discussed by Johannes Birringer in his study
Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, “they might be called ‘grave-diggers’,
working on the edge of the two extremes of destruction and preservation,
throwing up the skulls of history and transforming them.”2
The Field Day Theatre Company is such a group of historians
and archaeologists caught up in a world of a “continuous past”, observed by
Stewart Parker in his play Northern Star3, and defined, in Field Day’s case, by
sectarian unrest and perpetual conflict. Their theatre attempts to unmask the
futile conflicts and to offer a solution based on cultural reconciliation. It also
tries to re-imagine the “skulls of history” in such a way as to contribute to a re-
definition of the Irish identity discourse. However, the balance that they initially
intended to establish between history, present-ness and a possible future
determined by reconciliation, was continuously disturbed by the space they

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

The choice of Derry/Londonderry, or “slash-city”, as the company’s

headquarters did not come as a surprise, as Brian Friel, one of the main founders
of Field Day, discussed the city and its recent history in his earlier play The
Freedom of the City5, published in 1974. The dramatic worlds revealed in the
play subscribe to the spatial and linguistic ideologies of the time, but also
prepare the space of Derry’s Guildhall for the intrusion of the future theatre
company, in an attempt to culturally re-create the postcolonial tendency of the
margin conquering the centre. Also, through what Seamus Deane called the
“displaced voices”: American sociologists, English judges, soldiers and voice-
overs from the past, the play outlines the main concerns that will define the
ideologies put forward by the Field Day Theatre Company. As Deane observes
in the “Introduction”6, written in 1984, to Brian Friel’s collection of plays,
published in 1996, the discourse that these voices produce is “obviously bogus”.
However,
“its official jargon represents something more and something worse than moral
obtuseness. It also represents power, the one element lacking in the world of the

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

Discussing the issue of the semi-fixed feature space in

architecture, Edward T. Hall presents in his book The Hidden Dimension8 the
case of American psychiatrist Humphry Osmond9 who, together with Canadian
architect Kyo Izumi researched the best architectural form for Osmond’s
Weyburn mental hospital in Saskatchewan in 1951. The conclusions drawn from
observations made in the hospital determined the existence of two spaces:
sociofugal (keeping people apart) and sociopetal (bringing people together).
What was determined as desirable after the research was flexibility and
congruence between design and function so that there is a variety of spaces in
which people can become involved or not, as the occasion and mood demand.
The main point of the Canadian experiment is its demonstration that the
structuring of semi-fixed features can have a profound effect on behaviour and
that this effect is measurable. In addition to these spaces, I will define two types
of language: sociopetal and sociofugal, related to the spaces defined by
Osmond. Both spatial and linguistic issues construct, within Friel’s play, an
image of Derry’s Guildhall that will reappear quite often in the reviews of the
Field Day plays after the company’s first premiere in 1980 with another of Brian
Friel’s plays, Translations.
The central action in The Freedom of the City is set in the
Guildhall, in the Mayor’s parlour, which, according to the stage directions,
should take up “almost the entire stage” (The Freedom of the City, p. 4). The
space is grandiose and depersonalised, creating a “heavy and staid” atmosphere.
The large portrait of a forgotten civic dignitary and a vase with artificial flowers
reinforce the idea of superficial construction. The Guildhall is a grim space of

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)

While Skinner’s discourse balances between irony and tragedy,

“SKINNER: Lily, this day I confer on you the freedom of the City of Derry.
God bless you, my child. And now, Mr. Hegarthy, I think we’ll make you a life
peer. Arise Lord Michael – of Gas.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 43)
22 Chapter One

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)

While in the Guildhall the sociopetal language is creating the impression of a

unified dramatic world with all its diversity, outside, the “scientifically”
determined and manipulated sociofugal language constructs a multiplicity of
worlds, bracketed off from each other. These worlds try to give an overall,
objective view of the historical event but they are constantly remaining at the
level of external commentary, tracing a line between the over-scientific and the
over-mythological. A heterogeneous language fragmented and specific to each
characters, defines the second space created in the play, theoretically an outside
space that should be inhabited by the characters inside the Guildhall but which
is determined by the voices of power: the judge, the soldiers, the American
sociologist Dr Dodds, the forensic doctors Professor Cuppley and Dr
Winbourne, the RTÉ commentator, the ballad singer, the priest. If the characters
within the Guildhall can only disrupt the material organisation of the inner
space, on the outside, the history of the event is manipulated by the voices of
power, determining not only the historical re-creation of the events but also,
through the ballad singer, provide a mythological manipulation of the reality.
All the characters outside the Guidhall translate the events in their own artificial
language. They are supposed to give an accurate report of the events but what
they actually do is to enforce the cover-up.
The extreme manipulation of the events is obvious especially in
the case of the RTÉ commentator, the balladeer and the army press officer. They
interpret history by creating their own version of it and by trying to justify their
reports. The transmitted information is the same but the ways of transmitting
differ thoroughly from one character to the other. The army press officer reads a
press release to a few reporters using the language of an alleged objectivity.
“OFFICER: At approximately 15.20 hours today a band of terrorists took
possession of a portion of the Guildhall. They gained access during a civil
disturbance by forcing a side-door in Guildhall Street. It is estimated that up to
forty persons are involved. In the disturbance two soldiers were hit by stones and
one by a bottle. There are no reports of civilian injuries. The area is now quiet
 Histories 23

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)

If the ignorance and the cover-up of the real events by the

representatives of power – the media and the army – become painful reminders
of contemporary realities to the audience, the story of the balladeer restores the
balance by discussing the comedy of transforming history and reality into myth.
Surrounded by singing children, the ballad singer turns history into myth, fact
into folktale. Brian Friel presents the audience with the farcical image of the
“genuine” Irish folk narrator, with a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other:
“He is unsteady on his feet but his aggressive jubilance makes him articulate.
24 Chapter One

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.

“BALLADEER: A hundred Irish heroes one February day

Took over Derry’s Guildhall, beside old Derry’s quay.
They defied the British army, they defied the RUC.
They showed the crumbling empire what good Irishmen could be.

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)

While some characters go to extremes, others stay within the

boundaries of their own scientific microcosms. The American sociologist, Dr
Dodds, acts like an outsider, dealing with the situation of the people in the
Guildhall as case studies. His language is that of the scientist who is not
sentimentally involved in the events. Like all the other characters outside the
Guildhall, he introduces himself to the audience, using a tone of privileged
understanding, which finally remains ineffective and insufficient. It is an
artificial, academic style, completely bracketed off from the reality of the actual
situation. He tries to justify the actions of the characters in the Guildhall by
using statistical data and sociological theories, but he finally acknowledges the
fact that there is no solution to the problems of the poor all over the world and
that the scientific discourse is as fragmented as the world of power in which it is
developed.
“DODDS: So the question arises: what of the future? What solutions are the
economists and the politicians cooking up? Well, the answer to that is that there
are about as many solutions as there are theorists. …They have, in fact, no
future. They have only today. And if they fail to cope with today, the only
certainty they have is death.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 72-3)

The judge, the policemen and the forensic doctors, as

representatives of the imposing, imperial power of Britain, try to give an
objective view of the events but they use the same facts in order to sustain the
legitimacy of their own actions. Based on the “proofs” he puts together from
“witnesses” – all of them representing the power structures, the judge ends his
report with a statement that echoes the Widgery tribunal’s report.
 Histories 25

“JUDGE: I must accept the evidence of eye-witnesses and various technical

experts that the three deceased were armed when they emerged from the
Guildhall, and that two of them at least – Hegarthy and the woman Doherty –
used their arms. Consequently it was impossible to effect an arrest operation.
The detailed findings of the tribunal now pass on to the appropriate authorities.”
10
(The Freedom of the City, p. 79)

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)

Within the fragmented world of distorting languages

representing the power of words over facts, there are two voices which seem to
be ignored by criticism. They cannot be placed within the established structures
of power but, on the other hand, they ARE power. There is a parallel
presentation, a mirroring between two anonymous groups of characters: the
British soldiers and the citizens of Derry. Both are depersonalised – Soldiers 1
and 2, Voices 1, 2 and 3. As related to the facts, the British soldiers give the
closest report so far. They share the sociopetal language of the insiders – and of
the citizens – but politically they are on the other side of the barricade.

“SOLDIER 1: The fucking yobbos are inside the fucking Guildhall!

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.

“VOICE 3: I heard fifteen or sixteen.

VOICE 1: Maybe twenty.
VOICE 3: And a baby in a pram.
VOICE 1: And an old man. They blew his head off.
VOICE 2: Oh my God.” (The Freedom of the City, p. 31)

The multiple sociofugal worlds of these discourses are joined by

the three “insiders” who, after their death, give a monotonous, almost clinical
report on their life and death. Their impersonal voices complete the artificial
construct of the fragmented VOICE. They have to use a “dead” language to be
able to join the “outside” world.
“MICHAEL: My mouth kept trying to form the word mistake – mistake –
mistake. And that is how I died – in disbelief, in astonishment, in shock. It was a
foolish way for a man to die.

LILY: In a way I died of grief.

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

Theories and Histories

In order to tackle the problem of history and its theatrical
representation in the Field Day plays, I wish to construe a framework of thought
which will permit the inclusion of these plays and the view on history that they
advocate into the larger frame of contemporary thought on the position of
history and historiography.
History is related to the idea of origin, as a device for
establishing and ensuring the idea of an identity. In Language, Counter-memory,
Practice15, Michel Foucault presents a devastating critique of the very notion of
origin, as historians are accustomed to using the term. Foucault’s main argument
is centred on the idea of origin as endless quest for the beginnings, thus
annulling the originality of the historical event. The idea of “origin” brings
about several presuppositions: that every historical moment is a homogeneous
totality with a unique significance, that historical development is a necessary
continuity with events that are linked together by a relationship between cause
and effect. In reality though, a historical event:
“is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle but the reversal of a relationship of
forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against
those who had once used a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax,
the entry of a masked ‘other’. The forces operating in history are not controlled
by destiny or regulative mechanisms but respond to haphazard conflicts. They do
not manifest the successive forms of a primordial intention and their attraction is
not that of a conclusion, for they always appear through the singular randomness
of events.”16

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

The problems of tradition and identity that defined the Irish

historical writings in a quest towards the recovery of a mythical existence
deserve, Deane observes, “a long-delayed hammering”. Both terms are treated
as inventions, which keep Ireland in a loophole of history that the Field Day
plays attempted to break. The new view on history and historiography brought
historical writings closer to literature, critics acknowledging the fact that “all
history and literature, as far as I understand them, are forms of mythology”18.
This new critical trend subscribed to Benedetto Croce’s dictum – discussed by
the author in relation to Giambattista Vico’s philosophy19 – that “all history is
contemporary history”, thus underlining the process of creation of history, the
process of writing and interpreting history always from the point of view of
contemporary issues. Historians become increasingly aware that the conventions
of narrative and story apply to their own work, thus walking a fine line between
reality and fiction. There is a troubling similarity between the recorder of and
the participant in the events, in that they are both interpreters. Roland Barthes
discusses in his book Camera Lucida the impossibility of being a witness
because of the general tendency of appropriating the historical event and making
it “my history”:
“As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys
it for the sake of my history (impossible for me to believe in “witnesses”;
impossible, at least, to be one…).”20

Performing historical plays on stage creates the possibility to

confront the sense of separation and exclusion that Roland Barthes was alluding
to, enabling the audience to “believe” in witnesses. The traditional devices for
constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past must be
disrupted. The idea of a history “created” by the historian or the historiographer
by putting together well-determined events to explain or justify ideologies or to
establish and enforce national identities brings into mind the “other” history, the
well-concealed history, the mirror double of the officially known. It would be
the role of the artist as opposed to the rationality of the historian, to bring this
hidden history to life and disclose it for an audience whose ideological
preconceptions are determined or at least influenced by the official version. The
“official” history is characterized by a definite choice of events; “it encourages
thorough understanding and excludes qualitative judgments – a sensitivity to all

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

things without distinction, a comprehensive view excluding differences”21. This

balance is shattered the moment the artist reveals the hidden mirror-image of the
official story. However, it is still the existence and ideological power of the
official history that triggers the imagination of the artist and makes him disrupt
it through the discovery of the OTHER. There is a close relationship between
history and literature, as the latter appears to de-centre the former from the
inside. As Michel Foucault noticed:
“it is in history that rhetoric turns into the Library and the Library folds into
fiction, and it is there that the impossibility of presence, the reign of the
simulacra and the limits of regarding the space/time couple as the foundations of
the world’s knowability all stand revealed. And it is in history that “literature”
appears as that form of writing which wishes to colonize experience for and by
language”22.

History as fact is only a single temporal dimension and does not

constitute truth in itself. It has to be complicated by the history of the reader,
which in its turn, is determined by the very idea of History embedded in the text
and which presupposes a meaning prior to the reader’s confrontation with the
text. History threatens to engulf both the writer’s style and the society to which
the artistic event is addressed as:
“history is in front of the writer as the event of a necessary option among the
several moralities of language: history necessitates making meaning out of
literature according to possibilities which the writer cannot control”23.

However wide the range of visions on history and possibilities to choose

between the different facets of the “truth”, Roland Barthes recognizes the fact
that it is impossible to break free from a “gluey” past but it is the way one reacts
to or against that past that makes the historical representation worthwhile. Thus,
there is nothing surprising when a country periodically re-considers the objects
of its past and describes them anew in order to know “what it can do with
them”.
The contemporary obsession with revisionism and the re-
thinking of history cannot be equated with an idyllic re-tracing or re-capturing
of a heroic past. There is always the political agenda behind re-tackling one or
another historical event. Hayden White admits that “interpretation [and, I would
add, re-interpretation of existing views on history] presupposes politics as 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

of the conditions of its possibility as a social activity”24. Political partisanship

and moral prejudice may lead the historian, the artist and the reader to misread
or misinterpret documents or events, and thus to construct events that never took
place. If for the historian this could be fatal, the artist and the reader can get
away with it by invoking the artistic re-imagination of the historical truth. The
interpretative power of the artist meets no limits in the re-thinking of history
but, given the fact that history in its written, factual form is provided by the
historian, the latter has to set the limits of interpretation according to the facts
and, based on facts, he/she should protect this limit from the permanent
rewriting of history that characterizes ideological speech.
The past enjoys no other existence apart from our consciousness
of it. The recent views on history see the historian as the conoceur who has to
establish the value of the study of the past not as an end in itself, but as a way of
providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems
peculiar to our time. The artist who chooses to represent certain past events,
favouring a particular interpretation, which could help settle or, on the contrary,
inflame the political or social problems of his/her time, advocates the same goal.
Paul Ricoeur suggested in his essay “Memory and Forgetting” that “narratives
are at the same time the occasion for manipulation through reading and directing
narratives, but also a place where a certain healing of memory may begin”25.
The artist, as part of that collective memory defined by Ricoeur as storage of
violent blows, wounds and scars, tries to provide “another” way of telling,
another way of interpreting, even though based on the same facts that make up
his/her historical identity.
In the same way, playwrights writing historical plays dramatize
past events in order either to validate the audience’s present behaviour or to
criticize it and establish an alternate model. Christopher Murray asserts that
historical drama “has always been concerned with power, identity and the
national consciousness”26. This influences the dramatist in choosing the past
event most appropriate in order to channel the feelings and beliefs of the
audience towards the historical reality of present times. However, in the
rendering of the past on stage or in any other aesthetic form, especially in a
society in conflict, it is important to keep in mind that “what is considered a

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.

The recently rediscovered “storytelling” characteristic of history in general and

historiography in particular, was acknowledged by theatrical performances,
dramatists choosing to tell the “story” of the past in a different way, from a
different point of view or within the framework of a new interpretation. The
Barthesian “end of history” does not work in theatre. We are surrounded by a
society that values media-coverage of wars, executions and destruction, but in
this global image, theatre is “sand in the works of the society”. Historically
involved theatre companies, including the Field Day Theatre Company, cannot
afford to agree with an “end of history”. For these companies the movement,
within history, should be from personal histories towards a general view on
history, which would encompass heterogeneity rather than the homogeneity of a
former official History. Theatre should work in support of difference and the
acceptance of that difference. Ariane Mnouchkine, one of the defining theatre
directors of the 20th century, founder of the company Thêátre du Soleil observes:
“‘The end of history’? That amuses me. Saying this one risks the loss of
language and the loss of the possibility of thinking; one risks becoming more and
more passive, able to be bought and sold... Theatre is doubtless the most fragile
of the arts, the theatre public is now really a very small group, but the theatre
keeps reminding us of the possibility to collectively seek the histories of people
and to tell them... The contradictions, the battles of power, and the split in
ourselves will always exist. I think the theatre best tells us of the enemy in
ourselves. Yes, theatre is a grain of sand in the works.”29

In Mnouchkine’s vision, theatre is an art of memory in which we can recognize

who or what haunts us. The principal focus point of theatre should not be the

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

final obliteration of history, as that is rendered impossible by the historical

position proper that theatre fulfils in our society. The moving force behind
theatre’s social and political agenda must be the recovery, for the audiences, of
that forgotten “other history”, the heterogeneous his/her stories that balance the
power of the established History. And the only way of achieving this goal is by
re-enacting, performing History in order to re-capture the dissolved essence of
the histories.

History and Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, the problem of performing history is
complicated not only by the status of the province itself as “neither here nor
there”, both “within and without”, but also by the fact that the national identities
of the groups involved are determined by the perpetual ritual performances of
their historical heritage. Thus performance is not restricted to the stage but it can
be observed every time one of the “defining” events of history is re-enacted in
the streets – the Battle of the Boyne, the Siege of Derry. These special types of
historical street performances have constituted the focus not only of stage plays
like Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the
Somme, for example, but also of other forms of artistic representation, like the
photographic works of Victor Sloan in his collections The Walk, The Platform
and The Field, produced in the latter half of 1985, and Drumming, produced in
1986. Both these collections encapsulate the interplay between past and present,
history and history-in-the-making, observing displays of communal identities,
religious affiliations and public expressions of power relations. Highly theatrical
public performances of identity and personal histories, the Orange parades use a
combination of costumes, music and props in order to define and mark cultural
and social boundaries. Often the performance of rough music is used to re-
establish and re-confirm the “moral boundaries” of the community and also to
intimidate neighbours and the marginalised, to show the “other” the marked
space of identity and power. The ritualistic character of the parades provides the
possibility of historical legitimacy.
There is a strange problem with history in Northern Ireland.
Since 1920, the province seems to exist in a historical loophole. The clocks
appear to have stopped (much like Miss Havesham’s clock in Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations) just before 1968. Unfortunately, this does not mean that
history disappeared and time stood still in a primeval space where people are
living happily ever after, but, on the contrary, the violence and suffering, the
meaninglessness of the events keep reinventing themselves in a vicious circle
without foreseeing a way out. The whole situation is matching Estragon’s lines
from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “Nothing happens, nobody comes,
34 Chapter One

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

Despite their apparent and ironic resemblance, the two

communities in Northern Ireland construct themselves as not only different but
irrevocably different. Willie Doherty, a leading Northern Irish photographer and
performance artist, discusses this issue of sameness in connection with the two
communities living on both sides of the River Foyle in Derry. Once again, in
Doherty’s works like in the Field Day plays and cultural activities, Derry
becomes the space that allows an in-depth artistic discussion of the issue of
separation and a move towards reconciliation. The urban space that Doherty
focuses on is Craigavon Bridge in Derry, which crosses the River Foyle,
dividing the mainly Catholic west bank from the predominantly Protestant east
bank. The image of the bridge can be interpreted as both uniting and separating
the two conflicting groups, thus being inscribed in the binary structure that
determines the entire map of the city. However, the bridge, overlooked by the
statue of reconciliation, created by Maurice Harron and entitled Hands Across
the Divide, represents at the same time a fragmented space of troubled memories
and life suspended between the two banks of the river as in a limbo of history.
As an urban space in the city of Derry, the bridge conveys the individual
crossing it the possibility to exist in this double-edged limbo, in a freedom
located in-between the two politically determined spaces, but also aware of the
historical pressure of the site. The photographic diptych entitled simply The
Bridge (1992) is one of Doherty’s earliest photographic works. On two
opposing walls. It depicts the lower level of Craigavon Bridge, deserted, in a
misty daylight. The complete absence of human activity in the first photograph
induces a feeling of profound unease in the viewer. The dark, oppressive

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”).

“Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.”34

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

Such an attempt to reconcile the two communities was made by

the creation of yet another museum in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Folk and
Transport Museum. The same Richard Kirkland describes the museum as “a
metaphor for the act of re-beginning in narrative”. It was created in 1958 as “a
manifestation of a strong sense of national or cultural identity”35.
Notwithstanding the official description, the museum was intended to re-create
the cultural “authenticity” and “unity” of Northern Ireland, being initiated “as a
way of neutralizing distinctive or even dangerous local cultural identity by a
process of rendering such tendencies within a paradigm of tradition.”36 The
attempt to create an artificial unity of tradition and identity did not bring the
much expected reconciliation but, on the contrary, it deepened the gap between
the two conflicting groups, the following twenty years bringing an unparalleled
period of violence which became known as the Troubles.
From within this society in crisis, the Field Day Theatre
Company tried to bring a solution to the historical conflict through a refreshing
cultural agenda which appeared in articles, a series of pamphlets and, most
importantly, in a series of plays intended, at least theoretically, for audiences
from both communities. Started as a multi-ethnic project and as a response to
the cultural hegemony of capitals such as Dublin, Belfast or London, Field Day
focused mainly on the problem of history. They defined their view on the
aesthetic representation of historical events by placing it within a more general
structure, however, still overwhelmingly based on binary oppositions. Field
Day’s view on history combines the Hegelian vision of history as development,
as a long sequence of triumphs of humanity and the image of the historian as
one whose primary function should be the acceleration of this development;
with Walter Benjamin’s pessimistic view of history existing in a deadlock built
on a long sequence of catastrophes. The board of directors voice Benjamin’s
pessimism in their Preface to Ireland’s Field Day: “nothing left but the sense of
exhaustion”. Further on, they present the central aim of Field Day’s biggest
venture to date, the publication of An Anthology of Irish Writing, as that of
“revealing and confirming the existence of a continuous tradition, contributed to
by all groups, sects and parties, in which the possibility of a more generous and
hospitable notion of Ireland’s cultural achievements will emerge as the basis for
a more ecumenical and eirenic approach to the deep and apparently implacable
problems which confront the island today.”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.

Classic Heroes: Brian Friel’s Making History

Field Day’s solution for the impossibility of an internal
representation of the Northern Irish Troubles was to form a touring company,
attempting to link in one artistic experience the protagonists of the historical
feuds that transformed Northern Ireland into the epitome of the border country:
always within, forever without. Derry/Londonderry proved to be the perfect
space for this enterprise: it was the city that provided the Protestant myth of the
siege, the belief that the enemy is forever at the gate, waiting for the sentry to
fall asleep and occupy the space within the walls. It also gave both communities
two of the most important dates in their own histories: the siege of 1698 which
is seen as central to the historical consciousness and experience of the Protestant
community, while Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972, is a date that reinforced
the Catholic myth of continuous sacrifice and martyrdom enhanced by the
futility of the Widgery Report, perceived from the very beginning as a cover-up
of the British government – re-analysed by the Saville enquiry, which was given
an extraordinary dramatic representation in 2005 by the London Tricycle
Theatre Company – and further reinforced by the hunger strikes of the
Republican prisoners in 1980.
Brian Friel’s third original play for Field Day premiered in
Derry on 20 September 1988. With Making History, Friel was returning to the
history play, a genre that brought fame to Field Day and to Friel with the
company’s first staging of Translations in 1980. Making History provided the
artistic possibility to express on stage Field Day’s view on history and
historiography, a view presented in the pamphlets and in articles, but which
needed artistic reinforcement from a renowned playwright like Brian Friel, who
had already discussed the issue of historical authenticity in his 1974 play The
Freedom of the City. Field Day’s belief that throwing light on the past would
illuminate current schisms, that “ancestral voices, the ghosts of history, would
dispel the atavistic antagonism of the present”39, is brought to life in the form of
a history play which is itself not so much a history play as a play of history, of

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

historiography, trying to disclose the intricate ways of “making history”, of

creating the heroic past of a nation.
I am reluctant to term Making History simply a “history play” in
the classical sense of the genre for the simple reason that, in my reading, the
play goes directly against the monolithic image of History in order to lay bare
the process of manipulating events and give voice to the multiple “histories”
that usually hide behind the wall of History. Moreover, one has to keep in mind
the peculiar status of the history play in Irish theatre, which has contributed
either to the critical neglect or to the frequent openly hostile reception of this
type of work.
Brian Friel was conscious of the slides and traps within the
meaning of History. He considered that there was an obvious resemblance
between the role of the historian and that of the artist. As Gerald Fitzgibbon
observes it, the role of the historian as mediator of the past is determined in
terms of retrieval, selection, evaluation, interpretation and narration, the exact
terms that characterize a writer of “historical” fiction. For Friel, “making
history” means either “having a decisive or significant effect on the course of
public events or writing a story of those events after they have occurred”40. In
Making History, Friel’s intention is to reveal the intricate ways in which history
is written, thus transforming the “history” of the play into metahistory, into a
dramatic essay on the topic of history and undermining its own status as history
play. Notwithstanding the fact that the main plot of the play develops within the
frameworks of Elizabethan time, the cyclical events of the history of conflict in
Northern Ireland initiate a permanent exploration of contemporary conflicts in
an Elizabethan guise.
The main conflict of Friel’s play is focused not only on the
relationship between Hugh O’Neill, the Great Earl of Tyrone – the only man
seen capable of uniting and leading the Irish nation – and the English planters,
represented in the play by the Butcher Bagenal, for example; but also on that
between the public, historical figure of the Earl, the history-book Hugh O’Neill
and the private man Hugh, the one who loves his English Upstart wife and looks
back with fondness on his life with the Sidney family. From the latter, derives
the clash between Hugh and his private historian Peter Lombard, Archbishop of
Armagh. Lombard appears to be a “sorcerer” of history, willing to re-invent a
glorious past for the benefit of the people as, in times of trouble, the nation
needs a hero and O’Neill is the ultimate hero material.
Friel’s choice to focus on the life of Hugh O’Neill, enhancing its
lack of heroism and the tragedy of a man caught between History and story,

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

matches the Field Day Theatre Company’s commitment to recognizing the

political implications of cultural narratives and images. The tendency of the play
is to de-mythologize the text-book heroic past of O’Neill by making him
“human”, by bringing him down from the lofty heights of heroism to a humanity
that implies mistakes, loves and fears. Friel takes up the role of Lombard by
trying to “make” history out of History and showing that a community driven by
the past can be shaped by whoever decides to give an “acceptable” view on
facts. His views on writing history bear the same characteristics as Archbishop
Lombard’s. Friel writes in the programme notes to the play:
“Making History is a dramatic fiction that uses some actual and some imagined
events in the life of Hugh O’Neill to make a story. I have tried to be objective
and faithful – after my artistic fashion – to the empirical method... But then I
remind myself that history and fiction are related and comparable forms of
discourse and that an historical text is a kind of literary artefact.41”

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

Notwithstanding the critical voices that accused Friel of

tampering with historical facts for political reasons44, it is important to state that
Lombard appears as an honest character from the very first scene of the play. He
declares: “I’m no historian, Hugh. I’m not even sure I know what the historian’s
function is – not to talk of his method.” (Making History, p. 8) Lombard does
not pretend to be an authoritative historian but more of a storyteller, a maker of
histories who considers that imagination plays the most important part in writing
his story. The paradox of a dilettante, a man who openly acknowledges his lack
of historical training, influencing the reception of historical events through the
apparent truth of his writings, determines, from the very beginning, the
metatheatrical issues of the play. We are not witnessing the creation of a History
but the writing of the story of Hugh O’Neill. R. F. Foster argues in The Irish
Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland45 that history in Irish narratives
tends to become a kind of “scaled-up biography”, while biography takes on
aspects of a “microcosmic history”. The illusion of “history” is complete as
history is turned into story and story is yet again manipulated into “history”.
To confirm the reading of the play as a pseudo-history play, it is
vital to reinforce that what Lombard is writing is a story. He is creating a myth
because “there are times when a hero can be as important to a people as a God”.
(Making History, p. 67) Thus, Peter Lombard joins the list of Friel’s
mythmakers, which includes, for example, the historical “manipulators” in The
Freedom of the City. Having this in mind, on the surface, the critical accusation
of manipulating historical facts for political reasons fails its target as Friel tends
to de-mythologize a Nationalist hero and an “extraordinary” Gaelic past rather
than attempting to tackle with Protestant “imagination”. However, although
Friel sets out to decompose the heroic, nationalist image of O’Neill, he ends up
re-inventing him on the lower level of the “humane” myth, much more
influential from the point of view of national imagination.
The fact that the play reveals myth-making at the basis of the
creation of a “national identity” points at the roots of the Northern Irish
sectarian Troubles as both communities are “imagined” and shaped by myth-
makers of the past. Hayden White observes in his essay “The Historical Text as
Literary Artefact”:
“Events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of
them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition,

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.

Lombard seems to sustain the same principles when asserting

that the way of creating history is to impose “a pattern on events that were
mostly casual and haphazard and shaping them into a narrative that is logical
and interesting.” (Making History, p. 8) Thus, considering White’s postmodern
theoretical view on history, Lombard’s BOOK can pass both as history and
story, reinforcing the contemporary theoretical view of history as multiplicity,
as mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events47. According to
White, “most historical sequences can be emplotted in a number of different
ways, so as to provide different interpretations of those events and to endow
them with different meanings”48. Lombard echoes this view in the play:
“I don’t believe that a period of history – a given space of time – my life – your
life – that it contains within it one ‘true’ interpretation just waiting to be mined.
But I do believe that it may contain within it several possible narratives: the life
of Hugh O’Neill can be told in many different ways. And those ways are
determined by the needs and the demands and the expectations of different
people and different eras.” (Making History, p. 16)

The main historical source of Brian Friel’s play is Seán

O’Faoláin’s biography of Hugh O’Neill, The Great O’Neill: A Biography of
Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, 1550-1616, published in 1942 as an illustration of
the revisionist trend in Irish history dominant in intellectual circles from that
period. O’Faoláin’s main goal was to write a definitive biography, to capture the
“real” O’Neill but, having completed his book, he admitted defeat and described
his narrative as a “popular” account of O’Neill’s life and times. For O’Faoláin
as for other revisionists of Irish history, the term “real” meant to capture a less
heroic image of the great heroes of the past. However, as Lombard observes in
the first scene of the play, “History has to be made – before it’s remade”
(Making History, p. 9), and thus the “historical” source of the play is already
tampered with, it is already manipulated in order to meet the necessities of the
people and of the time.49

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

As Richard Pine argues in his book The Diviner – The Art of

Brian Friel, Friel used the already artificial histories of others “in order to create
a possible world in which the exercise in understanding and expression can take
place”50. The playwright’s enterprise to bring a historical figure on stage and
examine the popular, heroic accounts of his deeds and their influence on
historical interpretation meets Field Day’s area of inquiry voiced by Seamus
Deane in his preface to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature:
“adaptations, readjustments and reorientations that are required of individuals
and groups who have undergone a traumatic cultural and political crisis so
fundamental that they must forge for themselves a new speech, a new history or
life story that would give it some rational or coherent form.”51

By revealing the myth-making process, Friel destroys the mythical basis of

O’Neill’s popular story, but, on the other hand, enhances the Earl’s humane
heroism, that of a man caught between written history and the reality of his life.
The play provides a Chinese box structure of making and
unmaking histories which proves, above all, that the time has come for enjoying
multiplicity and the greyness of in-between spaces instead of the black and/or
white determination of the continuous sectarian divide in Northern Ireland.
Walter Benjamin states in The Arcades Project that “every dialectically
presented historical circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in
which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played
out.”52 The structure of the play underlines the determining importance of these
indeterminacies: in the first act O’Neill’s contribution to History has not
happened yet, while the second act ends with the image of an O’Neill whose
contribution to History has already ended. Friel wants to show his audience that
history in its written form is always a version of the actual past defined by
Kevin Barry as “the notional mass of undifferentiated events”53. The actual past
is considered to be an imagined boundary for the attempt to write history in the
sense of “story” or “version”.
The generic idea for the play seems to come as a response to
O’Faoláin’s words in the preface of his book on O’Neill:

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

Set in 1591, Making History deals with “episodes” – fore and

after histories – in the life of Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone. After swearing
loyalty to Queen Elizabeth and marrying Mabel Bagenal, the daughter and sister
of two successive Queen’s Marshals, Hugh is forced to make a choice between
English and Irish culture, between the Crown and the old Gaelic clans. What
would be a “simple” choice for a Gaelic hero, becomes O’Neill’s dilemma,
determining the complexity of his character, as an individual, balancing between
his English education in Sir Sidney’s household, reinforced by his upper class
English accent; and his Gaelic background, with the possibility of becoming
“king” of Ireland. Paradoxically, it is exactly his English experience that makes
him the first choice in becoming the leader of the “nation”.
As Richard Pine observes, an already united and established
England had started, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, “its huge project of
translating the rest of the world into its image.”55 This dream of glory was
experienced by young O’Neill in the Sidney household where he apparently
meets Drake, Frobisher and his officers “on the eve of their first South
American voyage” (Making History, p. 34), another historical myth, similar to
Casimir’s “remembrance” of the famous people who set foot in the big house of
Ballybeg in Friel’s Aristocrats. In his dialogue with Tom, Casimir describes the
interior of the house in Ballybeg continuously connecting it to illustrious leaders
of history and to representatives of culture in order to provide a feeling of
legitimacy and give a certain hope to a space crumbling around him:

“CASIMIR: …And this (chaise-longue) is Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator –

tremendous horseman, O’Connell – see the mark of his riding-boots? And that’s
the fifty-eight –
TOM: The clock?
CASIMIR: Chopin sonata – third movement.
TOM: Oh.
CASIMIR: And this (candlestick) is George Moore, the writer – I wonder why
that’s George Moore. And this (book) is Tom Moore – you know – Byron’s
friend – (Sings) ‘Believe me if all those endearing young charms which I gaze on

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

If Casimir recreates his own personal history and that of his

family by bringing together images that determined the History and culture of
Ireland, O’Neill becomes a “creation” of History, of the English nobility who
prepared him to become “a leader of his people” (Making History, p. 35). Thus,
all the impossibilities construct a character full of controversies and interior
conflicts, caught between a Europe that is moving towards new ideas that match
his own reforming and modernizing mind; and the world of his roots, as
embodied by the character of Hugh O’Donnell, a Gaelic space of perpetual
conflict between clans for reasons as non-heroic as sheep:
“O’DONNELL: And another thing I want to talk about: the shit O’Doherty up
in Inishowen. Do you know what the wee get’s at, Hugh? Nipping down as far as
Killibegs, stealing our sheep and shipping them off to France! Running a bloody
big export business – with my sheep!” (Making History, p. 9)

Kathleen Hohenleitner observes that Friel adopts Seán

O’Faoláin’s characterization of Hugh O’Donnell in its entirety – popular hero,
pure “Gael”, hot-headed – “casting him as a comic, semi-Falstaffian figure
whose loyal devotion to Gaeldom and Catholicism sends him enthusiastically
into battle or exile”57. Friel was criticized58 for the character of O’Donnell
because it was considered that with O’Donnell, Friel brought on stage the well-
known image of the stage-Irishman, drunk, foul-mouthed and extremely
impulsive, focused on himself rather than on the problems of the country.
Christopher Murray argues that the character of Owen Roe O’Donnell is
completely changed in Making History as compared to the historical facts.
Having in mind the “truth” of history, O’Donnell was a capable soldier, whose
heroic escape from Dublin Castle on New Year’s Day in 1592 has lent him

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

legendary status. The O’Donnell we encounter in the play is far from a

legendary hero. He not only accentuates O’Neill’s “civilized” English education
but, more than that, O’Donnell appears as O’Neill’s alter ego. O’Donnell’s
character is set as a negative double to O’Neill, but he is also part of the de-
mythologizing morphology of the play. The threatening possibility for O’Neill
to become another “Gael” is always present as Sir Sidney observes when
quoting his friend, Anthony Trollope: “<Those Irishmen who live like subjects
play but as the fox which when you have him on a chain will seem tame; but if
he ever gets loose, he will be wild again.> So. Speak to that, Fox O’Neill.”
(Making History, p. 35). The duality of O’Neill’s character, his continuous
vacillation between English and Irish culture is further enhanced by his use of
language. He usually speaks in a lofty English accent but whenever his emotions
surface he immediately switches to his native Tyrone accent, thus proving the
deeply rooted connections between himself and the Irishness he ends up
representing as a historically “manufactured” Gaelic hero.
The two acts, Before Kinsale and After Kinsale, provide a rich
dialectic, reinforcing the confrontation between fore-history and after-history.
The demythologization and revisionism brought to the play from Seán
O’Faoláin’s book appear in the setting of the first act, O’Neill’s home in
Dungannon, County Tyrone. Unlike what it would be expected from a “hero”
and future “king”, O’Neill’s house is simple and comfortless: “the room is
spacious and scantly furnished: a large, refectory-type table; some chairs and
stools; a sideboard. No attempt at decoration.” (Making History, p. 1). This is
the space where history is in the making, where important encounters and
discussions take place, and it is also a space of a hero in the making.
During the first encounter between Lombard and O’Neill, the
latter becomes aware of an “unapproved” history being written about him, a
history that Lombard has already began to write without informing its main
protagonist, who immediately voices his dislike: “I don’t think I like this idea at
all.” (Making History, p. 5) Lombard is also delivering gifts from the Pope – a
large candelabra and an elegant birdcage – both in deep contrast with the
bareness and simplicity of O’Neill’s own home. The conversation that follows
between Lombard, O’Neill and O’Donnell outlines historically and culturally
the time and space of the play. Lombard delivers “news” from Rome and Spain:
the Pope wants to use O’Neill and his cause for a new crusade in the name of
the Catholic religion, while Philip II, the king of Spain, promises help for the
Irish cause. Lombard also mentions another book he is writing, a book on the
“Irish situation”, a type of popular history like many others that helped establish
the myth of Irishness Field Day is trying to deconstruct. However, by
mentioning the Commentarius, Friel blends historical reality within the fabric of
 Histories 47

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)

Lombard’s lofty, intellectual speech is contrasted with O’Donnell’s lines,

always intersecting Lombard’s but focusing exclusively on problems of the
home or of his continuous fights with the other chieftains – for apparently
“simple” reasons like sheep, which in his eyes acquire an overwhelming
importance. O’Donnell’s discourse is intended to continuously undermine and
disrupt Lombard’s speech, revealing Lombard’s tendency to manipulate events
by “translating” them into fabricated stories. The irony of the situation is at its
finest when O’Donnell’s sheep problems – which completely deconstruct
Lombard’s thesis on the religious reasons for the chieftains’ warrior identities –
are followed by Lombard’s news that “Europe is looking more and more to us
as the ideal springboard for the Counter-Reformation.” (Making History, p. 9)
The interplay between fact and fiction is a key preoccupation in
Brian Friel’s play. The master narrative of Irish history is subverted through the
invented subplots used to disturb the colonial perception of O’Neill’s figure59.
In addition to challenging the metanarratives of the historical Other, the long-
standing dramatic tradition of the association between Englishness as male and
Irishness as female60 is subverted in the play by reversing the established roles
and representing Englishness as female and Irishness as male. Mabel Bagenal,
O’Neill’s Upstart wife becomes the epitome of a borderline identity, crossing
the boundaries between the Englishness of her past and the Irishness of her
present. In the dialogue with her sister Mary, Mabel tries to bridge the gulf
between the THEY (the Irish) and the WE (the English). The two pronouns are
so important that the whole dialogue is structured around the dialectic between
the two, spiced with horticultural allusions that become symbols for creating
and mixing identities. Christopher Murray considers the meeting between Mabel
and Mary to be the key scene of the play, where Friel probes the effects of the
unusual marriage between an O’Neill and a Bagenal, thus reflecting on the

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)

The language becomes figurative as the dialogue between the

two sisters moves on, without creating what Peter Ure called “a parable” in
Shakespearean terms62. As Murray discusses it, the term parable does not work
for Friel’s imagery as he is describing a future possibility rather than a past or

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

The symbolic “impossibility” of cross-fertilization is brought up again in the

second act of the play, when Harry Hoveden. O’Neill’s English secretary,
describes the cause of Mabel’s death in childbirth as a “poisoning of the blood”
(Making History, p. 53). Although the cross breeding as process is possible, the
result is death.
Mabel’s position in the structure of the play is unusual for a
woman during the time span that the play covers. She is given a great deal of
political acuteness as she advises O’Neill not to accept the role created for him
by Lombard, that of the leader of Counter-Reformation in Europe. She considers
that accepting that role would simply mean “grabbing at religion as a coagulant
only because they have no other idea to inform them or to give them cohesion”
(Making History, p. 38). Mabel’s worries underline the problem of O’Neill
being written out of reality and into a history that does not represent him. His
political views are much broader than what Lombard wants to impose on him

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

Underlining his view on historiography, Lombard challenges the

idea of truth in history, considering that writing history equals writing a story.
The “making” of history cannot be defined by simple binary oppositions of the
type suggested by O’Neill (truth vs. lie). For Lombard, history is not necessarily
a lie but a convention, a pattern applied on a series of events:
“People think they just want to know the ‘facts’; they think they believe in some
sort of empirical truth, but what they really want is a story. And that’s what this
will be: the events of your life categorized and classified and then structured as
you would structure any story.” (Making History, p. 66)

Lombard’s theory reiterates George Steiner’s view on history as both an act of

translation and an act of creative lying, as a “selective use of the past tense”64. In
discussing Steiner’s influence on Friel, Helen Lojek points out that Making
History “both discusses and illustrates the extent to which to write history is
indeed to translate the past, to make a story”65.
The ending of the play provides an alternating pattern between
the two narratives, that of the “real” O’Neill and that of the historic figure. The
parallel chanting provides different levels of interpretation – O’Neill is reciting
his final submission to Queen Elizabeth while Lombard is reading from the first
pages of his history – and re-enforces the hybrid character of the play as the two
monologues interpenetrate in a “perfect” history, containing both the version of
the historian and that of the historical character written into history:

“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)

As a play about historiography and the definition of the Self on

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

The criticism directed against Making History and Translations

as creating dangerous myths in a society already determined by a constant
reference to a seemingly ideal past, derives from the criticism against Field Day.
The Company was seen as a cultural wing of the Nationalist movement, trying
to theatrically sugarcoat the ideological agenda of an extremist political vision
that had as a final goal the unification of the island of Ireland. The majority of
the company’s critics – Edna Longley, Sean Connolly or Lynda Henderson –
saw no difference between the hard-line theoretical and analytical views
expressed especially by Seamus Deane in the Field Day pamphlets and the
theatrical enterprise of the company. And indeed, quite often the ideology found
its way into the plays and the productions of the company. However, the
problem of history drawn upon by Friel especially in Making History belongs to
a wider, more general discussion on the relationship between historiography and
literature. The fact that Friel was part of the Field Day Theatre Company and
staged his play within the framework of the company made critics connect

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

immediately whatever he was writing with the ideology presented in the

pamphlets. The seemingly unbreakable relationship between Brian Friel and
Field Day which by now had a well-established theorist in the person of Seamus
Deane, came to an end only when the playwright tried to detach his new play of
1990, Dancing at Lughnasa, from the Field Day canon by offering it to the
Abbey Theatre. The story of the relationship between Friel and Field Day and
his attempt to exist outside the “history-making” machine of the company,
resembles, paradoxically, the relationship that defined Hugh O’Neill’s existence
within history and his continuous attempt to redefine himself outside the
boundaries of the historical society.

The “Making” of the Reviews

The dynamic morphology of the reviews provides a wide range
of critical comments on issues of history, historiography and the dramatic
representation of historical events, reflecting the problematic rendering of
history that constitutes the focus of Brian Friel’s play. Making History was
intended as a play about the creation of written history, the manipulation of
events by applying on them the patterns and conventions of the story. Ironically,
the reviews that accompanied the Field Day production of Making History, from
Northern Ireland to Dublin and then to London, follow Lombard’s theory of
writing the “proper” version of the event, as they move from an overtly political
interpretation to one focused on the artistic and dramaturgical characteristics of
the production.
The opening night in Derry’s Guildhall was considered to be
“magical” not necessarily because of the quality of the production but because
of the political determination of the venue. James Downey writes for The New
Nation in November 1988:
“The symbolism, you might say the magic, of the venue compensate for its
deficiencies. The acoustics are poor, the stage in my opinion too small – though
no smaller than those of some provincial venues where the play would be staged
subsequently.”

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.”

Notwithstanding the political and, ironically, historical

importance of Derry, the focus of the reviews should have been more on the
production rather than on the political underscores of the event. The reader has
the impression that what really matters is not the production – which in the
reviews of the premiere is given a second-hand importance – but the social and
political background against which the event is projected. The same political
tone is kept by the reviews after the premiere in Derry, the pros and cons
depending on the affiliation of the newspapers. For example, the Ulster Herald
writes in its 15 October 1988 issue about the Field Day production of Making
History staged in the Omagh Town Hall:
“The audience in Omagh were visibly taken aback by the English accent in
which O’Neill speaks, but then we realize that O’Neill was educated in England,
and the effect is all the more startling when the actor quite consciously lapses
into the occasional line in the Tyrone dialect.”

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.”

Moving further away, across the Irish Sea, on the Cottesloe

stage of the National in London, the reviews got more and more focused on the
production in all its elements: actors, staging, dramatic structure. This matches
Stephen Rea’s comments on the issue of the reviews comparing the local critics
with the British reviewers: “Sometimes local critics cannot get beyond the local
 Histories 55

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.”

Niall Tobin’s Lombard is seen as a mixture of sophisticated

clerical diplomat and “canny parish priest. The language of politics is his
currency and there is a sense that every word he utters is carefully chosen, held
up to the light, viewed from all angles, measured for effect before it is spoken.”
Critics have intensely scrutinized the two female characters, the
reviews acknowledging the importance of Mabel and Mary in the economy of
the play. McKeone notes that Clare Holman is a revelation in the role of Mabel,
showing “an uneasy mixture of New English determination and nervous
vulnerability”, while Emma Dewhurst is considered to have given a convincing
representation to the character of Mary as the representative of the New English
inflexibility towards the native culture. Although the majority of the reviews
were praising the acting, some critics considered the staging as being rather
static, lacking the political intensity that could have been drawn out from the
language, while others blamed the overtly intellectual text of the play as the
cause for the static production. Michael Billington writes for The Guardian on 7
December 1988:
“The scene where O’Neill harangues his sister-in-law, Mary Bagenal, and asks
whether he should ally himself with a Fermanagh rebel or observe his vowed
obeisance to England. The question is rhetorical but the whole point is that, by
driving the poor woman into a corner, O’Neill is illustrating the untenability of
his own position: by keeping Emma Dewhurst’s Mary center stage in a state of
unflinching immobility, Mr.Curtis drains the scene of its political tension.”

Christopher Edwards observes in The Spectator on 10 December

1988: “the relationship between O’Neill and Mabel is lacking emotional depth.
The intensity between them derives from a vivid and clearly articulated
awareness of their cultural and political differences”.
Brian Friel’s achievement with Making History underlines the
great interest shown by the Field Day Company to the problem of history,

68
Stephen Rea in an interview with Kevin Jackson, “Running Wilde on the Road”, The
Independent 15 September, 1989, p. 18.
56 Chapter One

historiography and historical representation in all the forms of artistic

expression. Playwrights like Thomas Kilroy, Stewart Parker, Terry Eagleton,
Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney in their plays written for the Company
continued this interest. All these correspond to the definition of a Field Day play
given by Seamus Deane in his “Introduction” to Nationalism, Colonialism and
Literature:
“…a political crisis produces a clash of loyalties that is analyzable but
irresolvable […] the dramatic analysis centers on anxieties of naming, speaking,
and voice and the relation of these to place, identity and self-realization.”69

Home Heroes: Stewart Parker’s Pentecost

In his collection of essays One-Way Street and Other Writings70,
Walter Benjamin discusses history as infinite in every direction and unfulfilled
in every instant. The image of history as labyrinth and the historical subject lost
in this labyrinth become much-used tropes in historical representation.
Notwithstanding the feeling of being lost, the subject becomes an insider to the
labyrinth, the structure being re-imagined as an area of humanist potential.
Surrounded by fragmented spaces, both psychological and physical, the subject
tries to recover its identity from the surrounding futility.
The situation in Northern Ireland is further problematized within
this framework. The cultural morphology of the province presents a society of
fixed forms and binarisms with an endlessly circular history dependent on an
oppositional relationship. The patriarchal binary system of representation
defines this imagined community (Protestant vs. Catholic; Nationalist vs.
Unionist) providing certain stability but denying any sense of real development.
The passivity of this view springs from a shared past, which appears as a kitsch
folk memory re-emerging in every gesture and at every moment of crisis. The
present political and cultural situation of Northern Ireland faces the paradox of
being bracketed off from reality and history, tending to work against re-
construction. Histories are imposed on Northern Ireland and the artificiality of
the province, which emerges from the perpetual collision of these histories,
appears in yet another binary opposition: Catholic vs. Protestant imagination.
Notwithstanding the presence of Northern Protestant directors
on the Field Day Theatre Company’s board – and it has to be acknowledged that
they were overwhelmingly nationalist in their views on the future of Ireland –

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

According to Stephen Daniels, a landscape is “a cultural

image”74 which is structuring and symbolizing the surrounding space. This does
not mean that landscapes are immaterial but they exist on the brink between the
“reality” of nature and the “reality” created by humans. The subject lost in the
labyrinth of the mind is determined by a further loss in the labyrinth of the city,
being locked into the city and its history. The cities appear as dependencies of
time; they become images which reflect transitoriness rather than stable
corporeal places. Italo Calvino describes the city as the “container” of the past
and the future, as a space created by memory and language:
“The city… does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written
in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the
steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment
marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. Memory is redundant: it
repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”75

To “read” the history of a settlement is an interpretative skill

dependent on a shifting, negotiated identification with the community which is
to be recognized. In creating a communal identity, the past is perceived as an
established touchstone rather than a narrative of schism and fracture. Instead of
uniting the fragmented elements of history in creating the identity of a nation,
the past is considered in its arbitrary “wholeness” from which the essence of an
identity can be drawn. As far as Belfast is concerned, in the absence of a
narrative linear thread to history, the self can only “read” the history of the city
by first being part of it and by further recognizing the futility of separation from
its organic, psychic wholeness.
The city and the history of Belfast overtly determine the lives of
the characters in Stewart Parker’s Pentecost. Marian, Lenny, Peter and Ruth are
all subject to the overwhelming pressure of the time, 1974, and the place,
Belfast. The city becomes fluid, perpetually changing. This image of the city
reminds one of the deep insights of Ciaran Carson’s poetry in Belfast Confetti:

“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

Today’s plan is already yesterday’s – the streets that were there

are gone.
And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons.

The linen backing is falling apart – the Falls Road hangs by a

thread.
When someone asks me where I live, I remember where I
used to live.
Someone asks me for directions, and I think again. I turn into
A side-street to try to throw off my shadow, and history is
changed.”76

From the changing map of the city, Parker creates a microcosm

of history and society in a house described as “a respectable working-class
‘parlour’ house”, built in the early years of this century. The building becomes a
witness to the making of history in Northern Ireland. The theatrical symbolism
of the house is present in the language of the characters. The home, the place of
belonging, becomes a symbol for the general issues discussed in the play: those
of leaving or staying – the guilt of escaping:
“RUTH (to Peter): You don’t know what’s been happening here. What the
people have gone through. How could you. You got out.”77

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

– is opposed to the a-historical character of the house, a-historical precisely

because it contains the history of a century, thus managing to escape the
“present-ness” of the conflict outside.
The physical image of the house is further enhanced by the
psychological and ultimately physical image of the ghost of Lily Matthews, the
former inhabitant of the house. The presence of the ghost is one of the first
elements of the surreal that Stewart Parker introduces in the play. He notes in
the Introduction to Three Plays for Ireland:
“Plays and ghosts have a lot in common. The energy which flows from some
intense moment of conflict in a particular time and place seems to activate them
both. Plays intend to achieve resolution, however, whilst ghosts appear to be
stuck fast in the quest for vengeance.”78

The furnishing of the interior space resembles the labyrinth of

the city and of the province, preserving the characteristic elements of the past:
“Everything is real except the proportions. The rooms are narrow, but the walls
climb up and disappear into the shadows above the stage. The kitchen in
particular is cluttered, almost suffocated, with the furnishings and bric-a-brac of
the first half of the century, all the original fixtures and fittings still being in
place. But in spite of now being shabby, musty, threadbare, it has all clearly been
the object of desperate, lifelong struggle for cleanliness, tidiness, orderliness –
godliness.” (Pentecost, p. 147)

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)

The house re-imagines Northern Ireland as the archetypal

“border country”, creating a sense of being on the borders of history as well as
on the borders of spatial development. In addition to the physical image, a
psychological space emerges, alluded to by the “badgers in the belfry”, where
the personal problems of the characters blend into the historical surroundings.
The map of Belfast is continuously changing but the characteristic element in
the “development” of the city is destruction, the annihilation of both spaces and
people. As imagined space and existence, the interregnum, term discussed by
Nadine Gordimer in her 1982 essay on South Africa, “Living in the
Interregnum”, fits Stewart’s image of Belfast: “historical coordinates do not fit
life any longer; new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but
to the ruled”82. Notwithstanding the fact that society exists in a time of change

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)

Recalling Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City, the intruders in

Parker’s play occupy the Protestant stronghold that Lenny has inherited from a

Penguin, 1989), p. 263.

 Histories 63

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)

The main confrontation of the play between Marian and Lily’s

ghost surpasses the personal spheres of the characters. The house itself, as a
possible façade for the established political power, is personified with the
introduction of the ghost. Dressed in a Sunday coat and hat and best handbag,
Lily appears, on the surface, as the protector, the keeper of the Protestant faith,
“the custodian of Belfast history”83. Opposed to Lily, Marian is the centrifugal
power of the play, determined by personal problems and tragic memories,
unable to forgive and forget. Lily, the centripetal power, is identified with the
power of a limited history. She is the embodiment of a century of struggles, of
death and despair. From the very beginning, Lily appears as the hovering image
of Protestant ideology. She puts on a mask used to represent, to reproduce an
idea, a history and a past.

“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)

“LILY: The devil is in this house...” (Pentecost, p. 180)

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)

However, Lily’s character is marked by a complexity that

surpasses the simplifying tropes of a tough woman that embodies the Protestant
ideology and who becomes “humanised” by the discovery of the secrets of her
life. From the moment she appears on stage, Lily, the ghost, insists that she is
more real than the intruder, Marian, and tries to “exorcise” her from the house
by singing Protestant hymns. The two women continuously exchange roles, the
haunting becoming the haunted and the other way round:
“MARIAN: You think you’re haunting me, don’t you. But you see it’s me that’s
actually haunting you. I’m not going to go away. There’s no curse or hymn that
can exorcise me. So you might as well just give me your blessing and make your
peace with me, Lily.” (Pentecost, p. 180)

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

165). Her historiographic, archaeological side breathes, in this case,

centrifugality. She wants to see the house on postcards, she wants people to
come and watch the history of her “nation” in a museum. The creation of an
artificial space of history does not display here a sense of wholeness and unity.
The museum breaks up the stability of the house transforming it into a
fragmented universe of designed history. Nevertheless, her own secrets, and the
discovery of Lily’s past which bares an uncanny similarity to her own – Marian
lost her baby, Christopher, while Lily gave up her baby – bring her back from
the track of history into a life determined by the need to re-imagine Lily’s
memory and thus to re-discover her own self.
Marian realizes the mistake of trying to freeze the moment of
history by transforming the house into a museum. She decides to re-imagine it
ito something belonging to both cultures.
“MARIAN: That was a wrong impulse. A mistaken idea. It would only have
been perpetuating a crime… condemning her to life indefinitely. I’m clearing
most of this out. Keep just the basics. Fixing it up. What this house needs most is
air and light.” (Pentecost, p. 202)

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

MARIAN: Which reality did you have in mind?

LENNY: Your own, Marian, your own reality, you’ve been talking to yourself,
you’ve been counting spoons, you’ve been babbling in tongues in the middle of
the night!” (Pentecost, p. 192)

The multiple realities perceived by the characters are reinforced

by Marian’s babbling in tongues. Parker dramatically assimilates the biblical
vision – the babbling in tongues at the presence and influence of the Holy Spirit
– into the psychology of pain and loss which characterizes the lives on stage,
particularly the women’s lives. Marian’s “realities” are determined not by the
presence of the Holy Spirit but by the pain of losing her child, by the conflict
between her and Lily and, finally, by realizing the similitude between herself
and the ghost. The character of Marian incorporates both Catholic and
Protestant Biblical visions transforming her into a viable link between the two
conflicting groups. Her name invokes the image of the Virgin, while the name
of her child, Christopher – the bearer of Christ – reminds us of the possibility of
translating, transposing the Christian faith across the divide between the two
communities. However, the death of the child, its unwillingness to live, projects
a dark picture towards any possibility of reconciliation. The remote horizon of
peace realized through religious belief is further darkened by the only remaining
replacement of the Holy Spirit, the hovering helicopters and their searchlights.
The spiritual flight towards higher spheres of understanding is broken by the
epitomes of war and surveillance. The world of humans is not observed by the
eye of God but by the surveillance light of the army helicopters.
Slowly, Marian becomes young Lily’s mirror-image, the Lily of
the passionate relationship with Alan Ferris, the English pilot, the Lily of the
painful abandoning of her child. The theme of childlessness becomes central in
the economy of the play. However, unlike the same image of childlessness that
appears in Brian Friel’s Making History, representing the impossibility of cross-
breeding – the fate of O’Neill and Mabel’s child being decided from the very
beginning, in Stewart Parker’s play the suffering of the women, both Marian
and Lily, brings a feeling of “sisterhood”, of shared motherly pain. This is the
feeling that brings a certain degree of unity between two characters so different
as far as their religious background is concerned.
The image of sterility can, at the same time, be interpreted on
the much larger scale of the external, political world surrounding the house. The
political sterility of the province, the public sterility of a broken community is
re-imagined in the microcosmic society of the inside, in the frustration of the
characters. However, all through the play, there is not much interaction between
the two spaces (the exterior/political and the interior/private). There are
moments when the historical space is intruding in the womb-like shelter
represented by the house: the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson’s speech at
 Histories 67

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

conflicting situation outside, of the Other that has to be included in the

resolution.
The narrative of the reviews of the premiere in Derry provides a
wide range of comments on Parker’s text and on the production itself. The
majority of the critics observed the problems raised by the last scene of the play
but, for different reasons including the political pressure of the venue and the by
then well-established name of the company, the reviewers opted out of a
thorough discussion of the weaknesses of both text and production.
Reviewing the premiere for The Sunday Tribune on 27
September 1987, Fintan O’Toole observed that the play became “more and
more evangelical, building towards the image of “being born again”, using the
language of the Bible with an intensity and fervour that belongs only to the
Protestant tradition” and presenting images which are felt that “they are being
hammered home with too much insistence”. Although O’Toole’s main problem
was with the text of Pentecost, he praised Patrick Mason’s production
considering that the performances of the actors were of a very high calibre.
Many of the reviews focus on the production and particularly on
the rendering of the final scene of the play and yet fail to give a convincing
analysis of it. Treacy Fitzgerald notes in the Dublin Opinion:
“…the religious, musical and emblematic imagery tends, particularly during the
Second Act of the play, to be excessively underlined. In fact, the biblical
apocalyptic language becomes oppressive and, for some, a little embarrassing.”

Discussing the complexity of the performance, John Keyes

writes for the Fortnight: “the direction, by Patrick Mason, is fluid and easy,
working with the text, following its moves and arguments and exhibiting it in
tough and tension-filled stage pictures”. The importance acquired by the
production and by the relationship between the director and the playwright is
underlined by Claudia W. Harris in Theatre Ireland in November 1987.
However, she notes the incongruities between this particular production and the
power of Stewart Parker’s text:
“More than any other director, Patrick Mason included Parker in rehearsals, and
yet directions in the script were not fully realized. For instance, the ending is still
not wholly satisfying – not because it’s too strong but because it’s not strong
enough. When Marian declares, “I want to live now, I want this house to live.
We have committed sacrilege enough on life, in this place, in these times.” (p.
73), she sits staring into the fire as she has throughout the play. That statement
calls for a new action. The touch from Lenny might help, if it were more
observable, but then he turns his back on the group and goes out on to the porch
to play his trombone. There is not the coming together in the house which
Parker’s directions indicate, with Lenny and Peter playing together and Ruth
70 Chapter One

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

The problem of identity, still widely disputed within the

framework of Irish Studies, constituted one of the most important elements of
the Field Day policy. As the Company was defined by critics to be “a
quintessentially Irish phenomenon”, the question arises: what does it mean to be
“quintessentially Irish” and how can the company and its achievements
dissociate themselves from the traditional definitions of Irish identity.
Ireland’s colonial experience, however disputed it might be by
other, more distant colonies of the British Empire1, has left its mark upon the
way in which identity in general and Irish identity in particular are discussed
within Irish Studies. An ancient language, lost and then re-discovered through
nationalist language movements, an Elizabethan plantation which engendered
the rise of controversial heroes like Hugh O’Neill, famines and hunger strikes
blamed on the British colonizers, all these historical events provided the basis
for a vision of Irish identity closely related to Britain as the colonial power.
Notwithstanding the continuous attempts to move away from Britain as much as
physically and politically possible, the established definitions of Irish identities
were always connected to a need of being with or against the British Empire.
The overwhelming characteristic of the identity discourse was and still is a
national obsession with self-definition and recognition, an attempt to renegotiate
the terms in which Irishness and Irish identity were portrayed within the British
colonial discourse. Field Day’s main concern regarding identity was to react
against the established stereotypes of Irishness based on worn oppositions with
new concepts of Irish writing and politics, “unblemished by Irishness, but
securely Irish”2.
1980, the year when Field Day was created, saw an aggravation
of the Northern Irish “Troubles”. The political solutions that everybody awaited
seemed to be lost in the maze of futile discussions. The two conflicting

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

The main “problem” with Northern Ireland is that two myths of

origin meet in an almost irreconcilable clash. The Catholic/Nationalist
community was threatened with destruction from outside by the Elizabethan
plantation, only to feel the same threat from the inside after the colonizing
process. On the other hand, the Protestant/Unionist community, enjoying the
“mythical” justification of the Empire, feels threatened within the same space by
a local community which enjoys the mythical justification of the land. It is
interesting to observe, for example, the interpenetration of mythical elements
between the two communities, the Red Hand of Ulster and the heroic image of
Cú Chulainn being used by both to support their creed.
Thus, the original potential of any genuine myth will always
exceed the limits of a particular community or nation, “the mythos of any
community is the bearer of something which exceeds its own frontiers; it is the
bearer of other possible worlds”5. However, the possible worlds discovered by
myths in Northern Ireland are related to segregation and violence, both
communities using the ancient myths to support their innate right to the space
they inhabit. Theoretically, there is a very strong relationship between the
possible worlds opened up by the multiplicity of myth and the hybrid identities
that seem to define the post-modern existence of contemporary communities.
The Northern Irish identities, however, remain stuck in a limbo between the
traditional hyphenated identities and the new hybrid identities, neither of the
two communities willing to truly understand and de-code the possible worlds
opened up by the re-actualization of myth.
The Field Day pamphlets recognized the overwhelming
importance of myth in the definition of Irish identities and considered that one
of the solutions for the impasse in which Northern Ireland was immersed would
be to de-mythologize the established mythical discourse by interpreting it, by
making it historical and ultimately political. Seamus Deane observed:
“…in front of a system, the first rule is to historicize. The second rule is to
recognize that everything is political in the broadest sense. Culture is the zone of
the political. Central systems have always used culture as means of legitimizing
their status quo.” 6

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

Notwithstanding the continuous support for a new, plural

identity for Northern Ireland within the wider horizon of a modern Europe, by
1992 Seamus Deane considered that “pluralism is one of those myths that
liberalism generates periodically every five or ten years. I don’t think pluralism
is an answer to anything”7. The fact that Deane challenges pluralism itself,
integrating it within the “evil” binary structures of the traditional culture as a
decoy that tradition uses to “challenge itself”, could point towards a failed
attempt, on the company’s part, to impose a different, plural vision of Irish
identity through the plays put on stage. However, Deane acknowledges this
failure, blaming it on the personal shortcomings of the directors, but mostly on
the political and historical conditions in Northern Ireland and the Republic,
which resisted a healthy opening towards multiplicity. Another reason for the
failure of implementing a multifarious view of identity within Irish culture is
considered to be the continuous need for self-mythologization seen as protection
against the assimilative power of the colonizer. Deane sees this tendency
towards ritual and myth as a “sticky swarm” of terms that needs “a much-
deserved hammering”. He acknowledges the potential dangers of re-thinking
these mythologies, as they might be interpreted as manipulations of the myth
rather than a mythologizing process. And indeed, Field Day has been accused of
re-creating dangerous myths through its plays and pamphlets, thus sustaining the
politics of the Nationalist movement. Seamus Deane himself fired up this
criticism by arguing that there is no innocent interpretation and that reading and
writing is never innocent, belonging to culturally specific situations and
moments.
Discussing the tendency of certain cultures, especially
postcolonial, to imagine a virtual space that could provide the basis for the re-
creation of a new culture, Michel Foucault defines the term “heterotopia”8 as a
“perfect” space that engenders a process referred to as “the heterotopia of the
mirror”, in which the Self reconstitutes itself into reality. The analysis of three
of the Field Day “identity plays” will focus on the “heterotopia of the mirror”,
the way in which these plays reflect the construction of virtual identities that
emanate from the “safe” haven of mythology or from an ideal image of power
induced by the structure of the colonial centre.
Notwithstanding the fact that the issue of identity, like that of
history, is overwhelming in almost all of the Field Day plays, I will only discuss
Thomas Kilroy’s Double Cross and The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre

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.

Doublings: Thomas Kilroy’s Double Cross

In an article included in the collection Theatre Stuff: Critical
Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, Thomas Kilroy observed:
“…the writer who is born into a traditional culture and lives to see it undergo
massive change has a peculiar problem in bridging the present and the past. My
own may be the last generation with such a sense of continuity with the past,
particularly the immediate past.”9

The problems of representing the past in such a traditional

culture require a special vision of history, a vision determined by the continuous
interplay between fact and fiction, between appearance and reality. Thomas
Kilroy’s identity plays raise numerous issues concerning the relationship
between audience and the events presented on stage, the necessity of disrupting
the traditional historical narrative with fictitious sub-plots in order to address
contemporary problems. Kilroy’s plays engage with a wide range of problems,
placing at the centre of his theatrical vision the idea of constructing individual
identities from the conflict between the public image and the private self. The
conflicts he uses in delineating individualities reveal features of an artificially
constructed unity of the self. There is always a certain doubleness about

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

Kilroy’s historical figures – doubleness also observed in Brian Friel’s play

Making History – but the most important issue about his characters is the
conflictual construction of their identities. These always involve Irishness as a
vital component which is constantly challenged by another identity, built up
from ready-made social definitions, a secure pseudo-identity which helps them
erase their Irish origins effectively.
This artificial image is the one exposed by the playwright, as a
mask that hides the true self of the character. But the question arises: is there a
“true” self that could be attributed to these characters or, quite on the contrary,
the Irishness they seem to possess is just another mask used as an illusionary
basis for the creation of artificial selves. The society in general forces
individuals to define themselves in social terms, but with Kilroy’s characters
there is always much more involved: their hypothetic self, the Irishness they
historically and biographically embody, urges them to construct an image
completely opposed to the original and based on language and power. The
burden of a colonial, fragmented sense of Irishness is replaced by the burden of
pretending to fit the society of the oppressor, the society of power. The role of
the victim is exchanged for a role of power not by building on the basis of their
original identities, but by completely denying those in an attempt to enter the
power society and maybe to disrupt it from the inside. Kilroy’s problematic
characters are constantly haunted by ideas of belonging and treason. Their
existence is defined by a liminal state, in-between identities, always balancing
between reality and the fiction they created for themselves, and most of the
times, between Ireland and England. However, it is not easy to give up the
identities they were born with and thus they are faced with the problematic issue
of treason.
Margret Boveri discusses the problem of treason in her book
Treason in the Twentieth Century, where she observes that, by definition,
traitors are “externally two-faced and internally divided”10. These individuals
are usually challenged by the problem of homelessness, where home involves
the deeper issue of belonging. Boveri notes the existence of several traitors who
“learned to love two countries and were torn between their allegiances” or the
“border people” who were neither exactly homeless nor displaced in the
ordinary sense of the word but “are torn between the two cultures which pull at
them”11.
It is not by chance that Thomas Kilroy chose William Joyce and
Brendan Bracken as main characters in a play like Double Cross, which
discusses problems of belonging and identity. William Joyce came from a

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.”

This structure of power is discussed by philosopher Michel Foucault in relation

to issues of power and knowledge, of seeing and being seen. In his work
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault describes the
implications of “Panopticism”:
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even
if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to
render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be
a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person
who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power
situation of which they are themselves the bearers. The Panopticon is a machine
for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally
seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever
being seen.”15

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as the ideal structure of power reinforces the

position of these characters as that of the prisoner who becomes observer in the
Central Tower by denying his previous existence. Once integrated in the power
structure, the newly constructed self is challenged not only by his previous
existence as prisoner but also by the difficulties he faces in his attempt to be

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

accepted within the power structure. There is a continuous overlapping between

the roles they take up and the real life that comes back to haunt them.
Double Cross presents two historical characters “with one foot
in Ireland and the other one in England”, as Stephen Rea put it, characters
fighting to belong to the powerful centre by mimicking the postures of the
British colonial power, but being always reminded of the fact that they actually
belonged to the colonized OTHER that they continuously denied. Thus, with its
focus on the problem of fictionalising identity, and treason seen as a balance
between Ireland and England, Double Cross responds to the view, voiced by
Rea above, of what a Field Day play should be.
Double Cross was first produced in Derry’s Guildhall as part of
the annual Field Day enterprise on 13 February 1986. According to Anthony
Roche, “the play corresponds to the Field Day debates: relation between
language and identity, crossing of established boundaries, betraying of self and
others”16. It also lines up with Kilroy’s previous plays, “debating the notions of
personal freedom, resisting the pressures of social conformity and marking out a
space of existential possibility”17. Kilroy wrote in an Introduction to the 1994
edition of the play:
“I wanted to write a play about nationalism and in a real sense Double Cross
derives from the whole debate about national identity which Field Day did so
much to promote in the 70s and 80s.”

Paradoxically or not, if we think about the Field Day Theatre Company’s

dismemberment and Kilroy’s absence from the board of directors, by 1997
Kilroy’s opinion about the creation of Double Cross changes as he moves away
from Field Day and more towards his own personal reasons for the play. He
states in an interview with Paul Brennan and Thierry Dubost:
“That particular play, Double Cross, was written out of a kind of rage. A rage
against the whole nature of fascism. A rage against the kind of power residing in
role-playing, in costuming, in uniforms, a rage against militarism, and I was
writing about two characters, two figures, that really came out of anger in me.
Now you can’t actually produce something worthwhile on that level. So, what
actually happened to me was that I had to find within myself a lot of empathy for
these two individuals, or at least understanding, or whatever. But the distancing I

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

jester entertaining Winston Churchill. The rapid staccato of the dialogue

between the two expresses concerns with the problems of acting and doubling.
Both characters acknowledge the deceitful image of the OTHER, the fact that
the images of power that they represent were created through acting and the
manipulation of the images and of the language of the power structures.
Towards the end of the dialogue, the constructed identities of the two characters
are so blurred that they overlap and utter the same questions using almost the
same words:

“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)

This overlapping of identities opens up a new phase in the narrative structure of

the play. The two narrators, an Actor and an Actress, dressed in anonymous
coats, appear on stage to provide the audience with the “objective” stories of
Bracken and Joyce. There is an obvious discrepancy between the Bracken/Joyce
and the Actor/Actress couples. If Bracken and Joyce are over-determined,
building identity upon identity just to deny their origins, the two Actors are
presented as the anonymous voices of history, belonging to a collective identity,
to the universal flow of the Historical Voice and thus able to take up different
roles. Being part of the collective identity of history gives the two narrators
more substance than Bracken and Joyce who completely re-invent themselves,
gradually becoming identifiable with the cardboard figures hanging above the
stage. As characters, Bracken and Joyce line up with Kilroy’s constant
assumption that “the notion of character has disintegrated and with it the
reliability of speech as an expression of a stable self”24. The only stable selves in
the play, however artificially constructed, are the Actor and the Actress as their
speech is the enacted discourse of history, their identity is that of the “players”
putting on the mask of theatre, thus keeping their own identities protected from
the cruel light of the public image. They play the role of the mouthpieces of
history recounting somebody else’s existence.
The problems of identity discussed in the play are further
complicated by the introduction of the characters Actor and Actress. The fact
that they are defined by the roles they play emphasizes the theoretical

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

impossibility of identifying the “real”, “genuine” Self. Because, as actors, they

take up a multiplicity of roles, their “true” identity is invisible and impossible to
grasp. By opposing them to the two main characters, Kilroy questions the
viability of the discourse that played a determining part in the ideological
definition of Field Day as theatre company. The story the Actor and Actress
begin to lay out in front of the audience is that of “two men who invented
themselves” (Double Cross, p. 19). In a clinical style, they present the reasons
for this self-invention:

“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)

Bracken even contradicts the playwright himself by amending the fictional

meeting between Bracken and Joyce that will be acted out at the end of the play.
“BRACKEN: …And that’s another thing. This fellow Joyce. Never met the
chap. I want to make that perfectly clear, because you will hear otherwise later
on.” (Double Cross, p. 20)

The audience witnesses a continuous interpenetration between different layers

of reality: history penetrates fiction and fiction penetrates the realm of
performance in a need to redefine the boundaries of the world. The English
86 Chapter Two

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

troubled by Bracken’s tendency towards fictionalising his life, thus incidentally

including her own life in the story: “I have to say what is what. I can’t abide
unreality... you spend your life constantly evading, constantly avoiding,
constantly inventing”. (Double Cross, p. 27) Bracken’s explanation for his
continuous “embroidering” upon reality is related to his initial position as the
colonized “victim”, as the outsider lured by the centre. His main reason for his
made-up “reality” is the need for space and freedom, “both patriotism and
treason being fuelled by the same hunger for space”. (Double Cross, p. 28)
Paradoxically, these goals are reached by entrapping himself in the power
structures of British society. The space he needs is achieved by the “hiving-off”
of the Other, seen as “some tyrannical shadow, some dark father” (Double
Cross, p. 28) and thus the freedom is annulled as the individual is fragmented,
disturbed by the appearance of a necessary counterpart.
Unfortunately for Bracken and for Joyce for that matter, they got
stuck in a limbo between the two states: the Other is not completely vanquished
and the space so badly needed is populated by the ghosts of the past. This
situation fragments the individual in such a way, as it is almost impossible to
determine the reality of the Self. There are layers and layers of fictionality self-
imposed on the character, created through the language of the oppressor.
Bracken shapes himself in the form of a “work of art”, considering that only
through his re-invention he can break free from his previous life, from his
loathed past. However, Popsie decries the notion of self-invention, complaining
that the “real” Brendan slips away every time she tries to reach him: “Every
time I try to reach you, yet another Brendan Bracken is talked into existence.
Like a distracting mushroom”. (Double Cross, p. 28)
For Bracken, language and above all the faithful appropriation
of the English language bears an overwhelming importance in the re-invention
of his character. Thus, when Popsie terms his way of speaking “aboriginal” he
feels his self-built structure shake and almost tumble to the ground. Bracken
himself is aware that his entire self-image is built on language: “It (language) is
what makes me what I am! Without it, I am nothing!”. (Double Cross, p. 30) By
attacking his way of speaking, Popsie forces Bracken to face “a gross version of
reality”, a true image of himself.
Lord Castlerosse, a Sunday Express gossip columnist, underlines
the duality of the Irish and their need to be accepted in the world of imperial
power. He is another character pretending to be more English than the English
and trying to transform his past into an image favoured by the high society. The
determining difference between the two characters is that while Bracken wants
to completely erase his past, Lord Castlerosse intends to change his country,
Ireland, and re-invent it in the form of “another” England:
 Identities 89

“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

mixes entertainment and politics. Bracken created a bogus social personality to

exploit others for profit and power, however, this did not create an actual
position of power but rather a trap devised by the society, which exploited him
by establishing the role he must play and the accents he must adopt.
The last scene of The Bracken Play is extremely important in the
economy of the play as we witness the imminent transformation of Bracken into
Joyce. The Actor and the Actress enter the stage and change the cardboard
figures, thus preparing the space for the transformation. They help Bracken to
disrobe to Joyce: “beneath the overcoat there is the fascist black shirt and tie.
Spectacles removed. Wig removed to a close-cropped hair. A scar is exposed
the full length of the face.” (Double Cross, p. 47) The choice of the playwright
to have this transformation on stage reinforces, for the audience, the illusory
notion of identity laid bare by this metatheatrical device. The difference
between the two characters lies only in costuming, in pretending and acting. To
create a connection between the two parts of the play, the final scene of The
Bracken Play builds up a space of crossing, of borderline between the two sides
of the Self.
After disrobing, the actor who plays Joyce now appears in the
middle of a crowd in Manchester, advocating the teachings of Oswald Mosley’s
British Union of Fascists. By allocating Joyce a position already within the
British power structures, Kilroy determines a close spatial relationship between
the two characters. Joyce’s appearance on stage at the start of his play may bear
a double interpretation: that of continuation, the play of the Self is continued by
the play of the Other, both being treated as inseparable halves of the same being.
The second interpretation might be that of breaking the structures, of reacting
against the compliance of Bracken’s life within the British political society.
Both interpretations acknowledge the identity of the two characters, their
external sameness, as far as their place of origin is concerned, and their interior,
self-identification.
The only difference one can notice in Joyce’s first appearance as
compared to Bracken’s behaviour in the first part of Double Cross is the
conviction with which he presents his beliefs. In his long monologue advocating
the evils of the Jewish community, related to richness, power and revolution,
Joyce overpasses Bracken in his fierce fanaticism to hide his own identity. Joyce
begins to focus on an extremist political structure in his wish to make England
“pure”, without realizing that he is convicting himself as an outsider. Joyce
possesses a power present in his speech, his belief in extremism and his
attraction towards treason being apparent from his teenage years in Ireland
when, together with his father, he was a spy for the Black and Tans. As far as
the development of the two characters is concerned, it has to be observed that
The Joyce Play is determined by a strong character with complex relationships
 Identities 91

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

The meeting between Beaverbrook and Joyce comes as a mirror

image, as another doubling of the meeting between Bracken and the same
Beaverbrook in The Bracken Play. The Lord’s obsession with origins and
nationality makes him visit Joyce in prison only to find out about “the profound
fidelities produced by treason” (Double Cross, p. 74). The problem of treason
and the issues raised by it are discussed once again, now in a direct conversation
between the two characters. Beaverbrook, a journalist who is aware of the
power of the spoken and written word – “I’ve changed the government in this
country through my printed words. It depends on the ability to use words to
create power.” (Double Cross, p. 76) – is intrigued by the possibilities created
by treason and by the philosophy behind it. He relates everything to origins and
identity, observing the fact that he almost lost Brendan Bracken’s friendship
only because he started exploring his birthplace. At a certain extent,
Beaverbrook makes a connection between Joyce and Bracken as far as their
concepts of identity and belonging are concerned. The problem of identity is
redefined as one of the main issues of the play, having a determining role in the
creation of both Bracken and Joyce. Their view on identity differs from the
classical image of the stable self, the play advocating the instability of identities
in a world dominated by the WORD. “Identity can be a fiction” (Double Cross,
p. 76), states Beaverbrook at the end of his meeting with Joyce, a fiction that has
been created for and by the two main characters all through the play in their
need to bypass their inherited identities and to create something else, a new
identity that should allow their entrance into the structures of power.
The final scene of the play brings Joyce and Bracken together on
stage, mirroring the beginning and thus finalizing the circularity of the play. The
playwright uses the same video projection technique to bring Bracken on stage:
“On the video Bracken appears as if behind bars or a grille of iron.” (Double
Cross, p. 78). The meeting is supposed to take place in Joyce’s prison, however,
the audience knows from the beginning of The Bracken Play that they never
met, according to Bracken himself. Thus, the mood of the scene is one of
“reverie”, of a dream sequence that creates a surreal image in the final instances
of the play. Bracken tends to identify Joyce with the brother, the hateful double
that troubled him for a lifetime. The theme of the continuous search – “I have
searched everywhere else. I searched the streets. I have only begun the search.”
(Double Cross, p. 78) – reinforces the image of the lost soul, migrating from one
place to another in order to find his identity. After years of pretending and
fictional creations of identity, Bracken begins his search for his true Self in an
attempt to find his brother whom he has always avoided. With Joyce’s
conviction and death, Bracken is refused the comfort of having a double, a
shield that he could always use in protecting his own self by projecting his
negativity onto the Other.
 Identities 95

Through the issues discussed, Thomas Kilroy’s play, however

de-constructive it might be, manages to become an integral part of the Field Day
enterprise. Brian Friel considered that Double Cross challenges questions of
“betrayal and an exploration of the necessities of treason” and thus enters the
“canon” of the company, being considered the second “core text” after Friel’s
Translations. Duality and fragmentation represent ideological doubles in the
Field Day policy and Thomas Kilroy intends to destabilize the apparent balance
between the two. The Field Day production, directed by Jim Sheridan, seems to
have solved, at least partially, the controversial problems of identity emerging in
the play by using innovative techniques. However, the identity discourse that
surfaces both in the text and in the production, relates back to the ideological
texts of the company, the problems of identity creation in Northern Ireland and
the voicing of this process in the Field Day plays. Notwithstanding, Kilroy
reaches even deeper into the structures of Field Day with his second play for the
company, The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre.

Staging Identities: Thomas Kilroy’s

The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre
Seamus Deane considered that “in order to address the disorders
of Northern Ireland it is essential first to see them as human problems and then
to think about the roots from which they spring”26. These times of political
trouble and social unrest proved to be vital not only for the development of the
Field Day Theatre Company but also for the new artistic tendencies that Irish
and Northern Irish playwrights started to build within the framework of their
plays. Stewart Parker observed in his Dramatis Personae:
“If ever a time and place cried out for the solace and rigour and passionate
rejoinder of great drama, it is here and now. There is a whole culture to be
achieved. The politicians, visionless almost to a man, are withdrawing into their
sectarian stockades. It falls to the artists to construct a working model of
wholeness by means of which this society can begin to hold up its head in the
world.”27

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

This urge to create a different form of artistic expression by

constructing a national culture at the same time, was taken up by Thomas Kilroy
whose first play for Field Day, Double Cross, proved to be a success both in
Ireland and the UK and provided Stephen Rea with the possibility of playing a
double role, that of Brendan Bracken and William Joyce. Kilroy’s next play for
Field Day tried to focus not only on the political and historical issues
surrounding and haunting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but also on the
postmodern ways of expressing and creating artistic meaning.
The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre is, on the surface, a
tragic-comedy about theatre itself and the power of performance in a world at
war. During the Second World War, a travelling theatre company run by
Madam MacAdam arrives from a war-tormented Belfast into the apparently
peaceful and neutral town of Mullingar in the Irish Free State. The actors and
the locals interact within a scenario having at its basis two main ideas that
determined the Shakespearean vision of theatre: “all the world’s a stage” and
“the stage of fools”. All through the play there is a constant confusion between
reality and illusion on and off stage, the interaction between players and
audience being structured in a Chinese-box style by creating plays within plays
and illusions within illusions. Everything on stage appears to be a simulacrum,
where all different elements are put together in a collage that surpasses reality.
The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre goes towards the
type of postmodern theatrical thinking that brings together different traditional
techniques and new ways of theatrical expression in such a way as to make the
audience recognize both the new elements of creation and the historical and
political ideas embedded within this new frame. Thus, in this play Kilroy uses
“theatrics and transvestism as a means of interrogating questions of identity”28
and as tools to expose the codes constructing everyday discourse. In addition,
through The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, Kilroy de-constructs the
image that Field Day created of themselves as a travelling theatre with the
greater plan of taking over or, at least, of influencing the established master
narrative of culture both in Northern Ireland and the Republic. I would venture
to argue that this “hidden” critique that often surfaces in the text of the play is
one of the main causes for the play’s almost complete failure in production. The
Madame… incorporates a multitude of issues and discourses that can be easily
related back to the Field Day enterprise: the idea of the travelling company, the
necessity the members of the company feel to regain the greatness of the past by
working against the established trends, the discussions on the role of the theatre
in a conflict zone.

28
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p.
209.
 Identities 97

However, Thomas Kilroy sometimes changes the tone of the

discourse from a dramatic account of the problems faced by the company in a
zone of conflict, to an ironic rendering of their futile efforts, in certain instances
referring almost directly to Field Day’s choice of plays. Lyle Jones, the main
actor of the imaginary theatre company run by Madame MacAdam, advocates a
position that sustains, above all, the importance of performance. For him, theatre
means acting, but the actors cannot exist without the audience and thus they
have to satisfy every need or wish the spectators might have:
“We actors are the creation of our audiences. They create us nightly. We exist
only in their imaginations. When they walk out of the theatre we cease to exist.
We become nonentities once more. Just like everyone else.”29

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

reinforcing the key preoccupation of his theatre: the continuous interplay

between history and artifice, between appearance and reality.
Kilroy’s intention to build an artificial world with disturbing
features of reality evokes Baudrillard’s “simulacrum”. In Simulations31, Jean
Baudrillard observes that simulation and simulacrum represent the generation by
models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The main idea behind the
term “simulacra” is that the territory, the “wild” unmapped existence no longer
precedes the map; it is the map, the artificial boundary, the bracketing that
precedes the territory within brackets. The real is produced from miniature units,
from matrices, memory banks and command models.
The ghostly space created at the beginning of the play is under
surveillance, this time not from the helicopter searchlights as in Stewart Parker’s
Pentecost, but from the bombers hovering above. The “distant sound of a
bomber approaching” “serves to set free the play from one fixed place and
moves it into a border zone of threat and uncertainty”32. This borderline space is
characteristic for the artistic vision of postmodernism: there are spaces of
indeterminacy and distress where the two forces defining them – the centrifugal
and centripetal forces – are combined in creating a theatrical vision of “reality”.
It is difficult to define the actual position of the performance within the
established rules of theatrical perception given the multiple layers of aesthetic
production that spring to life from the very first scene.
The brightly painted van of the Madam MacAdam Travelling
Theatre appears on stage creating the illusion of theatre within theatre. The
metatheatrical device of bringing on stage another theatre with its own audience
doubles the accepted relationship between audience and production. The duality
of the structures is a characteristic of Kilroy’s plays. His characters always
balance between reality and fantasy, between being performers and individuals.
Identities are created through a mixture of roles and real life. Thus, there is a
constant communication between the production and the audience in an attempt
to delineate the possible structures of the performance.
The director and lead-actress of the company, Madame
MacAdam, faces the audience in the stalls and lays bare the production to
follow. Standing at the footlights, on the edge between the stage and the
audience, between reality and fiction, Madame MacAdam takes up the role of
the omniscient narrator. She shares with the audience the insights of theatre and
performance in times of conflict, be that the Second World War of the stage

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)

intertwine in a manifesto on the place of theatre within a world of simulacra and

fragmentation.
Following Madame MacAdam’s prologue, the first scene opens
with the appearance on stage of a line of Local Defence Force (LDF: Home
Guard), led by Squadron Leader Bourke, otherwise the town baker, “a fat man
with agitated moustache” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 2). Bourke and the
LDF men may initially be regarded as comic, gag-like characters, but, as the
play unfolds, it becomes obvious that Bourke and his men are intended, through
their actions, to raise questions concerning costuming and the power that the
uniform confers to individuals. All through the play we are presented with a
parallel discussion on the issue of costuming within the framework of the binary
opposition public/private. On the one hand, the actors and their relationship with
costumes and acting and, on the other hand, the security that the military
uniform offers to the ones who wear it.
In many of his plays, Thomas Kilroy is concerned with the
problems faced by the individual in relation with the public and social pressures.
He observed: “I am fascinated and often appalled by what happens when the
intense, concentrated hopes, fears, beliefs of the private person are subjected to
100 Chapter Two

the fragmenting, diffusionary effects of public life.”33 In the case of The

Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, the presence of the uniforms seems to
unleash the most violent human instincts by conferring the safety and the
immunity, which come from the function they assign. In a book on cross-
dressing34, Marjorie Garber argues that “dress codes” in society “had as their
apparent motivation the imposition of discipline’ and also a sense of hierarchy,
ordaining a certain set of behaviours which she terms ‘vestimentary’”.35
In Kilroy’s play, the “vestimentary” behaviour of Bun and his
men opens up the problem of militarization and the manipulation of power
allowed by the wearing of the uniform. The simple fact that they are wearing
uniforms gives them the power to dominate and control. As a character, Bourke
can be analysed along two very well defined lines. He is the fanatic Squadron
Leader Bourke and the nice town baker Bun. There is no in-between. Bourke’s
two personalities do not mix because the uniform is acting as a shield and as a
threshold, a portal that defines his double existence: “In this uniform I’m not
Bun Bourke. I’m Squad Leader Bourke.”(The Madame MacAdam…, p. 2).
Madame MacAdam, as a director, actress and observer, knows
exactly how costuming transforms one character into another:
“They are simply undressing. Casting off a role, putting on another. You mustn’t
be afraid, child. These are our demons. Pathetic, stunted, dangerous little men.
I’m afraid that is another lesson to be learned from theatre. Once one puts on a
uniform one is in danger of unleashing one’s violence.” (The Madame
MacAdam…, p. 66-67)

In his commentary on the problematic of the Self in Thomas Kilroy’s plays,

Thierry Dubost observes:
“Behind Bourke’s grotesque military definition of himself lies a challenge to the
pertinence of establishing immutable, predefined categories of people. Bourke’s
willingness to lose all sense of humanity by failing to recognize a friend as a
friend because he happens to belong to a different, hierarchical social group, has
political implications as it re-enacts tensions between opposed cultural groups in
Northern Ireland.”36

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

The uniform that gives Bourke power becomes more than a

general costuming incident, being identified with the troubles in Northern
Ireland. The apparent grotesque innocence of the LDF men’s actions is
destroyed by the appearance of Bourke and his men in Nazi uniforms, as they
present themselves in front of Rabe, the foreigner, the outsider, the Jew.
Notwithstanding his apparent two-dimensional character,
Bourke becomes more and more dangerous: a simple, and initially comic theft is
transformed into the vivid image of dictatorship and tyranny. After encouraging
his LDF men to steal the actors’ costumes, Bourke “swaggers” on with a crown
on his head. If the uniform was giving him the illusion of local power, the crown
makes him aspire to much more and he starts by standing up to the Sergeant:

“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 Sergeant appears as a more humane character. If Bourke seems to cross

easily between the persona of Bun Bourke, the baker, and his military identity,
Squadron Leader Bourke, the Sergeant seems to be torn between his role as a
father and his duty as citizen and member of the LDF: “There is times I feel this
uniform melting into me skin. I was never cut out for this job, Chamberlain.”
(The Madame MacAdam…, p.10) He tries to reject the idea of costuming for
military reasons of inducing discipline and control, but he welcomes the vision
of acting on stage:
“The Sergeant is left alone. He looks around him, then practices one or two
dueling feints with his blackthorn stick. Becoming bolder he puts on a little
show. Then stops, embarrassed.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 77).

The multiple layers of the Sergeant’s character are reinforced by his

involvement in dog-races. Although he is supposed to impose the law on a
community in crisis given the closeness of the theatre of war, he asks Lyle
Jones, one of the actors, to put on a show at the races and, together with his
friends the Chamberlain and Slipper go through the effort of painting a dog so
that the people at the race course would not realize that the real champion dog is
dead and buried in his garden. The Sergeant becomes another director-type
character who organizes a performance and tricks people into believing it. And
this is the power of theatre as Lyle Jones observes it: “What is important in the
end is that we make them believe, you see. Even for one moment. To believe.”
102 Chapter Two

(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).

The gap between generations is not restricted to the different

theatrical ideologies of Rabe and Lyle, but it also encompasses family relations.
Both Jo and Rabe would like to cast away the memories of their parents who
complied with the power of the colonizer or the bullies of society – Jo’s parents
left Ireland and went to work in England as so many others before them – thus
giving satisfaction and justification to the power structures.

“JO: Maybe we can do without mothers and fathers altogether. …So we can be
ourselves.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 24)

Rabe exemplifies this transformation, the coming of age of a generation when

he states the artistic, theatrical standards that should be met in every production.
 Identities 103

He feels betrayed by another member of the old generation, Madame MacAdam,

as he considers that she gave in to the traditions and rules of the materialistic
society while she was promising him a new type of theatre:
“RABE: She made it sound as if theatre could heal everything, make it whole
again. Well, where is it then? This great fucking theatre of transformation?” (The
Madame MacAdam…, p. 26)

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)

His image of what theatre should be is a surreal, Artaudian, “opening of a

skull”. Rabe’s vision moves away from the traditional ideology of theatre
followed by the on-stage company performing the melodrama of young Robert
Emmet’s life – ironically, played by the aging Lyle Jones. His theatre suggests
the reaching of a new level of performance, a level that aligns itself with the
characteristics of the times: fragmentation, blurred boundaries and nightmarish
visions.
“RABE: What I want, see, is to make this happen upon a stage. Curtain goes up,
a man’s skull opens up and we see the inside. All these creatures parade and
dance. Such costumes, you’ve never seen the like, raging colours, material like
metal and fur, all pouring out of this skull. Then it all ends, this play or whatever,
this play ends in a great red hunt. The hunting down of these creatures, actors
carrying long, pointed spears, see. And sound, yes, drums, but also strange
instruments like horns or bugles but different, whistles and conches. It’s a
moving painting right now, in my head. I want to play the hunter and the hunted
at the same time.” (The Madame MacAdam…, p. 40)

Notwithstanding his dreams of greatness, Rabe remains an idealist only in

theory. He keeps up his habit of disappearing; leaving everything and everybody
behind and continuing his search for what Madame MacAdam called “the
impossible, perfect performance”. She realizes that the main problem with Rabe
is not his dreams of creating a new type of theatre and, implicitly, society and
thus disrupting the existing structures, but the fact that he is incapable of
104 Chapter Two

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

much part of theatre as it is playing on stage.

The only difference between Jones and Bourke is that Lyle
honestly believes in the power of theatre, in the capacity of the actor to make the
audiences “believe” and in the very close, almost overlapping relationship that
theatre has to establish with the surrounding world. Bourke’s need for
costuming has nothing to do with the aesthetic principles of performance. The
uniform represents a protective shield for the “tired and drooping” individual
underneath. Nevertheless, Bourke’s relationship with costumes and acting is
much more dangerous than either Lyle Jones or Rabe’s. His uniform provides
him the opportunity to feel power and control and to impose that on everybody
around. Using the historical moment perfectly—the closeness of the ghost of
war—Bourke may shortly become the image of tyranny and oppression.
The discussions on the theme of theatre and the different views
on the art of performance develop in a space very open to pretending and acting.
Madame MacAdam observes:
“This is an extremely dangerous country. How can you perform theatre before a
population of performers? They constantly complete one’s lines for one.” (The
Madame MacAdam…, p. 46)

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

Artistic Identity Uncovered: Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar

In an article entitled “The Old Myth of Ireland”37, Edna Longley
astutely pointed out that it is almost impossible to write a good play about Oscar
Wilde mainly because one cannot avoid “constant quotations from Wilde or
mimicry of Wildean formulae”.
The multiple facets of Wilde’s personality and his intricate
aesthetic vision, combined with the position he occupies in the universal canon
of the arts, make it very difficult to render a theatrical vision of his life and
achievements. However, notwithstanding this pronounced impediment in
writing a play about Oscar Wilde, in 1989 the Field Day Theatre Company
decided to stage Terry Eagleton’s first play Saint Oscar. The intricacies
surrounding this production were numerous and, in retrospect, the play is
rightfully considered to be the poorest theatrical choice of the company, Saint
Oscar being associated more with the critical and theoretical style of the Field
Day pamphlets than with the dramatic works previously presented by the
company.
The issues of identity and nationality, so frequently discussed in
the Field Day pamphlets provided, from the very beginning, a pronounced
affinity between the personality of Oscar Wilde and the main points on the Field
Day agenda. Stephen Rea’s “definition” of a Field Day “identity play” matched
perfectly with the comments of the same Rea on Oscar Wilde:
“Wilde is an example of that kind of psyche, of the neurosis of colonized people.
He seems so obviously and comfortably English, but the areas in which he seems
most English, his individualism and brio, are actually the ones in which he’s
most Irish. We want to explore that paradox, but also to reclaim an Irish writer
who has been subsumed into English culture.”38

The apparent characteristics of Wilde’s identity, the continuous

balance between being Irish and English, the tragedy of always being
considered an outsider and the paradox of being inevitably “subsumed” to the
English culture, posited Wilde within the line of “problematic identities”
presented at the core of previous Field Day plays. Wilde’s pure theatricality, his
concern with appearance and reality, with masks and rhetoric, transformed him
into a candidate suitable for the Field Day stage. Eagleton’s central aim was to
turn “Wilde’s own dramatic parodies back on himself, finding some way of

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

reinventing him without, as far as possible, actually quoting him”39. However

noble these intentions might have been, the play and ultimately Trevor
Griffiths’s production in 1989, proved that Wilde’s “ghost” was not extremely
pleased with the attempt to “reinvent” him, many of the dramatic parodies
backfiring on the quality of the play.
From a theoretical point of view, it seemed appropriate to bring
a character like Oscar Wilde on the Field Day stage. One of the company’s
central projects had been “to demystify and reinterpret an inadequate and
impoverished understanding of history”40. In their pamphlets, the Field Day
ideologists had been exploring the ambiguous and paradoxical dimension to
Irish identity, especially through literary figures like Yeats, Joyce and Wilde.
However, the pamphlets ended up discussing fictional constructs of identities,
attempting to push the concept of identity towards the so-called “hybrid”
identity, which underlined the cultural ecumenicalism promoted by the
company. Against this background, Terry Eagleton’s play appears determined
by the playwright’s theoretical and critical beliefs and his continuous
contribution to the Field Day pamphlet series. In an interview with Kevin
Jackson, Eagleton acknowledges the fact that his “professional dealings in
critical theory are anticipated in Wilde’s emphases on criticism as a form of
creative writing, in his belief of truth as a convenient fiction”41. The critical and
theoretical affinity convinced Eagleton to attempt a dramatization of Wilde’s
life, focusing on his struggle within English society and on the ideologies he
used in constantly re-defining himself. Notwithstanding his critical background,
the dramatic construction of the play proved to be a difficult task for Eagleton.
The almost complete lack of theatricality is explained by the playwright as a
personal limitation as a dramatist. However, according to the same Eagleton “it
is also part of a deliberate attempt to reintroduce that artistic form which has
always made the genetically empiricist English most deeply uneasy, the ‘theatre
of ideas’”42.
The genesis of the play provides an insight into the evolution of
Saint Oscar from a collage of aesthetic ideas to an intended and ultimately
failed dramatic representation of these ideas. In a discussion with Joe McMinn,
Terry Eagleton confessed that the play was not originally intended for any
company to stage. He wrote it as a reaction to many of his students’ opinion that
Oscar Wilde was English. With Saint Oscar Terry Eagleton wanted to pull
Oscar Wilde back to his Irish cultural origins. A version of the play was passed

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

Many reviews and comments on the play were made having in

mind the playwright’s background as a leading Marxist literary theorist. Declan
Kiberd, for example, observes that Marx, however never directly quoted, is
present in the text of Saint Oscar, through his suspicion that “culture and
literature are not simply determined by political and economic forces, but they
are probably the last bastion of liberating human energy and imagination”44.
Furthermore, it is important to observe that the lack of theatricality provided by
the text was counterbalanced by the production which, paradoxically, was
termed one of the best productions of the Field Day Theatre Company. Paul
Hadfield considered that technically Saint Oscar “is without doubt the best
production Field Day have done. The integration of the elements of music, light,
design and staging is wonderfully realized, masking to a large degree the
unevenness in the script”45.
The first act of Saint Oscar opens with the Chorus, gathered on
stage to sing The Ballad of Oscar Wilde. As a classical theatrical device, the
Chorus emphasizes the aestheticism of the play. It determines the beginning and
the end of Act One, while in Act Two the Chorus re-emerges as the group of
Rent Boys and Carson’s paramilitaries, only to end the play in the heightened
rhythm of a grotesque carnival. Notwithstanding the dramatic and technical
importance of the Chorus, in Saint Oscar it appears as an artificial device which,
on the one hand, could render a postmodern reading to the play, having in mind
its author’s theoretical background. However, on the other hand, the feeling of a
forced inclusion of the Chorus in the structure of the play increases only its
artificiality, leaving the aesthetic process of the dramatic construction
unsatisfying. The Chorus is used not so much as a classical dramatic tool but
rather as a group of cabaret dancers and singers, a grotesque reiteration of the

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

“The moral of our tale it is plain for to tell:

Unnatural practices land you in hell
If you’re quare and you’re Irish and wear a daft hat
Don’t go screwing the son of an aristocrat.” (Saint Oscar, p. 6)

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:

“They left me for dead in a handbag on Victoria railway station. A handbag!

(Saint Oscar, p. 6)
They called me Ernest. Ernest Wilde!” (Saint Oscar, p. 7)

The erroneous naming is quickly corrected:

“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 line that distinguishes reality from fiction is blurred, the

play reiterating the perpetual balance between reality and fiction. Wilde lives his
life surrounded by masks and illusions, creating a purely theatrical existence for
himself. The Wilde of Saint Oscar appears as a literary figure constructed from
echoes of his own works.
According to Michael Billington the play fails to hang together
from a dramatic point of view because of Oscar himself. “His presence indulges
112 Chapter Two

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)

Eagleton uses the mirror-self to enhance a political side which is

sometimes lacking in the historical and biographical data concerning Wilde. The
playwright uses “transformative politics” in underlining the fact that in a
colonial situation the issues of pleasure, serenity and style are always politically
double-edged: they become weapons for subversion. Thus, the aestheticism,
which appears to be an end in itself, becomes a mask, a theatrical self-display,
covering a permanent crisis of identity within the colonial subject. The

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)

I subvert their forms by obeying them so faithfully.” (Saint Oscar, p. 25)

He almost relishes the chance to appear in court and transform

the very core of colonial power into a theatrical performance: “I should take a
notebook to court with me, in case things get tedious. I could dash off a comedy
about my life; or a verse tragedy, depending on the verdict. If I have to go down,
I’ll go down writing.” (Saint Oscar, p. 29-30) The end of Act One is determined
by the appearance of a character, Richard Wallace, which caused reviews of
Saint Oscar to flare up with political accusations. Anthony Curtis states that
Richard Wallace is a character unknown to Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellman
and thus, he “seems to have been invented by Eagleton to give the political
dimension lacking in the sources, in reality, Oscar’s loyal friend being Robbie
Ross”49. Eagleton was accused to have imagined Richard Wallace just to please
the political agenda of Field Day. Wallace appears as the representative of the
workers’ unions, some kind of Labour party activist who could have been
intended by Eagleton to counteract the ongoing Tory policy represented by the
iron fist of Margaret Thatcher. At the same time, the image of Wallace as the
representative of socialism—which might indeed have sprung from the Marxist
background of the playwright—and his participation in the Trafalgar Square

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)

Furthermore, Wallace’s activity is contrasted with Wilde’s

“inactivity”, with his preference to be a socialist and an individualist at the same
time. This apparent lack of “physical” involvement with the revolutionary
movements of the time both in England and in Ireland push Wilde’s image
towards that of a martyr, one who does not react to the evils of society but
chooses a silent, or, in Wilde’s case, linguistic resistance. The theme of
martyrdom is prevalent in the play, being referred to both in the text and in the
Field Day production. Eagleton’s text equates Wilde’s “martyrdom” both on the
personal (sexual) and public (political) levels with the painting Wilde loved the
most: Guido Reni’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian: “I love him [Bosie] as the
torturer’s victim loves the knife that will put him out of his agony; as Saint
Sebastian loved the arrows.” (Saint Oscar, p. 19) The title of the play takes up
the image of the saint combining it with that of Oscar in a doubling that renders
both tragedy and irony.
Through the trial scene Oscar becomes the epitome of a modern
saint seen not exclusively from the point of view of religion but also as a
character struggling to get to grips with his own identity within a contemporary,
hostile world. On the other hand, if opposed to the rebel who faces the power
system in an actively subversive way, Oscar’s aesthetic babbling becomes ironic
and induces sadness to a character that pretends to have a grip on the world of
the rulers. Within the Field Day production, the image of Saint Sebastian
dominated the stage in a combination of visual effects and innovative lighting.
Bob Crowley’s design became part of the totality of the meaning of the play.
The gigantic image of Saint Sebastian with arrows piercing his body overlooked
the stage reminding the audience of a perpetual link between the main character
and the sculpted figure.
Edna Longley views the presence of a larger that life Saint
Sebastian as a political manifesto. She writes: “Wilde as Saint Sebastian comes
to represent the timeless victimization of the Irish ‘people’ and ‘nation’”50.
Nevertheless, many other reviews saw Crowley’s bold design as a Magritte
painting, “a naturalistic drawing room at first glance, but on double-take a
disconcerting zone of fantasy incorporating references to Wilde’s favourite

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)

In a courtroom built in a surrealist style, the second act of Saint

Oscar focuses on the trial in which Wilde was accused of “sodomistic
intercourse” by Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry.
The dramatic construct of Act Two turns towards a more political approach
combining Edward Carson’s manipulations, representing the prosecution and
the establishment, with Wilde’s aesthetic and artful comments. The scene
changes from a lighter, art for art’s sake surrounding, to a gloomy, dark space
overlooked by a larger than life judge placed high up on a ladder draped in red
cloth, creating the impression of the pressure imposed by the imperial structures
of power within the courtroom. Many reviews observed the extremely creative
use of the stepladder as symbol: support for the judge and bed in the prison
scene, to be transformed into the Eiffel Tower in the Paris scene and the cross
on which a defiant Oscar is finally martyred like Saint Sebastian: “They nail me
up to the tree of my agony and I look down on them from that lonely height with
refinite forbearance.” (Saint Oscar, p. 49)
The simplicity of the visual effects enhances the complexity of
the image created, thus requiring the audience to read both the verbal and the
visual messages in an integrated way which leads to the “theatrical”
transformation of the play. According to Trevor Griffiths, Terry Eagleton’s play
had to be “theatred” in some way, and, because the text was oversaturated with
ideas, both aesthetic and political, the only way to open up and challenge such a
text was a spectacular stage design and the clever use of the Chorus. The
intention of the director was to provide the audience with a confrontational and
seductive production.

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

The political significance of Wilde’s character, his “decentred”

identity, a personality which evaded the direct in favour of the elusive, becomes
relevant in Act Two when he is opposed to Edward Carson, the “founding
father” of the Northern Irish state. Carson represents “timeless British
imperialism at its most oppressive in Ulster Unionism”53. Thus, here indeed we
encounter one of the basic conflicts that may have convinced the Field Day
directorial board to accept the play for production. It is not simply the conflict
between Irish and British but it goes deeper to oppose Irish and Irish from the
two sides of the border. Eagleton goes to such extremes that, at the end of the
play, he presents Carson surrounded by the Chorus “in paramilitary uniform,
head masks with eye-holes. Drums, union jacks. Drum roll.” Towards the final
scene Carson reminds the audience of a contemporary Ian Paisley, advocating
the dawn of a new world, of a new Northern Ireland where “artists have no
place” and where the words rattling like drumbeats are loyalty, betrayal and no
surrender. In the production, however, this part was cut due to the opinion that it
could upset the audience in Derry’s Guildhall.
The trial scene enhances the antithetical character of the play.
The dialogue focuses on two opposed characters, Wilde and Carson, in an
attempt to transform a “straightforward” binary opposition structure into a
multiple and complex relationship. The main distinction drawn between the two
characters is centred on the historicity of Carson as opposed to the aestheticism
of Wilde. Carson’s language is saturated with historical data and facts of what
he terms Oscar’s “real” life behind the glamour of his clothes and language. As
a reaction to the language of power, Wilde keeps up with his aesthetic wit,
which seems out of place in the gloomy surroundings of the courtroom. When
accused of “illicit” relationships and of being a “sodomite”, Wilde is more
concerned with the language in which the accusation is formulated rather than
with the seriousness of it:
“The Marquess of Queensberry left a card for me at my club on which was
inscribed the word ‘somdomite’. I have no objection to being called a sodomite,
but I have a proper respect for the English language, which is to be safeguarded
from illiterate oafs like the Marquess.” (Saint Oscar, p. 39)

Oscar uses literature and aesthetics to counteract the dryness of

the legal language. Moreover, he stylistically analyses Carson’s accusations - “I
reject the accusation but admire the alliteration.” (Saint Oscar, p. 41) – and
subverts his confidence by constantly linking him to Dublin and thus
undermining his overt “Britishness”:

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

Cross and The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, construct an impressive

response to the identity issues discussed by the pamphlets and, at the same time,
problematize the identity discourse put forth by the Field Day pamphlets and
articles.
 CHAPTER THREE

LANGUAGES

A determining element of the Field Day Theatre Company’s

policy from the very first play, Brian Friel’s Translation, and from the first
collection of pamphlets which opened with Tom Paulin’s essay “A New Look at
the Language Question”, was the need to find a new language that could express
the desired multiplicity of vision regarding the identity discourse in Ireland,
both North and South. The almost obsessive concern with language responds
largely to the theoretical morphology of postcolonialism, which openly
influenced the directors of the company and the contributors to the pamphlet
collections. The main postcolonial theory of language engendered new
analytical studies of the literatures created in former colonies, especially
belonging to the defunct British Empire. Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and
Benedict Anderson1, as leading representatives of the postcolonial theoretical
movement, have expressed the need to redefine the position of the colonized
Other in relation with the language of the colonizer.
Among these theories, Edward Said’s vision of postcolonialism
and the problematic dynamic that this vision ensued represented an integral part
of Field Day’s policy. Reflecting upon Said’s theoretical and critical
achievements, Seamus Deane discusses in his tribute to Said’s death in 2003 the
main characteristics of postcolonialism as outlined by theorists like Said,
Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
“Postcolonialism requires a theory of power that abandons ‘them’ and ‘us’ as its
governing terms. Those who are not like ‘us’ can only be understood in the terms

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

Thus, Edward Said’s aesthetic of postcolonialism follows to a certain extent

Jacques Derrida’s idea of “difference”4, always focusing on the important
realities that separate the histories of the colonizer and the colonized. Even
though openly sided with Foucault in the infamous Derrida-Foucault debate in
the 1970s, Said’s “humanism” would have found proper grounding in Derrida’s
theories. Seamus Deane notes that Said chose Foucault because the
postcolonialist in him was intrigued by the equation between knowledge and
disciplinary power, which Foucault famously translated in Jeremy Bentham’s
architectural construction of the perfect prison, the “panopticon”. Said’s
rejection of the possibility of reconciliation problematizes Field Day’s insistence
on the main function of their plays. It also brings into the spotlight the main
reasons the company presented to David Rudkin when, in 1983, they refused to
stage The Saxon Shore, a play commissioned by Field Day. The board of
directors considered that Rudkin’s play (which will be discussed in-depth later
in this book) did not subscribe to the reconciliatory tendencies of the company
and it would have offended the Protestant audiences who would have come to

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

Paradoxically, the unifying image created by the globalizing

power of English as lingua franca conceals an almost Babel-like world
characterized by fragmentation, dissolution and failure of communication. The
imposed use of the master language ensures an easier way for the colonizer to
enforce new patterns of political and social behaviour, thus establishing an
almost impenetrable connection between language and the idea of the nation-
state. The ideological constructs determined by the relationship between
language and nation, induce manifold responses from the colonized,
continuously trying to break or at least disrupt the power structures.
Ironically, the thus created postcolonial identity is founded on a
simulacrum. Theodor Adorno questioned the authenticity of this identity
considering that within the new theoretical discourse authenticity is read as
language and as ideology. However, the “definition” of the linguistic structures
and the ideologies included in the make-up of these identities as simulacra
renders the new image of the Other slippery. Nevertheless, Jean Baudrillard7

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

the traditional representations of “quintessential Irishness”. Both plays have as a

core issue the problem of language and the way in which language can
dismember and re-make identities. The postcolonial Irish identities no longer
accept to be defined as the mirrors of the Self but engage in challenging the
established traditions by trying to respond to the crisis of language and meaning
that characterizes contemporary existence.

Languages of the Past: Brian Friel’s Translations

If in Making History Brian Friel dissects the intricate
relationship between the historian as storyteller, the historical character and the
written story, Translations uncovers the initial activity of creating a culture and
a history through language. The theory behind Peter Lombard’s history of Hugh
O’Neill is put in practice in the small village of Ballybeg as the audience
experience the power of utterance and naming in the creation of a new world.
Lombard’s reasons for manipulating historical facts and events, for choosing to
highlight certain aspects of O’Neill’s life over others, appear as groundwork for
Friel’s handling of the issue of history in Translations. While Making History
depicts the mythologizing process O’Neill is subject to, Translations builds up a
world in which such a mythical structure is no longer possible. Lombard’s
creation provides the imaginary foundation for a culture that is cast off in
Translations only to be re-built in the English language.
Making History discusses the way in which an almost sacred
Irish historical past, providing the inspiration for an established national
identity, is based on an imaginary narrative, on a story created by Peter
Lombard. Translations depicts the move from this mythical Gaelic society, now
in decline, towards a “translated” Hiberno-English culture. The Communication
Cord fulfils the circular movement by dwelling on “the egregious foolishness of
those who allow themselves to be seduced by the imagery of a sanctified past”8,
a past which is the illusion constructed by Lombard.
The importance of George Steiner’s work, After Babel, is
determining for the play to such an extent that the characters in Translations
utter or represent very closely the theoretical strategy of the book. Brian Friel
depicts the close relationships between language and landscape, national
identity and linguistic utterance through Steiner’s “critique clichés, unexamined
similes and worn tropes”9.

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

In his Field Day pamphlet “A New Look at the Language

Question” Tom Paulin observes: “the history of language is often a story of
possession and dispossession, territorial struggle and the establishment or
imposition of a culture”10. The “language question” is almost always connected
to questions about nationhood and government, thus reinforcing the political
connotations of every text or utterance. As Seamus Deane concludes in his
article “Canon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland”: “There is no such
thing as an innocent text, even if it was only published yesterday. Reading is
never innocent, interpretation is never innocent. Writing is never innocent: it
belongs to culturally specific situations and moments.”11
Brian Friel’s Translations seems to subscribe to these
ideological “truths”. It presents the Irish community of Ballybeg (Baile Beag)
on the verge of a great cultural transformation: its translation into English. The
year is 1833, when British sappers are conducting an Ordnance Survey in
Ireland, “translating” local place names to inscribe them on their map. The
process of this transition is observed through the relationships between the local
“tribe” and the intruders represented by Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland.
The mise en scène is a hedge-school located in a disused barn, adorned with
“broken and forgotten implements”12. However, the opening image, before the
sappers arrive, is far from reiterating the idyllic space of a mythic Ireland. Friel
suggests the exact opposite by presenting a world in decline, a civilization in
regress, fossilized in its language and customs. Every detail of the hedge-school
and the characters inhabiting its space enhance the decline. The room where the
classes take place is “comfortless and dusty” (Translations, p. 1). Manus, the
eldest son of the school’s master, Hugh, wears “shabby” clothes and is lame
from childhood. Sarah, one of the pupils, has a speech defect and “when she
wishes to communicate, she grunts and makes unintelligible nasal sounds”
(Translations, p. 1). Jimmy Jack, another pupil, known as the Infant Prodigy,
lives in a world of gods and ancient myths, which for him is “as real and as
immediate as everyday life in the townland of Baile Beag” (Translations, p. 1).
Jimmy Jack’s filthy clothes enhance the physical degradation as he never
washes and lives in the same clothes “summer and winter, day and night”
(Translations, p. 1). This world illustrates George Steiner’s image of a
“paralysed community”, a civilization existing in a temporal loop and in a

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

Hugh recreates the same image in his dialogue with Yolland as a

reaction to the Lieutenant’s ambition to learn Gaelic: “it can happen that a
civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches
the landscape of… fact” (Translations, p. 43). However, Hugh’s depiction of
Irish society as ossified and lacking the link between language and fact also
refers to the imaginative richness of this society. Notwithstanding the external,
physical depreciation, the imaginative world of Irish civilization exceeds the
limits of the physical world. Hugh comments:
“You’ll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax
acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives…
Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of mythologies of fantasy and hope
and self-deception – a syntax opulent with tomorrows.” (Translations, p. 42)

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

national identity is constructed out of these imaginary fragments, no longer

matching the reality of existence. Friel’s critique is directed towards the extreme
mythologizing tendency of certain movements and ideologies in re-imagining
the “genuine” Irish identity. The burden of such an imaginary past is extensively
discussed in the Field Day pamphlets, some of which, like Seamus Deane’s
“Heroic Styles”14 for example, voice concerns about the Celtic Revival –
represented mainly by W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory – while others
express the necessity to create a new language which could provide unbiased
ways of dealing both with the past and with the recovery of a modern Irish
identity.
This new type of language is on the verge of being born in
Translations. It would be too simplistic to argue, as Richard Kearney does, that
Friel’s play dramatizes two views on language. The first of these is the Gaelic
view, which sees language as means to express “an essential privacy, the
hermetic core of being, the divine origins and etymologies”15. The second view,
opposed to the local, Gaelic view, is the English, technological vision of
language, where words are seen as signs for “representing, mapping and
categorizing”. Thus, the language problem apparent in Translations is, once
again, incarcerated within the over-used binary opposition structures. Brian
Friel’s play explores much deeper than the binary opposition Gaelic/English.
Communication seems to be impossible even between characters who speak the
same language on stage: Yolland finds it difficult to communicate with his own
father at home and with Captain Lancey in Ballybeg, while Manus encounters
the same difficulty in his dialogue with Hugh, his father or with Maire.
Paradoxically, the problems of communication tend to be solved by the use of
yet another language, the language of the Other. Yolland wants to escape from
the restraints of his own world by deciding to learn Irish and settle down in
Ballybeg, while the Irish speakers resort to Latin, Greek or even English in the
case of Maire, to escape from the fossilized community in which they live.
Thus, the question of language complicates itself beyond the binary oppositions
in order to unearth “the dreadful silences, cultural and personal, lying
underneath the surfaces of language”16. However, it is true that in order to
achieve another level of communication Friel sets the stage for a critique of both
Irish and English.
In the world of Ballybeg, which is constructed as a microcosm
reflecting the macrocosm of the island of Ireland, the Irish language reaches

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

Steiner, “any model of communication is at the same time a model of

translation, of a vertical or horizontal transfer of significance. Inside or between
languages, human communication equals translation.”18 The simplest model of
translation is the linguistic model of message and receiver while the more
complex issues surrounding the problem of translation involve, in fact, attempts
to safeguard civilizations from fossilization. As Steiner observes, “we possess
civilization because we have learnt to translate out of time”19. To a certain
extent, this is the translation type at work in Friel’s play. One example that
proves this tendency is the story of Tobair Vree. As place name, Tobair Vree is
“eroded beyond recognition” (Translations, p. 44) and it fails to express the
reality of the space it names. The process of naming has reached a stage of
paralysis similar to all the other elements of civilization. Nobody remembers the
real story behind the name; however, Yolland decides to keep the same name in
the Name-Book. Thus, Tobair Vree is re-born. It maintains the same name but
through the simple process of naming “it leaps into existence”: “Each name a
perfect equation with its roots. A perfect congruence with its reality.”
(Translations, p. 45) Yolland decries the erosion produced by the translation but
any communication, any creation of meaning ends with a loss as well as a gain.
Once re-named, the space moves towards a new life even though it partly loses
the connotations of its mythical past. Discussing Humboldt’s theories of
language, George Steiner observes in After Babel: “civilization is uniquely and
specifically informed by its language; the language is the unique and specific
matrix of its civilization.”20 The close, determining relationship between
civilization and language is blurred in Translations as the link between the two
seems to be severed. The signifier does not match the signified any more and
both are looking for refreshing interpretations. The problems of naming within
the local community are reinforced by the cases of Nellie Ruadh’s baby: it dies
shortly after the christening, and by Owen, who accepts, for a long time, to be
called Roland by the English soldiers. The dynamic between the two languages
is apparent when the translation process is enacted on stage.
In Act One, Owen translates Captain Lancey’s explanation for
the Ordnance Survey, a long and elaborate justification, which Owen keeps
short and practical in his translation, thus contesting the accepted
characterization of the Irish language as overtly ornate in style. However, in the
two occasions when Lancey asks Owen to translate his words for the
community of Ballybeg, what transpires from the process is Captain Lancey’s
image as the epitome of the colonizer. This is especially true at the end of Act
Two, when Yolland has been kidnapped and Lancey prepares a general eviction

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)

The fundamental duality of language, be that Irish or English in

this case, relies on the close relationship between the private and the public
aspects of utterance. Steiner observes that an essential part of all language is
private and because of the existence of this private aspect “there will be in every
complete speech-act a more or less prominent element of translation. All
communication ‘interprets’ between privacies.”22 The perfect communication, if
such a thing exists, would be a balance between the public element and the
privacies of a language, given the fact that the public aspect is the one that helps
the creation of meaning and understanding within a communication process.

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:

“OWEN: He [Doalty] says your whole camp is on fire.

LANCEY: I’ll remember you, Mr. Doalty.” (Translations, p. 63)

In addition, Lancey can be seen as the representative of the new world of

modernism as opposed to the primitive, mythological space of Ballybeg. He
speaks only English because it is the language of modernity defined by
capitalism, utilitarianism and the precision of the maps. Lancey was born in
1789 which, according to many historians, is considered to be the first year of

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)

Lancey’s efficiency is also underlined by the metaphor of mapping. Through the

Ordnance Survey, the Captain is imposing the efficient, rational way of
perceiving space. The map of Ballybeg transforms the mythical and dying
community into a “real” space, it saves the village from an idyllic but
continuously decaying Garden of Eden and plunges it into the historical realities
of the time. Paradoxically, the fixed, rigid grid of the map changes the “cold”
society of Ballybeg into a “hot” society, which “incorporate[s] change and
recollect[s] a plurality of histories and interpretations of [itself]”24. A clear sign
of this change is Máire’s reaction to Yolland’s disappearance at the end of the
play, when she draws a map of Norfolk on the floor where, just moments before,
Owen had his version of the map of Ballybeg. Máire’s reproduction of English
place-names that have no meaning for those present – Winfarthing, Little
Walsingham or Barton Bendish – connects the map with the reality of the space
and also mirrors the coming into reality of Ballybeg, now that there is a map of
the place. Through drawing the map and naming the places on the map, the
“mythical” space of Ballybeg comes into being, is created into existence. John
Andrews considers that the fact that Máire is the only character who actually
draws a map on stage could be interpreted as Lancey’s “ultimate
ineffectiveness”.
“In a more literal way, it could be a measure of Máire’s failure that despite her
geographical gifts she has never thought of putting her own parish on the map.
But that simple gesture of tracing part of Norfolk on the floor reminds us that
Lancey, like so many earlier map-makers in Ireland, has perverted the science of
cartography by making it an instrument of imperialism.”25

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

In Translations, this new possibility of a language freed from

the constraints of the social and the political can be observed in the love scene
between Máire and Yolland. A “pure” language of emotions based on human
relationship and gesture rather than on the social preordained rules of
communication provides the lovers with new tools for creating meaning. The
established order of language is undermined by the new meanings attached to
the words they utter. The sound of the words is more important than the
meaning:

“MÁIRE: Say anything at all. I love the sound of your speech.

YOLLAND: Go on – go on – say anything at all – I love the sound of your
speech.” (Translations, p. 50)

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

elements of language. In Máire’s case, these linguistic units are represented by

three basic components of biological existence: water, fire and earth; while for
Yolland they are represented by the place names that he had to alter and
translate into English with Owen’s help. The place names that shape the
landscape of Ballybeg become internalised, the public becomes private in the
lovers’ attempt to express their feelings.
The mirror image of the relationship between Máire and Yoland
is represented, to a certain extent, by the relationship between Manus and Sarah.
The opening scene where Manus is teaching Sarah to speak develops all through
the play into a relationship based on the same common language of emotion.
Sarah is able to speak only when Manus is around. Although Manus envisages
this relationship as a teacher/pupil one, Sarah’s dependence on Manus’s
presence determines her linguistic world. When at the end of Act Three Manus
has already left the village of Ballybeg, Sarah is no longer capable to utter her
name when Captain Lancey asks her:

“LANCEY: What’s your name?

OWEN: Go on, Sarah. You can tell him. (But Sarah cannot. And she knows she
cannot. She closes her mouth. Her head goes down.)” (Translations, p. 62)

Sarah’s return to a world void of utterance is representative of the atmosphere

that envelops the end of the play. Previously, Yolland showed his attraction for
the lovely weather in Ballybeg, which made him want to settle down in the
village in spite of Owen’s ironic remark:

“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)

However, the “normality” of the weather is reinstated by the rainy days,

inducing a general feeling of dissolution. If in Act Two the audience could
witness the possibility of creating an alternative way of communication, mainly
between Yolland and Máire, Act Three also re-establishes the gap between the
locals and the British soldiers. This gap is reinforced by Lancey’s threats to
punish the whole community for the disappearance of one soldier, Lieutenant
Yolland.
Ballybeg seems to sink back into the cauldron of mythical
images that defines its existence. The language of the past, so different from the
“facts” of history, engenders the creation of personal, heroic stories. The story
of the nation is encapsulated in Hugh’s account of his and Jimmy Jack’s
participation in the 1798 rising:
 Languages 137

“Everything seemed to find definition that spring—a congruence, a miraculous

matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh,
green land. The rhythms of perception heightened. The whole enterprise of
consciousness accelerated. We were gods that morning, James… By God, sir, we
were magnificent. We marched as far as—where was it?—Glenties! All of
twenty-three miles in one day. And it was there, in Phelan’s pub, that we got
homesick for Athens, just like Ulysses. The desiderium nostrorumʊthe need for
our own. Our pietas, James, was for older, quieter things. And that was the
longest twenty-three miles back I ever made.” (Translations, p. 67)

Hugh’s attempt to retrace the “images of the past embodied in

language” (Translations, p. 66) illustrates his dictum, taken directly from
Steiner’s After Babel, that “to remember everything is a form of madness”
(Translations, p. 67). The memory of the past, of the apparently unalterable
facts of history, is constantly renewed by different personal stories. History as
an account of dates and facts ceases to exist and it is transformed into stories,
always re-imagined. The “translation” from history to story is the main theme
that defines Brian Friel’s play. It also constitutes the dramatic representation of
the Company’s central concern, the re-evaluation of the past through the means
of a common language that could lead to dialogue and reconciliation.
Hugh’s decision, at the end of the play, to learn the new place
names and thus re-imagine the surrounding space and re-new the images of the
past through another language is not a sign of surrender to the forces of the
colonizer or, at least, not only that. By learning English and by appropriating the
new place names, the people of Ballybeg break from the mythologizing
temporal loop in which they existed and move towards new and challenging
spaces of imagination. The experience of colonization is transformed into one of
renewal, which implies alterations to the memory of myth: Hugh fails to
remember the myth of the Tyrian towers which he knew “backways”. The
linguistic map of imagination changes and with it the memory of myth is
altered.
The power attributed to language by Translations raises
concerns about the dangers of the political manipulation of the linguistic units.
There is a fine line to be traced between the power of language to re-new and re-
discuss ossified images of the past, and the power to manipulate these images
for a pre-determined ideology. The unease introduced by Translations relies
precisely on the liminal sites of transgression suggested by the play. Patrick
Grant observes that the play debates “the dangers of crossing cultural borders in
general”27 while illustrating a fatal disconnection between the private centre and
the social or public fact. Once the critique moves away from the binarism of

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

As the representative of “history”, John Andrews recognises the

entertainment value of Friel’s play, but observes that some of the historical
inaccuracies – like the use of bayonets and the eviction of the peasants from the
land in response to Yolland’s disappearance – paint quite a grim image of the
Ordnance Survey and its completion in Donegal in the 1830s. Also, the fact that
Friel uses the names of real British soldiers for his characters Lancey and
Yolland, is or can be interpreted as an attempt to convey historical authority to
the play. However, Andrews acknowledges the right of fiction to create worlds
which have counterparts based in the “reality” of history and observes that
Friel’s play is not so much connected to 19th century Ireland as to the realities of
the 20th century.
“My next reaction was to see Translations as a play about late twentieth-century
Ireland. And then, following a hint from the text, I began to see it rather as a set
of images that might have been painted on screens, each depicting some passage
from Irish history, ancient or modern, the screens placed one behind the other in
a tunnel with a light at one end of the tunnel and the audience at the other, so that
it is only the strongest colours and the boldest lines that appear in the composite
picture exhibited on stage.”33

Thus, even though recognising the importance of fiction in creating historical

worlds that deal with what he calls “the sharing of historical guilt”34, Andrews
felt it necessary to clarify the historical facts that lay at the basis of the play, and
put the spirits of the real Yolland and Lancey at rest.
Brian Friel responded to John Andrews’ observations by
describing the process that led to the creation of the play which intended to
discuss “the death of the Irish language and the acquisition of English and the
profound effects that that change-over would have on a people.”35 The intricate

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

and “past-ness”, reinforcing “a perverse desire to remain fallen, to make no

attempt to rise, to spend your life contemplating your navel.” Edna Longley’s
concerns were directed against Friel’s choice of subject for the play, considering
that Translations is “refurbishing an old myth”41, a pre-colonial Eden used for
the only purpose of nationalist political propaganda. In addition, Sean Connolly
argued that Translations is based on historical inaccuracies which paint an
image of the British colonizer as destroyer of an idyllic Irish society. After
observing that a playwright, novelist or poet has no obligation to follow the
truth of the facts of history when writing a historical piece, Connolly critiques
the lack of historical foundation for the events presented in the play only
because Translations belongs to a company, Field Day, that has as a major aim
“to present a particular vision of Irish society, past and present”42. Connolly
notes that the programme notes that accompanied the premiere of the play
include “quotations from primary and secondary historical sources whose
function can only be to vouch for the authenticity of the version of the past
which it sets out”43. Translations is accused of generating an image of 19th
century Ireland that would become more accepted by the audience than the
historical facts, the play is literally accused of creating history, the critic falling
into the trap of equating fiction with history. A narrow minded and superficial
interpretation of the play follows, framed by a passionate but contradicting
critique of Field Day. First of all, Connolly considers that the play should have
presented historically truthful events even though he observes that some of the
best achievements of historical fiction were those based on the counterfactual,
the satirical and the wholly imaginary. However, he cannot accept the idea of
the historical imaginary related to Field Day given the ideology of the company.
Thus, he considers his obligation as critic to clarify the historical facts that lay at
the basis of Translations, explaining fiction through history. Sean Connolly’s
critique never passes beyond the purely superficial textual analysis of the play,
spiced by a long row of statistical data regarding the hedge-schools and the
Ordnance Survey. The end of the article brings to light yet another accusation

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

that the “traumatic consequences” of loss and dislocation experienced by Ireland

in the 19th century
“may be seen in the obsession of later generations of Irishmen with questions of
cultural identity and in their blinkered but intense commitment to ‘tradition’ – an
obsession and a commitment which continue to be represented today in
movements like Field Day”44.

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

Fintan O’Toole discusses the Irish productions of Translations

after 1980 in Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre47. He
considers that the main characteristic of these productions is the fact that they
also reflect the ironies of The Communication Cord, Brian Friel’s satirical
response to Translations staged by the same Field Day Theatre Company in
1982. The first Abbey production took place in 1983, only three years after the
premiere in Derry and only one year after the premiere of The Communication
Cord. Joe Dowling, the director of this new production intended to take into
account Friel’s scepticism “about the undue deference afforded to
Translations”48, reflected in The Communication Cord. These contradictions
and uncertainties rendered Dowling’s production “bewilderingly uneven and
inconclusive”. O’Toole argues:
“The strategy which Joe Dowling seems to have adopted is to orchestrate the
play towards a series of major setpieces, hoping that the impact will carry
through some of the more dubious performances and also allow for a mixture of
tones which might overcome the problem of excessive reverence. This is not a
solution, but as a strategy it does have the advantage of allowing for some
moments of really great theatre to coexist alongside the inadequacies.”49

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.

Languages of the Present: Brian Friel’s

The Communication Cord
The impact of hostile critical response was decisive for the
staging, in 1982, in the same space of Derry’s Guildhall, of Brian Friel’s second
original play for Field Day, The Communication Cord. In answer to the
“reductive interpretations” of Translations, as Shaun Richards put it, Friel

50
Fintan O’Toole, p. 261.
51
Fintan O’Toole, p. 262.
52
Fintan O’Toole, p. 263.
 Languages 145

offered The Communication Cord, a work that, as he explained to Fintan

O’Toole in 1982, sought to dismiss “pieties that [he] didn’t intend” and staged
“an iconoclastic attack on the ‘authentic’ cottage with all its connotations of an
essential Irishness”53.
Brian Friel’s new play responded to one of the main issues at the
basis of Field Day policy: the re-interpretation of the master narratives of Irish
culture rather than their complete annihilation. The central intention of the play
corresponded to that of Translations, namely to critically reinterpret “the
received reality, translating the past, so that the present can be positively
transformed”54. It also had as a main theme the same issue of language and the
overwhelming importance of communication. However, Friel decided to change
the dramatic framework in which these issues were discussed and opted for
farce as the guiding structure for the new play. One of the main problems that
the play encountered in its dramatic interpretation was the haunting ghost of
Translations, always present in the background of any performance of The
Communication Cord, and there were not many. By openly describing it as an
“antidote” to Translations and a reaction against the pieties and the strong
critical reactions that the earlier play ensued, Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and
other critics that reviewed the premiere of The Communication Cord, rendered
the play a “simple” response to the intricacies of Translations. It was seen only
as a “sidekick” to Translations, many of its central issues, imagery and dramatic
values being overlooked for the farcical, comic re-interpretation of the “deep”
historical and cultural issues discussed by the play that became an Irish classic
immediately after its first production. However, I believe that there is much
more to The Communication Cord than the reviews and the production itself
intended to reveal. The problems of communication and the relationship
between myth, tradition and the contemporary Irish society moving towards the
globalisation of the 21st century are only two issues that find theatrical
expression in the play. By using farce and parody and willingly introducing in
the texture of the play the “remains” of Translations, The Communication Cord
also becomes an attack on the “canonisation” of the former, within the
framework of a crumbling culture relying on an idyllic past that has to be
artificially recreated. The Communication Cord is a “tragic” farce on the idea of
culture as “simulacrum”, a culture that lacks a valid historical basis but
constructs it through mythology, storytelling and a history told by people like
Peter Lombard. Much more than being only a reaction against the reception of

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

Translations, The Communication Cord uncovers the tragedy of a society that is

the future of the one presented in Translations. The characters that appear in
The Communication Cord are not simply parallels or mirror images of the ones
in Translations. Tragically they are future representations that paint quite a grim
image of a society that in the past was “translated” into existence by being
drawn onto a map.
Judith Butler discusses the significance of parody and farce in
relation to the issue of postcolonialism. She argues that “the [parodic] repetition
of the original reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea
of the natural and original”. Within a postcolonial society, this strategy is used
in order to destabilize the influential power of the centre. The given structures of
power are re-enacted in such a way “as to question their givenness, their
authenticity, their originality”55. Unlike “simple” comedy or comic imitation,
such use of farce and parody undermines the authenticity and validity of the
power structures. Seamus Deane also discussed the “tendency towards farce” in
his Field Day pamphlet “Heroic Styles”56. He stages his discussion within the
framework of Northern Irish society, closely connecting farce and comedy with
the stereotypes that define the two communities in the North. He argues:
“the image of the ‘Northerner’, in his full and over-blown self-caricature –
vacillation between the picturesque and the tragic, seeing in him the working out
of a tragic destiny. The repetition of historical and literary paradigms is not
necessarily farcical but there is an unavoidable tendency towards farce in a
situation in which an acknowledged tragic conflict is also read as an
anachronistic – aberrant – picturesque one.”57

In the case of Brian Friel’s The Communication Cord, the

farcical structure does not target, at least not directly, the postcolonial structures,
nor, for that matter, the Northern Irish stereotypes. Friel’s intention is to reveal
the foolishness behind the supposedly authentic re-creations, to use a
contradiction in terms, of an idyllic past. He ridicules the very foundation on
which Irish identity is constructed and also, the continuous obsession with
Irishness and what is “quintessentially” Irish, obsession which can be related to
Field Day itself. The Communication Cord is not only Friel’s critique of the idea
of “de-mythologization”, which, in a way, is rendered impossible given the fact

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.”

Traditionally, farce creates a closed, fixed world “governed by rules which

embody a mechanical, deterministic view of life.”58 However, within this
predetermined framework, Brian Friel chooses to present the audience with a
farce based on language and communication or, more precisely, lack of
communication. The world of farce is, in general terms, determined by language
but in the case of The Communication Cord this insistence on the issue of
language mirrors, in a distorted, “cracked looking glass” the critiqued focus on
language in Translations. Also, in a wider framework, the lack of
communication is reflected upon the political and cultural situation within the
Irish society of the time.
The parallels between the two plays are easy to identify from a
first read. The same “pastoral” environment, with a touch of modernity and
artificial perfection in The Communication Cord, the same failure of
communication between characters who speak the same language. The use of
Latin and Greek is exchanged for a mockery of French and German accents.
The “perfect colonial servant” embodied by Captain Lancey is replaced by the
“quintessential noble peasant”, Nora Dan, whose name also appears in
Translations. The character of Nora Dan seems to be “transported” from the
world of the previous play, where Hugh comments on her decision not to come
back to school that “Nora Dan can now write her name – Nora Dan’s education
is complete.”(Translations, p. 24) Thus, Nora Dan becomes the epitome of the
Irish peasant, ridiculed in The Communication Cord. The language of the
gestures and emotions, which is heralded as the common ground on which new

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

Jean Baudrillard’s definition of a nostalgic society relates to

what Colin Graham terms the problems of representation within Irish society:
“When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full
meaning. There’s a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of
second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity… there is a panic-stricken
production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of
material production.”62

The main characteristic of this nostalgic process is the artificiality of its

constructs, because it is based on a past generated “by models of a real without
origin or reality: a hyperreal.”63 There is a gap between the past reconstructed
from memory units and the present which relies on it. This difference blurs the
borders between true and false, real and imaginary to such a degree that by
entering the simulation one also enters the space of absolute manipulation.
The artificiality of the space is also reflected in language: Tim,
the linguist, has difficulties in communicating with the other characters, he is
“relaxed and assured” only when he is talking about his work, Discourse
Analysis with Particular Reference to Response Cries. Tim’s process of
communication is based on the artificial elements of linguistic science. The
farcical absurdity of the play results from Tim’s “split” vocabulary and from the
shaky authenticity of the cottage. The everyday language Tim uses is, according
to Jack, “damned limp”, but when he starts talking about the subject of his
thesis, the artificial elements of the scientific discourse abound in his
conversation, matching the space in which he encounters himself. The irony of
Tim’s character is based on the profound gap between what he is working on,
communication, and his incapacity to communicate in real-life circumstances.
Tim acknowledges the fact that
“all social behaviour, the entire social order, depends on our communicational
structures, on words mutually agreed on and mutually understood” (The
Communication Cord, p. 18)

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)

However, he is not capable of sustaining a simple conversation, his vocabulary

being “too limp”, as Jack observes. He is aware of the technical structure of
communication, and of the fact that without keeping to this structure, there will
be chaos:
“TIM: Without that agreement, without that shared code, you have chaos.
…Because communication collapses. (The Communication Cord, p. 19)

The farcical framework enhances the comic relationship

between reality and illusion. The house seems to “feel” that, from all the
characters, Tim Gallagher is the only one who openly expresses his dislike of
the house and of the past it represents. In the farcical scheme that Tim and Jack
organize to impress Senator Donovan, Tim pleases the Senator by regurgitating
what seems to originate directly from a touristy presentation of Ireland as the
land of “genuine” cottages and noble peasants:
“This is where we all come from. This is our first cathedral. This shaped all our
souls. This determined our first pieties.” (The Communication Cord, p. 33)

His description of the house continues in the same tourist-guide fashion:

 Languages 153

“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)

Everything is arranged in a museum-like style and, as noted before, even the

road to the house is designed to match “the soul and authenticity of the place”.
The chaos that ensues is “put on stage” for Senator Donovan
who is coming to visit the house with his daughter, Susan, Tim’s girlfriend. The
Senator is fascinated by “tradition” and the authentic way of living which he
thinks the West of Ireland still upholds, with the nice little cottages displayed on
the shore. His goal in life is to purchase a cottage or even a site in “handsome
Ballybeg”, in order to achieve “renewal, restoration, fulfilment” (The
Communication Cord, p. 43). His obsession with the “true centre” becomes his
trademark, as he seems to be amazed by everything connected to the way life
used to be a century ago in Ballybeg. He also has a very personal connection to
the rural way of life as he wants to be reconnected with his childhood, with the
roots of his identity which appear to be as illusory as the house itself:
“DONOVAN: You’ve no idea, Susie, how special, how very special all this is to
me. See those posts and chains over there? Haven’t seen those since I was a
child. I’ll explain them to you before we leave. …This is the true centre.” (The
Communication Cord, p. 46)

Senator Donovan perceives the house as the “heart” of an idyllic

Irish past, it is reconstructed to match perfectly the make-up of a genuine Irish
cottage but, in reality, there is no substance to sustain its structure as the idyllic
past is only an illusionary construct. The authenticity, or lack of it, is further
reinforced by the three wooden posts and chains “where cows were chained
during milking” and which will constitute a “trap of the past” for Senator
Donovan who, spellbound by the “living history” of the house and wanting to
ensure a “real” connection with his own past, chains himself to the posts and is
unable to free himself until the end of the play. The symbolic chaining to the
avatar of the past proves the Senator to be a character that embodies all the
characteristics that Field Day tried so hard to de-construct. He becomes the
epitome of the foolishness of those “who allow themselves to be seduced by the
imagery of a sanctified past”.
In trying to present the main issue of his thesis, Tim voices the
central theme of Translations, replacing Irish with German, as the times have
changed and the Other is now represented by the wealthy German tourists who
come to buy houses in the West of Ireland, intending to settle down in the heart
of an “authentic” Ireland.
154 Chapter Three

“TIM: An extreme example: I speak only English; you speak only German; no
common communicational structure. The result?—chaos.” (The Communication
Cord, p. 19)

However, as in Translations, the lack of communication also defines the

dialogue between characters speaking the same language. By having Tim
uttering this theory of communication on stage, Friel not only creates a
metatheatrical portal through which the dramatic intricacies of Translations are
clarified, but also, having in mind the farcical structure of the play, Tim’s theory
becomes a parody of the earlier play, a parody that strikes at the core of its
dramatic fabric.

“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)

Notwithstanding the close relationship between Tim’s theory

and the dramatic structure of Translations, the problems of communication
between people speaking the same language and the issue of role-playing
describe the essence of theatre and theatrical interaction. Moreover, these
problems of communication are at the basis of farce as a theatrical form.
Through his theory, Tim lays bare the same rules that define him as a character
in the play and his relation to the other characters. What follows is a play upon
this theory, an illustration of the trials and tribulations of communication both
between people speaking different languages – in this case German, spoken by
Willie Hausenbach alias Barney, French spoken by Evette and English, spoken
by the other characters – and by the characters speaking the same language,
English. The farce is constructed around characters who, willingly or not,
pretend to be somebody else in order to sustain the façade that Tim and Jack
erect for Senator Donovan and his daughter Susan. Paradoxically and further
enhancing the artificiality of the space, the hapless German tourist, Willie, who
has settled down in Ballybeg, represents the “locals”. He is the one who
welcomes Tim “home to handsome Ballybeg” (The Communication Cord, p.
48). However, ironically, his name had been changed to Barney the Banks in
order to be accepted by the “authentic peasants” of Ballybeg and in order to fit
the traditional way of naming: because he has money to by houses and sites in
the village, he is renamed Barney the Bank, the same way as Tim renames Jack,
Jack the Cod, to conceal his real identity from the Senator. Plunging into the
farce of naming, Donovan is pleased to discover that this old way of identifying
people reinforces the originality of the place:
 Languages 155

“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)

The language of the characters mirrors the absurdity and

artificiality of the house. The units of communication are slippery and the
common decoding system lacks even in the case of characters speaking the
same language. Elmer Andrews points out that “characters are continually
talking past each other and what we hear eventually is a frantic babble of French
156 Chapter Three

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.

“CLAIRE: I feel the reverberations.

TIM: I feel the reverberations.
CLAIRE: And the desire to sustain the occasion.
TIM: And saying anything, anything at all, that keeps the occasion going.
CLAIRE: Maybe even say nothing.
TIM: Maybe. Maybe silence is the perfect discourse
CLAIRE: Kiss me then.
TIM: I can scarcely hear you. Will you kiss me, Claire?” (The Communication
Cord, p. 86)

The rediscovered language of the body, of gestures and of

silence literally brings the house down. The language of silence makes Tim re-
consider the whole foundation of his academic work. History, myth, linguistic
theory, any discourse that one might use to communicate, have to be sustained
by a solid ground. The simulated images created through language lack
consistency and become simple holograms that can be manipulated and altered.
In the same way, the recreated images of a supposed historical originality
crumble to the ground under the weight of this new language that renders them
futile. The house, as a physical re-presentation of authenticity, is destroyed, or
destroys itself, not only because it lacks “real” foundation but also, and mainly,
because it has no place in a possible future. Destruction seems to be the only
way out from the loop of history, tradition and identity, providing the possibility
to create something that, while still keeping tradition in mind, moves away from
the past towards a future that encourages heterogeneity.
The play displays a cynical view of the motives and symbols
that lie behind the promotion of “traditional” Irishness, still to be found in Fáilte
Ireland brochures. The Communication Cord also questions the policies used by

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

Bolger’s “crumbling house”, like Brian Friel’s destroyed cottage

at the end of The Communication Cord, restores the balance of the real by
opening the quest, the search for a new, possible Irish identity which could have

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

as main component the relationship between language and reality. However,

there is an obvious generic difference between the two works. While Friel
presents a derisive view of the rural world re-built as the shaky basis of national
identity, Bolger’s imagery renders a tragic picture of the present. Hano seems to
be caught in the balance between past and future. The shattered house in the
woods re-enacts not only the destruction of an ossified past that the character
had always had to fight against, but also the dissolution of a possible future. The
space is characterized by a present-ness that can be read both as the tragedy of
the fragmented, postmodern Self, and as the new possibility to re-imagine the
destroyed past and future. Thus, similar to Brian Friel’s conclusion, the search
for identity and meaning begins with a total annihilation of the established
structures, including the future that those structures might construct.
 CHAPTER FOUR

ADAPTATIONS

Field Day and the World of Classical Myths

Declan Kiberd observes in his Introduction to Amid Our
Troubles – Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy1 that as early as the 12th century the
first Irish translation of Virgil’s Aeneid appeared and led to comparisons
between local mythological heroes and Aeneas, thus starting a long tradition of
literary works that referred back to the great classical writings of the Greek and
Roman Empires. The classical myths of a lost world were re-appropriated in
order to tell modern tales of a culture that was continuously searching for a valid
self-definition. James Joyce’s Ulysses suggested the idea that ancient Greece
refers to Ireland as the image of an old world, the home of lost but noble poetic
causes, destroyed by a modernity that was imposed upon its space. Thus, the
trope of Ireland as a lost world that could be retraced by artists through the
grandeur of a re-discovered ancient world became a standard of representation
determining constant re-workings of well-established myths of the ancient
Greek and Roman worlds.
Discussing the problem of cultural translation within the
framework of postcolonial societies, George Steiner observed that many
cultures “robbed of their own language” and cultural identity “by conquerors
and modern civilization”, try to translate their lost glory into re-imagined stories
based on the establishment of Homeric Greece, thus hoping to retrace their
“growth of consciousness”2. The need of colonial cultures to go back to the
mythological representations of antiquity refers to a re-appropriation of a lost
cultural identity that could be discovered in a canon of works that constitute the
foundation of a European cultural identity. However, this centripetal movement
induced by the powerful attraction of the grandeur of an apparently culturally
stable centre represented, at the same time, as many opportunities for the Other

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

Argentina. The intransigence of the Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

became the emblem of British politics. The image of a leader, who considered
the state to be above everything and everybody, defined a time when the clash
between private and public spaces emerged as the ultimate confrontation for the
establishment of new identities. Addressing the issue of the miners’ strikes,
Thatcher invoked the idea that “the state had to obey ethical imperatives that
were senior to all other ethical demands – familial, tribal, religious, sectarian –
by virtue of their universality and impartiality”11.
Both Richard Kearney and Seamus Deane discussed the impact
that the hunger strikes had in the political and literary circles at the time, often
relating it to the issue of myth and mythical justification. In his Field Day
pamphlet “Myth and Motherland”, published in 1984, Kearney develops his
previous idea on the mythical interpretation of terrorism12 by discussing the way
in which the tragedy of the hunger strikes was transferred into the space of
mythical symbolism. He considers that, by using myth, one can invest the
present with an unshakeable, timeless authority which works relatively well in a
society where there is a continuous unease about living in history, given the fact
that, as a traditional characteristic, the Irish are seen as “an a-historic people
who reject notions of chronology and see history as endless repetition of
familiar themes with no hope for resolution”13. The close relationship between
myth and tradition, the summoning of ancestral voices to sustain the fight
against a history seen as imposed and alien, ensures the position of myth as
main antagonist to history. The interpretation of the H-Block campaign as part
of the mythical victimization of Gaelic heroes continues the mythic rhetoric of
sacrificial martyrdom that characterizes the Republican discourse. The I.R.A.
subscribed to the mythic logic by using the death of the hunger strikers with an
extraordinary propaganda power. Seamus Deane observed the way in which the
hunger strikes were seen as “cultic expressions of victimhood or heroic and
dedicated actions”14 The often-dangerous mixture of myth and politics used in
an attempt to justify contemporary actions reflects the basic polarization:

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

“between a ‘mythologizing’ form of politics which interprets the present in terms

of a unifying past (sacred tradition) and a ‘demythologizing’ form of politics
which interprets the present in terms of a pluralizing future (secular progress)”15.

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.

The Return of Antigone: Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act

In an article included in the volume Amid Our Troubles – Irish
Versions of Greek Tragedy, Seamus Deane contrasted the two sets of
adaptations – Greek and Russian – that defined Field Day’s attempt to open up
their cultural enterprise towards classical European texts: “in the Greek plays,
catastrophe has arrived at the centre of the political and social system; with the

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

Russian plays, it is occurring, in a premonitory fashion, at the fringes”19. The

multiple facets of catastrophe as a turning point in the structures of power, play
a determining role in Field Day’s view on contemporary Northern Irish politics.
They embody the controversy that ultimately brought about the partial failure of
the company’s ideology: “based on the notion that a transformation of Northern
Ireland and of all Irish society was necessary and desirable if catastrophe were
to be avoided, it also believed that it was only catastrophe that could bring about
the transformation”20.
This paradox can also be discovered in the two classical Greek
plays that the company produced in their theatrical venture, Tom Paulin’s The
Riot Act and Seamus Heaney’s, The Cure at Troy. The resolution that might be
offered by the catharsis of the two plays becomes blurred. The divine
intervention used in the Greek original does not seem to work in a space where
both history and religion become part of an oppressive system that causes an
“ossification” of community relations. Rather than searching for a solution to
the problematic discourse of contemporary society, the two plays offer the
image of the desire to achieve a resolution. The possibility of a theoretical
salvation exists in the texture of the plays but it does not evolve towards an
actual achievement.
The controversial issues of “historicizing”/“de-historicizing”
and “mythologizing”/“de-mythologizing”, discussed by the Field Day
pamphlets, provided further difficulty for achieving convincing versions of
Greek tragedies. The movement towards a modern, plural, hybrid identity
implied a break away from historical and mythical interpretation. However, a
complete denial of tradition would ensure a lack of basis for the construction of
new identities. Thus, the conflicting voices that advocated the former or the
latter solutions were faced with the necessity of blending the two, revisiting the
historical and mythical images that defined Irish culture and reasserting them
within the framework of a fragmented, postcolonial world. The social, political
and theoretical dynamic created by postcolonialism offered an essential ground
for re-discussing the main elements that made up the identity discourse. One of
the postcolonial strategies was to go back to the classical texts of Western
civilization and de-construct them by re-placing them against the postcolonial
background of the now independent colonies. However, this process involved
much more than a simple re-considering of ancient texts. Notwithstanding the
fact that the majority of the postcolonial writers intended to de-construct the
classical metanarratives, by using them in a contemporary framework they re-
instated the universality of these texts and initiated a mechanism that would

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

simultaneously encompass two opposed movements: historicizing and de-

historicizing.
The Greek plays also provide a possibility to enhance the tragic
symbolism of the political realities in Northern Ireland. Seamus Deane asserts:
“the search for the tragic element as a means of universalising an historical
condition is sometimes undertaken with great subtlety, but once indulged it is
unrelenting in its determination to give to the most improbable historical
moments the grandeur of an eternal symbol.”21

Tragedy as genre is reflected upon a fossilized community which by being

witness to the catharsis of Sophoclean works, re-fashioned in an “Irish idiom”,
is made aware of its own tragic role within the morphology of contemporary
politics. However, both reviewers of the performance and Field Day theorists
underlined the problematic issues that resurface in the case of Northern Irish
adaptations of Greek plays.
In January 1984, following a request from Stephen Rea, Tom
Paulin decided to write a version of Sophocles’s Antigone for the company’s
yearly premiere. The decision was not hard to make as Paulin had already
considered a re-interpretation of the classical text following his literary
“quarrel” with Conor Cruise O’Brien, who had provided a crude and
straightforward Unionist interpretation of Antigone in his book States of
Ireland22. According to O’Brien, it was the “Irish Antigone” – Bernadette
Devlin McAliskey, one of the defining figures of the Northern Irish Civil Rights
Movement – who had brought catastrophe to the Unionist state. Paulin
comments on O’Brien’s reading of Antigone:
“O’Brien’s loyalties are to the ‘daylight gods’, and he sees the political conflict
in the play as one of unequal values and unequal personal responsibilities. Creon,
therefore, is both individual and institution, while Antigone, like St. Joan,
appears as an individual ahead of her supporters. She is ‘headstrong’ and
therefore more responsible because she can supposedly exercise choice. So
Creon is rendered almost innocent by his immobile precedence, his simply being
there. This is a severe distortion of the tragic conflict.”23

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

Paulin’s desire to set the records straight with O’Brien coincided

with Field Day’s decision to open up their theatrical enterprise towards the
classical texts of Greek antiquity, after staging in 1981 a Russian classic, Brian
Friel’s version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. There is no coincidence that
the company decided to initiate its classical venture with Sophocles’ Antigone,
as, from the outset, the prevailing political situation was exposed to
interpretations that could be easily translated into the universal morphology of
the Greek play. The relevance of the Antigone myth was also underlined by
George Steiner, a theoretician that enjoyed an outstanding influence with the
Field Day directors. Steiner notes in his book dedicated to the story of Antigone:
“Whenever, wherever, in the Western legacy, we have found ourselves engaged
in the confrontation of justice and of law, of the aura of the dead and the claims
of the living, whenever, wherever, the hungry dreams of the young have collided
with the ‘realism’ of the ageing, we have found ourselves turning to words,
images, sinews of argument, synecdoches, tropes, metaphors, out of the grammar
of Antigone and Creon.”24

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

The political situation in Northern Ireland was exacerbated by the extraordinary

intransigence that characterized the political outlook of Britain, with a Prime

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

Ulster “growl” that refers the audience to Edward Carson or even a

contemporary Ian Paisley.
“CREON: I would further like to take this opportunity of thanking each and
every one of you for your steadfastness and your most exceptional loyalty. …if
ever any man here should find himself faced with a choice between betraying his
country and betraying his friend, then he must swiftly place that friend in the
hands of the authorities. Thank you all for coming, and any questions just now?
We have one minute.” (The Riot Act, p. 15-17)

The press-conference reverberations of Creon’s speech reinforce the political

immediacy of his monologue. Tom Paulin argued that he wanted Creon to be “a
kind of puritan gangster, a megalomaniac who spoke alternatively in an English
public school voice and a deep menacing Ulster growl” and noticed that when
Douglas Hurd took over the position of Secretary of State that very September,
“he duly trotted out the cliché”40. However, critics of the production viewed
Creon’s first appearance – Fintan O’Toole and Robert Johnstone, for example –
as a failure to guarantee the tragic denouement. The ‘very funny’ impersonation
of a Secretary of State, the parody of a political functionary works as far as the
entertainment of the audience is concerned but, on the other hand, it weakens
the tragic conflict between Creon as the representative of the state and Antigone.
If from the very beginning, Creon is seen as a comic depiction, a caricature of a
contemporary politician, then the entire theatricality of the play is lost. O’Toole
notes that Antigone “works as a play because we are also interested in Creon as
a man, concerned with his dilemma and the way he tries to cope with it.
Sophocles’s Creon is a tragic hero as well as a villain. By satirizing him from
the start, the drama of his conflict with Antigone is rendered impossible.”41
However, if we assume that Paulin chose parody to render the
shaky ground that supports the representative of an imposed state structure,
there is still no clear political passion in the play to compensate for the loss of a
powerful counterpart for Antigone. The eponymous character, however
simplified by the colloquialism of her speech, still retains the strength that she
manifests in her encounters with Creon, the representative of the state. Anthony
Roche observes that Antigone’s “wildness”:

“ISMENE: You’re talking wild –

it’s Creon’s order.” (The Riot Act, p. 11)

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

of the modern resonances much of the theatricality of the original Antigone is

lost.”43

The clever language usage ranging from a colloquial, minimalist style to

Yeatsian references from Easter 1916, (for example Creon changing his mind at
the end of the play – “I changed it, but. / Aye, changed it utterly?” (The Riot Act,
p. 60) and some fine choral lines do not compensate for a lack of theatricality,
which juxtaposed with the theatrical exuberance of Derek Mahon’s High Time
becomes even more apparent. Notwithstanding the negative reviews of the Field
Day performance and of Tom Paulin’s textual rendering of the Greek myth,
Anthony Roche discovers in the final images of the play, however late, a
tendency to open up towards a possible space of reconciliation:
“the play, with its ending and Creon’s suffering, recognizes, belatedly, the
claims of the dead; and culturally, it at least marks out an open space through the
Field Day Theatre Company on which two dissenting traditions can begin to find
common holy ground.”44

Philoctetes Revisited: Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy

The year 1990 marked the tenth anniversary of the Field Day
Theatre Company and Seamus Heaney, one of the leading poets of
contemporary Ireland and director of the company, offered his first play as a
present for the celebrations. Derry’s imposing Guildhall once again hosted the
premiere of what Fintan O’Toole described as “a superb piece of poetic
embodiment”45, Heaney’s version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, The Cure at Troy.
The poet’s decision to turn to a Greek classic, and especially to Philoctetes, a
play considered to be the epitome of Sophoclean writing in its rendering of the
conflict between personal feeling and public loyalties, is related by the same
O’Toole to the idea of the poet as representative and voice of the tribe. Heaney
struggled in his poetic career with the two sides of the poetic enterprise, finding
it difficult, especially in his first volumes, to accept the role of the “tribal
shaman”, instead opting to express his own poetic voice and attempting to

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

impose a rather elitist poetry as a valid form of reconciliation within the

framework of the Northern Irish political situation. With The Cure at Troy,
critics consider that Seamus Heaney’s career reached a level where the public
involvement in the contemporary political texture became imperative.
The poet had to descend from his Ivory Tower and engage in the
public debate thus reaching towards the possibility of reconciliation not only in
the public eye but also within his inner conflicts of a self-proclaimed “inner
émigré”. Fintan O’Toole notes: “The modern poet going back to a Greek play is
trying to return to a poetry that is not relaxed and reflective, but tense,
concentrated, sacral, and, above all public rather than elitist. It is a return to
poetry as a rite of the tribe rather than a form of relaxation.”46 Heaney, the
private poet, and Heaney, the voice of the tribe, are in continuous conflict and
this struggle was included in the play, being enhanced by the inbuilt classical
conflict of the Sophoclean classic, between private and public loyalties.
However, Seamus Heaney’s choice to write a version of Philoctetes does not
make sense only from the point of view of his poetic career.
From its first premiere in 1980, Field Day enjoyed a quite
amicable relationship with Heaney, inviting him to become director and thus
attaching his name to a cultural enterprise that managed to become one of the
determining elements of the Northern Irish cultural “revival”. Therefore,
Heaney’s choice of play has to be viewed also from the point of view of his
allegiance to Field Day. The relevance of Philoctetes for the Field Day
enterprise is overwhelming: the hero, the “walking wound”, stranded on the
island of Lemnos, is torn between revenge and forgiveness, between always
remembering and showing off his wound and reconciliation. The moral conflict
of the play and the space of the island was carefully kept within the framework
of the ancient Greek world, but, indirectly, “it was full of whispers and
echoes”47 which made it fit into the Field Day enterprise.
However, Seamus Heaney always expressed his reluctance
towards any Northern Irish political parallels in the play. In an interview with
Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times, he considered that The Cure at Troy
contains no hidden political subtext and that reviewers should refrain from
looking for “coded messages” in the play48. Notwithstanding the lack of direct
equivalences between the play and the Northern Irish situation, I would suggest
that the political relevance of the text was even greater, focusing on the general

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

The problem pursued by Field Day Theatre Company, and

which found a solid ground in Heaney’s play, was that of understanding the
always-changing balance between the cultural and the political. Stephen Rea,
founding member of the company and co-director, together with Bob Crowley,
of the Field Day production of The Cure at Troy, considers that a response to
the play, which would equate certain characters with different political groups,
is “the most insulting and pathetic response which shows an offensive
complacency and a ghettoisation of the mind.”50 However, as discussed above,
it is very difficult for a Derry or Belfast audience not to perceive Heaney’s play
having in mind the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The audience, and here it is the
case of a politically and socially well-determined audience, come to meet the
artwork with their receivers already attuned. Their mental set determined by a
certain political background depends on the interplay between expectation and
observation, between the expected and the experienced. Sergei Eisenstein

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

discusses this useful predetermination of the audience in an article published in

the collection The Film Sense:
“Every spectator, in correspondence with his individuality, and in his own way
and out of his own experience – out of the womb of his fantasy, out of the warp
and weft of his associations, all conditioned by the premises of his character,
habits and social appurtenances, creates an image in accordance with the
representational guidance suggested by the author, leading him to understanding
and experience of the author’s theme. This is the same image that was planned
and created by the author, but this image is at some time created also by the
spectator himself.”51

The Cure at Troy combines the alertness to the tensions present

in Northern Irish contemporary society with the Greek playwright’s
understanding of the relations between public and private morality. Heaney’s
play however, and the Field Day production need a closer observation of the
way they interact with the classic Greek play on a cultural semiotic plan and of
the way in which a particular type of audience, in the case of the modern
production, relates to a play dealing with a classical truth.
The first change that Heaney makes in his version of Philoctetes
is the title itself. In “Production Notes in No Particular Order”, Heaney says that
the word “cure” is “backlit ever so faintly in Irish usage (or should I say Irish
Catholic?) by a sense of miracle. I wanted the title to prefigure a benign and
unexpected turn of events.”52 Thus, from the very first read of the programme,
the audience is assured that the “cure” will come at the end, Philoctetes being
“cured” into the loyalty and solidarity that he refused and was refused for ten
years. The production flier described The Cure at Troy as a “powerfully moving
play which probes the conflict between personal integrity and political
expediency, between the conscience of the individual and the call of the tribe”.
It is a journey of discovery, a journey into the very heartland of the individual’s
relationship with the world around him. Therefore, Seamus Heaney’s own inner
conflict, that between the poet as individual isolated in his Ivory Tower and the
poet as the voice of the people, is mirrored in the structure of the play,
Philoctetes balancing between his own consciousness and the calling of the
tribe.
The tragic journey begins on the island of Lemnos, which in
Sophocles’s play is seen to be a trackless and barren place, cut off from
civilization. The only dwelling that exists on the island is a rocky cave,

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

emblematic of the basic mode of Philoctetes’s existence. He is a character

defined by the scenic context. As an outcast from the society, he addresses his
natural surroundings directly and he personalizes them in a way which forges an
intimate bond between himself and the place which he has been forced to make
his home.
Heaney’s text follows the Greek classic, introducing
Philoctetes’s space as “a cave mouth/archway” with the suggestion of a volcano
in the background, thus emphasizing both the barrenness and solitude of his
abode but also the earthly power and fiery passion of the volcano overlooking
the desolate space. In the Field Day production of The Cure at Troy, the
designer Bob Crowley created a set that reminds us not of a barren, trackless
place but of a decayed space, forgotten by the fallen gods. Philoctetes relates to
this space with a duality that characterizes the whole conflict of the play: he
recognizes the negative connotations of the island, its barrenness and wildness,
the fact that there cannot be any salvation on an island which is “a nowhere”.
However, he also admits that this space constitutes a proper stage for his own
self-pity, for his own existence as a “walking wound”, a place that comes closest
to what he could call home.

“PHILOCTETES: This island is a nowhere. Nobody

Would ever put in here. There’s nothing.
Nothing to attract a lookout’s eye.
Nobody in his right mind would come near it.53
...
The island’s all there is
That’ll stand to me.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 51)

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.

“PHILOCTETES: I can see

The cure at Troy. All that you say
Is like a dream to me and I obey.
…
My head’s light at the
thought of a different ground and a different sky. I’ll
never get over Lemnos; this island’s going to be the
keel under me and the ballast inside me.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 80)

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

“ODYSSEUS: I can see the whole thing in my head,

So all you’ll need to do is listen
And do the things I tell you.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 4)

In order not to make a “deus ex machina” appearance (characteristic of the

classical Greek version), Heaney decided to use different ways of underlining
the power of Hercules over Philoctetes. “I tried to link the eruption of the
volcano with the god’s power, so that the synaesthetic climax – flame –
streamers of scarlet silk, lurid lights, synthesizer – rumble – would prepare the
presence of the god.”55 Hercules appears in Philoctetes’s head and then
transferred in the voice of the Chorus Leader.

“PHILOCTETES: Hercules:
I saw him in the fire
Hercules
was shining in the air.
I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.

CHORUS: I have opened the closed road.

Between the living and the dead
To make the right road clear to you
This is the voice of Hercules now.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 78)

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.

“CHORUS: And that’s the borderline that poetry

Operates on too, always in between

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

What you would like to happen and what will –

Whether you like it or not.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 2)

The Cure at Troy is enriched with two genuine parts: a prologue

and an epilogue uttered by the Chorus, both making clear the political and social
background against which the myth of Philoctetes is revisited by Heaney. In the
prologue, the Chorus talks about the people who think they are always right and
keep repeating their mistakes and people who go round carrying their wounds as
decorations. The Chorus is part of these people living in a world of uncertainty
and hatred.

“CHORUS: And their whole life spent admiring themselves

For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.

And a part of you,

For my part is the chorus, and the chorus
Is more or less a borderline between
The you and the me and the it of it.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 2)

Although living in a liminal space within their own society, the

moment the Chorus enter the space of the island of Lemnos, they feel lost in a
maze, they feel like strangers in a place where they do not feel the certainty of
their pain and suffering:

“CHORUS: But we’re in a maze.

We’re strangers and this place is strange.
We’re on shifting sand. It is all sea-change.
Clear one minute. Next minute, haze.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 12)

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.

“CHORUS: A hunger-striker’s father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.” (The Cure at Troy, p.77)

Notwithstanding Heaney’s refusal to associate Philoctetes with Northern Ireland

there are instances in the play when the associations with both communities in
the North are more than plausible as Philoctetes is the one using the words “no”,
“never” and “no surrender”, he is full of hatred and paralyzed by memories of
past injustice, living in a secluded space, outside culture, where the only
reminder of his past existence is his continuously hurting wound. Philoctetes is

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

“an aspect of every intransigence, republican as well as unionist, a manifestation

of the swank of victimhood, the righteous refusal, the wounded one whose
identity has become dependent upon the wound, the betrayed one whose energy
and pride is a morbid symptom.”57

“PHILOCTETES: All I’ve left is a wound.

CHORUS: Your wound is what you feed on, Philoctetes.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 61)

“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)

In his review of the Field Day production at the Abbey, Fintan

O’Toole compares Philoctetes, cursed, maddened, abandoned, exposed to the
hardship of nature to Mad Sweeney, a character also revisited by Heaney.
Philoctetes’s nostalgia for his home landscape, but, at the same time, his sense
of melting into the natural elements of “his” island can be compared with
Sweeney’s life on Glen Bolcain.58
Given the overtly poetic language used by the playwright, many
reviewers doubt the theatricality of the play, but, nevertheless, the reviews
respond positively to Des McAleer’s performance in the main role:
“a magnificent striking of the balance between the visceral and the elemental on
the one hand and the stylized expression of an abstract force on the other.
McAleer does what a play that is word-heavy needs its actors to do: he uses his
whole body rather than just his mouth, shows us a body wracked and wrecked,
but also transfuses with currents of pain as it is, intensely alive. There is no
misplaced sense of Philoctetes as a naturalistic character, but there is a full
measure of suffering humanity, of the physical reality that might have been lost
in the welter of words. This alone makes the play always compelling.”59

The main structure of Greek tragedies is based on two equally

powerful sides clashing, with the Chorus as mediator between the two. In
Heaney’s version, however, Philoctetes is seen as too powerful for Odysseus

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

and Neoptolemus to keep up with him. Fintan O’Toole comments that

Odysseus, the cynical politician and Neoptolemus, the innocent tool of his
manoeuvrings, are never given an engaging language on which to build.
Consequently, the performances of Seamus Moran and Sean Rocks in these
roles are far too small-scale and un-poetic to give us the sense of a real clash at
work, and the direction of Stephen Rea and Bob Crowley gives them “little to
work with in terms of movement or gesture or stylization which might provide a
physical compensation for the relative lack of linguistic excitement”.60
If Philoctetes’s position as the outraged victim and that of
Odysseus as the politician who would go to any length to see his plan put in
practice, are more or less stable, Neoptolemus’s position can easily shift from
one extreme to the other. He represents the people caught in the middle, who
might join up and take part or might watch and wait, who are uncertain and thus
capable of betrayal. All along the play, Neoptolemus balances between
Odysseus’s position, that of lying to Philoctetes and make him return to the
Greeks with his magic bow, and Philoctetes’s position, betraying Odysseus by
giving the magic bow back to its rightful owner.

“NEOPTOLEMUS: Duplicity! Complicity!

All right.
I’ll do it. (p. 11)
…
I did a wrong thing and I have to right it.” (The Cure at Troy, p. 64)

Going from betrayal to betrayal, Neoptolemus ends up in a more or less neutral

position, that of the rightful citizen who accepts the workings of the society but
has his own inner set of values.
The play finishes in an uplifting beat. The wounded man is
seduced from his island because if he stays on he will grow self-involved and
self-tormenting. Philoctetes has to make the move from the wound to the bow –
from contempt for political humanity to an active role in the resolution of
historical conflict. As a whole, the play fits the main cultural agenda of Field
Day: drama should be a factor in the re-reading and re-writing of history, “a way
of re-shaping the audience in posterity, if not in the stalls”61.
Fourteen years after the premiere of The Cure at Troy, Seamus
Heaney tried his hand at playwriting once again, with another version of a
Greek classic, Sophocles’ Antigone. The new play, The Burial at Thebes,

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

opened at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s National Theatre, in October 2004

during the Dublin Theatre Festival. From the very beginning, controversy
surrounded the play, critics disapproving of the change of title, considering that,
by changing Antigone into The Burial at Thebes the focus of the play shifts from
the heroine who fights for the familial right of burial, to the burial itself, to the
dead hero brother, leaving the female protagonist in the background and giving
way to yet another patriarchal interpretation of the text. The controversy
regarding the title of the play connected Heaney, once again, to his previous
participation in the Field Day enterprise, as the explanation he gave to his critics
clearly linked The Burial at Thebes to The Cure at Troy. The playwright argued
that he chose the title of his new play having in mind his previous version of
Philoctetes, intending to provide some sort of continuity between the two works
by deciding upon the same structure for the title. The political subtext of the
play and especially its staging brought to the foreground the political and
military situation in the Middle East. The focus moves from the previously
portrayed Northern Irish “Troubles” towards a more international situation
defined by terrorism and money:

“CREON: Here’s something else for you to think about.

For a good while now I have had reports
Of disaffected elements at work here,
A certain poisonous minority
Unready to admit the rule of law
And my law in particular.
I know
These people and how they operate.
Maybe they are not
The actual perpetrators, but they possess
The money and the means to bribe their way.
Money has a long and sinister reach.
It slips into the system, changes hands
And starts to eat away at the foundations
Of everything we stand for.”62

Heaney’s poetic language is maintained throughout the play, presenting a new

dimension of Antigone as compared to the previously discussed version by Tom
Paulin. The latter’s staccato dialogue is exchanged for the lyricism of Heaney’s
imagery. Once again, like in his previous play, Heaney intended to rise above
the simple political determinations that might transpire from the textual maze of
the play and create an image that moves beyond the political and the historical
towards something superior that the Chorus defines, at one point, as Fate.

62
Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), pp. 14-15.
186 Chapter Four

“CHORUS: Fate finds strange ways to fulfil its ends.

Not military power nor the power of money,
Not battlements of stone nor black-hulled fleets
Can fend off fate or keep its force at bay.” (The Burial at Thebes, p. 42)

Field Day’s Irish Molière: Derek Mahon’s High Time

Derek Mahon’s High Time, an adaptation of Molière’s The
School for Husbands, represented the second part of the Field Day double bill in
1984. The grey and stark setting of Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act was exchanged,
after the interval, with the clownish exuberance of the same actors, in a
colourful, punk setting, reflecting the directors’ experience in physical theatre.
Both Mark Long and Emil Wolk were well-known for a highly physical
performance style. Mark Long was one of the founders of the People Show in
1966, while Wolk was collaborating with the People Show but previously he
had acquired training with a circus family and he had studied mime with Marcel
Marceau.63 Their previous experience was illustrated by the production,
Marilynn Richtarik pointing out that “they embellished on the script in countless
ways, adding a backstage counterpart to Molière’s world and interpolating
scenes for which one searches in vain in the published script. All of this was
enhanced by music composed and played by Keith Donald, a saxophonist with
the Irish band Moving Hearts.”64
Derek Mahon, an already well-established representative of the
Ulster poetry revival in 1984, “leapt at”65 Brian Friel’s proposal to write a
version of Molière. He decided to choose The School for Husbands, as he
believed that the play has not been translated into English verse and also
because he thought that the main theme of the play met the general morale of
Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act: the damaging effect of inflexibility. The process that
led to the production saw different views of how to stage Molière’s play. Mahon
observes that, after a first discussion, the company decided to do the play in a
period setting, following the French original. However, having in mind Field
Day’s policy regarding translations of European classics, a period performance
would have been a rather “sterile exercise”66 as it was believed that the Irish
audience would not have responded to a stylised costume drama. Other options
were taken into consideration: the contemporary 1990s, the 1920s and finally

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

century court music or similar” which “changes to rock music”68 almost

immediately. The set that defines the space of the play reflects a residential
square, mirroring Dublin’s Georgian doorways, painted in bright colours. The
dialogue is rendered in verse, creating a Baz Luhrmann-like atmosphere69,
providing a continuous possibility of physicality by quickening the rhythm of
the action. The playwright warned the audience from the very beginning that the
play would challenge their horizon of expectations:
“you are, of course, asked to suspend your disbelief in various ways. You would
be unlikely, today, to come upon a guardian-ward arrangement like that of Tom
and Isabel; but, then, you would be unlikely to hear verse spoken in the street
either.”70

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:

“ISABEL: I cannot have you here

chatting up what’s-his-face” (High Time, p. 50)

followed, a couple of pages later, by Helen:

“What is this rigmarole? And who is ‘Val’?

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

Has someone been creating un scandale?” (High Time, p. 56)

Marilynn Richtarik analyses the poetic structures of Mahon’s translation,

concluding that the poet uses “outrageous rhymes” (sake rhyming with Iraq, for
example) to create something that the critic for The Irish Times termed
“unheroic couplets”71. “Mahon frequently splits contractions for the sake of the
rhythm:

“VAL: I think she’s been entirely fair, and I

‘ll go now and set her mind at rest.” (High Time, p. 46)

and sometimes the rhyme depends on the deformation of words or a Northern

Irish accent, or both:

“VAL: Who told you, sir, of this new subterfyoosh?

TOM: Isabel; let’s not beat about the bush.” (High Time, p. 41)72

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.

Field Day’s Controversial Choice: David Rudkin’s The Saxon

Shore and Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena
Field Day’s premiere of 1983 opened with a public controversy
regarding the choice by the company to stage the South African playwright,
Athol Fugard’s play Boesman and Lena rather than the play commissioned by
the company for that year, David Rudkin’s The Saxon Shore. The critical
analysis of Field Day’s choice, undertaken in articles and reviews75, revealed a
political discourse that the company had always denied but which was intensely
discussed by critics who had already been suspicious of the company’s declared
openness towards multiculturalism and ecumenism. The basic ideology of the
company stated in the pamphlets and in the essays written by the Field Day
directors, included the idea of multiculturalism and pluralism, that of opening up
the rigid frontiers of Irish cultural discourse towards a new, European
dimension.
Seamus Deane emphasised in many of his essays, especially the
ones written at the beginning of Field Day’s cultural adventure, that the
company enthusiastically attempted to leave the fossilized ground of Irish
tradition and move towards a pluralism that would break the Northern
stereotypes but, nevertheless, it would include a strong connection with tradition

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

In “Heroic Styles”, Deane discusses the two “visions” of

Irishness that have defined the cultural morphology of the country. The
“Romantic”, Yeatsian discourse, that favours a reading that “takes pleasure in
the notion that Ireland is a culture enriched by the ambiguity of its relationship
to an anachronistic and a modernised present”77, is set against the other,
Joycean, mode of reading, considered to be an escape “into a pluralism of the
present”78. However, the thrust of Deane’s essay is to reject both modes of
extracting an “essential” Irishness from cultural history. He considers that Field
Day should look for different registers of language to create new visions of
Irishness “unblemished by Irishness, but securely Irish”79.
Stephen Rea sustained this point by observing that there is no
Irish canon of plays that they would be interested to put on stage and that Field
Day would look at new plays, written especially for the company, and at plays
that had been already included in the European and universal canon of a
politically and socially active theatre. The main idea emerging from these views
is that it is impossible to do without tradition, but it is necessary “to disengage
from the traditions of the ideas which the literary revival and the accompanying

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

political revolution sponsored so successfully”80 and to look for new ways of

expression. One of these ways included a type of theatre that would subscribe to
a new, visual language to be used in the creation of an alternative Irish identity
which could point towards pluralism and hybridity. Thus, the plays put on stage
by the company responded to this requirement by discussing, in a then
innovative way, problems of history, identity, memory and myth and attempting
to impose a language that embodied the postcolonial tendency towards a new
writing and a new type of politics.
However, the situation of David Rudkin’s The Saxon Shore
complicated this liberal policy and gave rise to a variety of articles written by
critics of the company like Edna Longley, Lynda Henderson, Brian McAvera or
Sean Connolly, who considered that, notwithstanding the company’s policy of
openness and multiplicity, Field Day was continuing the “memory of the
wound” and the “navel gazing”81 that had characterized the discourse of Irish
studies up to that point.
Written in 1982 to a commissioning by Brian Friel and the Field
Day Theatre Company, The Saxon Shore was intended to be the 1983 world
premiere of the Derry based company. The commissioning of a play from a
well-known British playwright with Anglo-Irish origins subscribed to the
company’s express intention to encourage the production of new works that
could offer a definite opening towards a multiplicity of views on the Northern
Irish situation. The commissioning was also defined by the fact that, after a
large amount of criticism coming from the Protestant community, Field Day
decided to try their hand at staging a play written by a Protestant playwright,
who, notwithstanding, had nationalist views on the Northern Irish situation.
David Rudkin was extremely intrigued by Brian Friel’s request, as he assumed
the directors of the company to be “green nationalists”82 who would not be
interested in his vision of Ulster. The Field Day decision to commission a new
play from a British playwright with Ulster origins – David Rudkin’s mother
being of Orange Protestant origin – also responded to the fact that by 1983, after
staging three plays in a row by Brian Friel, the company had become known as

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

Agnes’s words confirm the identity crisis experienced by the

Saxons, but also emit the hypothesis that the higher power of the “mighty
Roman Empire” forced the Saxons to “rob and savage”, their vicious raids being
caused by an external agency, the imperial power, and also by their inner
transformation into werewolves, transformation that they cannot help. David
Rudkin takes great care to depict the settler Saxons as both manipulated by an
external power but also cruelly enjoying their bloody nightly raids. The position
that they acquire by the end of the play combines the two agencies (internal and
external) into a move towards a human-ness that was lacking in the morphology
of their identity. Athdark exemplifies this human-ness: when left alone in the
dark, he is overcome by the guilt of having killed his healer but also has the
power to strive towards becoming “a man”.
“ATHDARK: How shall I be neighbour, who have been such fiend to these?
There were such damage. There were such bloody slaughter done. And I killed
the lovely lady. She was healing me… I do as the Good Word bids me. Spathum,
sword, I make a blade of you. To shear the clay. … I must wake now. I must
wake. Stand. Dig my garden.” (The Saxon Shore, p. 49)

Richard Allen Cave observes about the play in an article

published in the Times Higher Education Supplement:
“What impresses with The Saxon Shore is the way every detail and dimension of
the play has an immediate meaning yet is richly metaphorical (…) It is Rudkin’s
power to engage with public crisis as it affects the roots of individuality that
makes this play a monumental work of the imagination.”92.

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

construction of a future national identity. The principle of identity present in the

play corresponds to the Field Day policy and subscribes to the need for
reversing the political cycle of identity and concentrating on individual
identities that make up the national consciousness. Lena is twice marked in her
fight for dignity: first as a coloured person and second as a woman. She
develops from a person overwhelmed by a “dumb, animal-like submission”95 to
Boesman, to a woman who cries for freedom: “I’ve held on tight too long. I
want to let go. I want nothing! Tonight it’s Freedom for Lena.” (Boesman and
Lena, p. 291)
The play’s fascination with language, which ties in perfectly
with Field Day’s concern with the role and power of language in creating
meaning and in defining identity, is brought to the fore when a third character
joins the duo on stage. The “old man”, a Black South-African, speaks a
language that neither Boesman nor Lena can understand. However, if Boesman
is overcome with hatred and anger against an Other that he does not know, nor
he wants to know, Lena’s need for human contact pushes her towards the old
man, in whom she finds a kindred soul. Boesman refuses to give in, treating
both Lena and the old man as unwanted Others: Lena, whom he can manipulate
and oppress as his woman – thus transferring on their relationship the frustration
of his own oppression by the white man – and the old man, who belongs to a
group of people that Boesman recognizes as inferior even to him. Lena’s image
as Boesman’s “inferior” becomes apparent when he tries to annihilate her only
mode of expression, her language: “Your words are just noise. Nonsense.”
(Boesman and Lena, p. 246) However, Lena does not need her language to
communicate with the old man, her solution resembling that used by characters
in Brian Friel’s Translations and The Communication Cord, where the language
of gestures, of human contact becomes more important than words.
By the end of the play, the peripheral voice of Lena, who at the
beginning was unable to “find her way”, finds the strength to re-assert itself
with the help of the old man who does not utter many words, but whose
presence provides the support Lena needs to retrace her own identity. After
entering the barren space of their new “home”, Lena sees “memories of herself”
on the old roads, and the whole play becomes a journey to recuperate that
memory, so that in the last scene her character appears a whole individual, even
achieving power and command over Boesman’s own violence and thus
becoming his equal:
“I’m alive, Boesman. There’s daylights left in me. You still got a chance. Don’t
lose it. Next time you want to kill me, do it. Really do it. When you hit, hit those

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)

By choosing Boesman and Lena as their 1983 production, Field

Day intended to secure their intention of bringing international plays on the
stage of the Guildhall and to convince the audience that their own problems, the
Northern Irish “troubles”, have parallels in different corners of the world.
However, the refusal of the possibility to open up the political discourse in the
North by deciding not to stage David Rudkin’s The Saxon Shore backfired in the
reviews and the interviews with the audience. Both expressed certain unease
about the company’s decision not to stage a play confronting the troubles in
Northern Ireland. According to the Londonderry Sentinel96, confronted with this
opinion, Brian Friel pointed out that this was not the result of a conscious
decision on the part of the company, as there are many works about the troubles
available. The decision to avoid what the Field Day considered to have had been
an open outrage as an outcome of David Rudkin’s take on the Northern Irish
situation, brought about comments from the audience that the company
preferred to avoid a serious discussion of the issues so ardent in the North.
Nevertheless, all the reviewers tried to find associations between Boesman and
Lena and the contemporary political situation in the North. In the Irish News of
22 September 1983, Eugene Moloney writes: “while not easy watching, [given
the strong South African accents of the cast], Fugard’s play also has a message
for Northern Ireland and what we understand by freedom”. In addition, the
Londonderry Sentinel of 21 September 1983 considered that both characters,
Boesman and Lena, were carrying strong echoes of Friel, and their fight against
oppression and for the recovery of their human dignity bore important parallels
with life in Northern Ireland.
The 1983 Field Day tour ended with voices being raised against
the company’s decision to refuse the staging of David Rudkin’s play The Saxon
Shore. The controversy outweighed the production of Athol Fugard’s Boesman
and Lena, proving, once again, that in Northern Ireland and for a Northern Irish
theatre company, it is extremely difficult to find a balance between political
requirements and dramatic and theatrical criteria in choosing the “right” play for
production. The year 1983 also gave rise to new questions about Field Day’s
“real” political agenda, the hidden programme suspected of providing a cultural
justification for the nationalist movement. To conclude, it could be said that, if
Field Day decided to reject David Rudkin’s play because they considered it
offensive to the Protestant community, this concern backfired and caused further

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.

Field Day’s Chekhovs – Brian Friel’s Three Sisters

and Frank McGuinness’s Uncle Vanya
By 1981, the year when Brian Friel’s adaptation or, as it appears
in the published version of the play and in the programme, “translation” of
Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters was staged, the Field Day Theatre Company had
a more defined theoretical idea about their position on the cultural map of
Ireland. From a cultural and political point of view, the premiere of 1981
represented a turning point in the company’s agenda, providing the opportunity
for Seamus Deane to write the first official manifesto of Field Day, published in
the programme notes to Three Sisters with the title “What is Field Day?”
The manifesto defines the artistic credo of the company,
pointing out the fact that the previous year’s premiere of Brian Friel’s
Translations did not represent a singular event but, on the contrary, it marked
the first step in the creation of a theatre which
“follows the now hallowed and hollowed tradition of the Abbey, the Théâtre
Libre, the Free Theatre of Berlin, Brecht’s theatre and maybe Grein’s
Independent Theatre in that it preserves the pretence of all drama, that of being
for the people, of the people and yet not popular in the consumer sense of that
term.”97

Notwithstanding Field Day’s initial intention to challenge the

established forms of theatrical expression, the 1981 manifesto assumes a sense
of belonging, of continuing the tradition of “reactionary” theatre but, at the same
time, it advocates the necessity to move towards a theatre focused on the
audience in Northern Ireland, reinforced by the policy of touring to provincial
venues usually bereft of theatre. Thus, from a theoretical point of view, Field
Day inscribes its theatre within the framework of the contemporary postcolonial
thinking that influenced the aesthetic credo of the company from its creation, by
defining its position as a reactionary element moving against established
metanarratives and binary structures. By establishing a link with the theatrical
tradition of Europe, Field Day defines itself as a company that intends to break
free from the limitations of the Northern Irish situation by confronting the

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

audience with a “new type of theatre” that would focus on Otherness as

compared to the “sameness” professed by, for example, the Lyric Theatre in
Belfast. However, the manifesto also reveals the problematic character of the
company’s position, the struggle to avoid the “fossilized” power structures that
defined the cultural discourse in Northern Ireland and the necessity to assert a
political status that could well restrain the aesthetic freedom advocated in
pamphlets and essays. Seamus Deane admits that Field Day is “a political
gesture, smacking of Northerness”, which he sees more as a natural outcome of
the company’s Northern origins rather than an open intent towards
politicization. The idea of “otherness” plays a defining part in the theoretical
morphology of the manifesto. It involves not only a different, an “other”
position within the tradition of Irish theatre but it also assumes the role of
challenging the existing stereotypes that characterize audiences in the North:
“For the contemporary Irish theatrical audience determines contemporary Irish
theatre. It does not find otherness in the theatre. It only finds the self it knows.
[Field Day] involves the idea of otherness. It breaks new ground not in stage
conventions, not in theatrical language, but in the idea of breaking down the
calcification of the theatrical audience.”98

Ironically, the manifesto published in the programme notes to Brian Friel’s

translation of Three Sisters, seemingly underrates the importance of “theatrical
language”, crucial in Friel’s view on what Field Day should be, in favour of the
theoretical constructions that should ensure a cultural change within the Irish
theatre audience. It may be argued that Deane’s manifesto marks a first,
potential rift between Field Day’s theatrical “wing”, led by Friel, and the
theoretical and “academic” wing led by Deane. Through the manifesto, Seamus
Deane also prepares the audience for the new Field Day plays yet to come, by
outlining the company’s theatrical agenda. Translations, Field Day’s first play,
provided the audience with the possibility of a glimpse of the “free space
between living our lives and having our lives lived for us”99. All the plays that
the company intends to put on stage in the following years will seem “foreign
and recognizable at the same time” but they will all have as main purpose to
change the audience, to “eventually open their eyes” towards wider horizons.
Therefore, the 1981 premiere of Chekhov’s Three Sisters proved
its importance not only from a theatrical point of view, but also from the point
of view of the cultural and political framework that started to be constructed
around the company. In accordance with Seamus Deane’s manifesto, Field
Day’s choice to stage a European classic met the company’s agenda of

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

concentrated on an English middle-class, using “proper” English. However,

some of the critics reviewing Brian Friel’s version of Three Sisters, continued to
be influenced by the established tradition of the English versions, the review of
the critic for the Irish Independent, discussed further on in this Chapter,
mirroring the “closed” boundaries of this traditional perception.
From the very first definitions of the Field Day Theatre
Company’s policy, Friel expressed an open interest in performing “plays of
excellence in a distinctively Irish voice that would be heard throughout
Ireland”108. He wanted to revolt against the tradition of the Irish actor
“pretending to be an Englishman, pretending you’re a Russian”109. In an
interview in Magill in December 1980, Friel Explains further:
“I think that the version of Three Sisters that we see and read in this country
always seem to be redolent of either Edwardian England or the Bloomsbury set.
Somehow the rhythms of these versions do not match with the rhythms of our
own speech patterns, and I think they ought to, in some way. Even the most
recent English translation again carries, of necessity, very strong English
cadences and rhythms. This is something about which I feel strongly – in some
way we are constantly overshadowed by the sound of the English language, as
well as by the printed word. Maybe this does not inhibit us, but it forms us and
shapes us in a way that is neither healthy nor valuable for us.”

However, this enterprise was considered, by many critics, to be futile and

patronizing, as the majority of the Irish population spoke English as a first
language and they did not feel the need to hear timeless classics translated into
Hiberno-English or being presented in an Irish slang just to make them more
acceptable for all levels of the audience. A critic for the Irish Independent
proclaimed that “Three Sisters is a universal and timeless play of imperishable
beauty, [thereby obviously requiring British upper middle-class diction] and it
needs no colloquialized slant to enhance its level of acceptability”110. This
critical opinion was opposed by Seamus Deane’s view, presented above, that
underlined the theatre company’s choice of staging Three Sisters not necessarily
because it is a “timeless play of imperishable beauty”, but because it depicts a
cultural and social situation that could resonate with the cultural morphology
existing on both sides of the border. In addition, the Irish Independent critic
contradicts himself when he argues that given the play’s “universal and
timeless” qualities, it does not work in what he calls the “colloquialized slant”
of the Field Day production. However, the universality and timelessness

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

creating a distance between the standard British-English imposed on Ireland by

the imperial power, rather than falling into the trap of the colonial binarisms.
Another problematic issue concerns the way in which the term
“translation” is used in relation to the play. The published version of Three
Sisters announces the play as “a translation” while on the dust-jacket of the play
published by Gallery Press, Brian Friel appears as the sole author of the play,
Chekhov being “remembered” only on the title page. However, from a technical
point of view, Friel’s Three Sisters is not a translation. The playwright himself
noted that he does not speak a word of Russian, his main sources being the
previous English translations of Chekhov’s classic. Thus, Friel made an
aesthetic statement that met his previous affirmations about the need to
“translate” the English versions into an Irish voice, which responds to the
“colonial dependency” pointed out by Seamus Deane. While theoretically not a
translation, Field Day heralded the play, in the press release before the premiere
in Derry, as being “a translation in the deepest sense of the word; translating the
essence and significance of Chekhov’s vision”. The “simple” translation of a
text from one language into another becomes in the case of Brian Friel’s Three
Sisters a problem of cultural translation. Friel was quick to explain that “he had
not adapted the play, changed it to an Irish setting, or tried to underline
specifically Irish meanings. Nor was his work a translation in the usual sense”115
but an attempt to provide an Irish understanding of Chekhov, and also an
attempt to redefine the term “translation” within the theoretical and cultural
framework of Field Day. Indeed, the transformations are subtle and they
emphasise the possible Irish dimension of the Chekhovian text. However,
compared to the second Chekhov play that the company put on stage, Frank
McGuinness’s version of Uncle Vanya, it becomes visible that the changes that
Friel imposed on the English text of Three Sisters are defining for the further
existence of his version.
It is also important to observe that, by the time Frank
McGuinness’s version was staged in 1995, Brian Friel was no longer part of the
company, and it also represented the last production of the Field Day.
Comparing the two plays from a technical point of view, McGuinness’s play is
more a translation in the proper sense of the word (notwithstanding the fact that
it always appears described as a version) then Friel’s Three Sisters. In Uncle
Vanya the changes are minor – some local expressions that work extremely well
within the Russian framework of the play – and, what I found even more
convincing, is the fact that McGuinness keeps the “silences” that determine
Chekhov’s original. The silences that are a hallmark of the Chekhovian dialogue

115
Quoted in Marilynn Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), p. 120.
208 Chapter Four

refer to the extreme self-centredness of the characters in a world that disappears

around them. The majority of the characters in Chekhov’s plays seem to be
talking to themselves, the dialogue being replaced by a series of long
monologues, broken by symbolic silences. Frank McGuinness keeps these
silences in his version of Uncle Vanya, which renders the play closer to the
Russian original. In Brian Friel’s Three Sisters, however, the playwright re-
works the main speeches to make the characters listen and respond to each
other, thus subverting Chekhov’s technique. In addition, the re-working of the
speeches brought about the problem of the play’s length, which became
apparent in Field Day’s Dublin production of Three Sisters as part of the Dublin
Theatre Festival, when part of the audience left well before the end of the
performance. The following pages will focus on the textual changes that
determined the two plays, and the critical reactions that dominated their
reception, within the framework of Field Day’s translation policy.
The theme and the setting of Three Sisters is determining in
Field Day’s choice of staging the play. The recognition of the disparity between
the “reality” of the characters’ lives and their dreams, the focus on the process
of “dreaming”, of longing for a space that, theoretically, is within reach, but it is
never conquered, represent themes that meet the mood of disappointment and
depression that characterized the decade of the 1980s in Northern Ireland. The
sisters’ longing for Moscow becomes an allegory for the Northern situation.
Seamus Deane describes the atmosphere in the North: “the whole culture
stagnates while it waits for the great day of constitutional reckoning”116. The
fact that the central theme of the play concentrates on the process of longing,
while the characters do not act in any way to achieve their dreams, refers to a
highly subjective, unnecessary suffering. This subjectivity allows the playwright
to dwell on the internal morphology of the characters, on their inner feelings and
hopes, on their lives determined by the promise of an unrealizable future. The
resolution appears as a desire, a dream, rather than a concrete possibility117.
Chekhov’s acute historical sensibility, discussed by Thomas Kilroy in the
programme notes to Three Sisters represented a determining influence on Friel,
a playwright with “a keen sense of time passing”118. From the very beginning of
Act One, the issue of time passing is symbolically represented by the clock

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

determine the Chekhovian text, is reinforced by his rendering of Chebutykin’s

drunken scene in Act Three. The doctor, haunted by the image of a patient who
died as a result of his mistaken diagnosis – an image which will re-emerge in
Uncle Vanya – is initiating a dialogue with his own reflection in the mirror. The
scene is reflecting the thin line between reality and dream, between existence
and non-existence:
“(He touches his reflection with his finger tip.) Maybe you’re the reality. Why
not? Maybe this (body) is the image. Maybe this hasn’t arms and legs and a head
at all. Maybe this has no existence… just pretends to exist… just pretends to
walk about and eat and sleep… I wish that were true. I wish you (reflection)
were the reality, my friend.” (Three Sisters, p. 73)

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)

However, Vershinin’s optimism is undermined by the main theme and the

structure of the play. The continuous longing for the better life in Moscow is
only an illusion, a way of counteracting the boredom and sense of frustration
that enveloped the house and, by extension, the whole society. As Elmer
Andrews argues121, the play is not about the hopes and the longings for a better
space and a better life, as neither of the characters act in any way to achieve
that, Three Sisters is about the irony of those hopes, how life mocks them. The
conclusion that the playwright is presenting the audience refers to the
impossibility of using escapism from the bleak reality, as that would only
enhance the inability of the characters to live in the present and to create a
“real”, achievable, future for themselves and for the society in which they live.
The resonances for the Northern Irish audiences are multifarious, as the play
encourages them to react against a life trapped in a reality that longs for a
glorious past and looks forward to a possible future, to a mythical resolution
based on destiny.
Marilynn Richtarik considers that, given the changes that Friel
applies to the speeches, his version of Three Sisters becomes more of a “social

121
In Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality Nor Dreams (London:
Macmillan, 1995), pp. 181-191.
 Adaptations 211

play” rather than a psychological drama. The social differences in language

between the Prozorov family and the other characters are accentuated in Friel’s
play. The Prozorovs appear as the representatives of the Ascendancy, and their
position is reinforced not only by their language but also by the house they live
in, which recalls the setting of Brian Friel’s Aristocrats. The Prozorov house is
the epitome of a society in decline, a society without a sense of belonging: it is
situated in isolation, outside a large provincial town, close to a river. The
interior maintains the past grandeur but there is a feeling of exaggerated
exuberance enhanced by the presence of flowers:
“In both the drawingroom and the diningroom there are spring flowers
everywhere—flowers on the tables, flowers on the piano, flowers on the
mantelpiece, flowers in vases on the floor; a profusion of flowers, almost an
excess of flowers.” (Three Sisters, p. 9)

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:

“OLGA: And you’re wearing a green sash. That’s … unusual.

NATASHA: You mean is unlucky, Olga? Because it’s green? Is it a bad omen,
Olga? … But it’s not really greeny green, is it? Like I mean it’s more a sort of
neutral green, isn’t it?” (Three Sisters, p. 33)

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

In these circumstances, Brian Friel and the board of directors decided to

commission a new play by David Rudkin for their premiere in 1983, which
ended in the controversy discussed previously in this chapter. However, turning
back to Friel’s version of Three Sisters, it has to be acknowledged that, given
the artistic preoccupations of the time referring to the need to provide the Irish
audience with an alternative to the traditional English versions of European and
universal classics, preoccupation shared by Thomas Kilroy as well – whose
opinion I have presented above, Brian Friel’s Three Sisters represents a notable
achievement. The language, the imagery and fundamentally the acting and the
fact that it was included in the Field Day framework, deeply resonated with the
Irish audience both North and South. Nevertheless, viewed in comparison with
Frank McGuinness’s version, albeit written almost fifteen years on, Friel’s
language and the changes he imposes on the Chekhovian text seem to be
exaggerated. They also seem to become reactions against the English versions
of the Russian text, rather than a genuine attempt to provide a new version for
the Irish audiences. Within the framework of the contemporary social and
cultural morphology of Northern Ireland, Brian Friel succeeds in accentuating
the difference between an Irish version of Chekhov’s play and the established

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

Kilroy recognizes the Russian setting of Chekhov’s plays as a space well-known

to the Irish audiences. The continuous sense of doom characterizing a society on
the brink of destruction, where there is a great alienation between people and the
surrounding spaces; the “talkativeness, tea-drinking and dreaming” and, above
all, the dark comic touch that arises from the human desperation presented in his
plays, all resonate with Irish society.
In his Uncle Vanya, Frank McGuinness is keen on keeping close
to the original text but, at the same time, the Irish touches of the play’s language
can be immediately recognized, especially in the dialogues between the
inhabitants of the house and Marina, the nanny. In her opening dialogue with
Astrov, Marina uses Irish dialectal expressions (“Drink up, pet. … You’re not
quite the fine thing you were once.”130), establishing her position as a servant,
but one that possesses an extraordinary insight into the morphology of the
family and the house. The setting resembles that of Three Sisters, with the big
house, isolated in the Russian countryside, showing signs of decay. The musical
tone of the play is given by the guitar, lying on one of the benches in the garden,
punctuating the desperation of the characters with notes that sometimes fill the
silences established between the characters.
The role of Chebutykin, the doctor in Three Sisters, is re-
examined by Chekhov in the character of Astrov, the doctor who is haunted by
the death of one of his patients. The discourse of evolution and the importance
of the present moment for the future society are recreated in the dialogues
between Astrov and Vanya. The doctor’s mild optimism, reinforced by his
concern for the forests in the region, is opposed by Vanya’s sense of desperation
and frustration with his own uneventful life and with Elena’s rejection of his
love and, implicitly, her loyalty towards her husband, professor Serebriakov,
whom Vanya discards as the representative of the false, shallow values of
society: “This means that for twenty-five years he’s been plonked where he
should never have been. Yet look at him – he swans around like Leda and her
duck.” (Uncle Vanya, p. 6) Vanya also voices his contempt for the lack of
constructive activity that characterizes the intellectuals of the country, in a
sentence that could be read both as a critique of the Field Day enterprise and

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)

A Bachelardian topoanalysis of the house clarifies the Chekhovian characters’

unease at living in the house but also the impossibility of crossing its boundaries
as “the external space is reduced to almost nothing and the universe is reduced
to the space of the house, the interior space.”131 The strange laws that rule this
space are illustrated by Vanya’s failed attempt to shoot the professor, with
resonances, once again, for the Northern Irish audiences: “Strange world. I tried
to blast someone to kingdom come – but I’m not arrested. I’m not going on trial.
This means I am guilty but insane.” (Uncle Vanya, p. 74)
However, the end of Uncle Vanya brings more hope of a
resolution than Three Sisters. After the departure of the professor and Elena,
Sonia and Vanya return to their everyday activities of managing the estate and
trying to send as much money to the professor as possible. Although re-
immersed, however actively, in a life of desperation and boredom, Sonia’s last
monologue directed against Vanya’s sense of doom, renders feelings of hope. It
also brings forth a sense of an expected revolution that would reward the
working class, the oppressed, after a long period of suffering. However, the
monologue reminds one of the last scene in Stewart Parker’s Pentecost, where
an illusionary, religious resolution, albeit ecumenical, is presented to the
audience. Sonia concludes that the resolution will come only in “another life”,
while their own lives will go on the same, with work and misfortunes. Thus, the
power and validity of the future resolution is diminished, providing only a
theological possibility.

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

THE FIELD DAY ENTERPRISE TWENTY-SEVEN

YEARS ON…

Notwithstanding the events of 1995, year which is considered to

be the last of Field Day’s theatrical enterprise, the Field Day Theatre Company
was not entirely ready to end its theatrical venture. Indeed, the focus of Field
Day’s work shifted from theatre to academic writing, be that critical articles or
the compiling of the much awaited and discussed Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, the first three volumes of which being published in 1991. However,
the heart of the company was still beating for theatre and in 1998, three years
after staging Frank McGuinness’s version of Uncle Vanya, Field Day’s name
reappeared on theatre posters. In the year that commemorated two centuries
since the United Irishmen revolution in 1798, Field Day collaborated with
Tinderbox Theatre Company to stage Stewart Parker’s play Northern Star in
Belfast during the Belfast Festival at Queen’s.
The idea of a collaboration and the layout of the programme for
the production of Northern Star signalled the real end of the company’s
theatrical enterprise. The programme also marked a definite move towards the
cultural and historical criticism that has defined the main interest of Field Day
since 1991, year when Brian Friel decided to have less involvement in the
company, and especially since 1995 with the initiation of the “Critical
Conditions Series”, which continued, at a larger scale, the pamphlet collections.
Although the cover of the programme presented the two theatre companies as
equal participants in the production, the content of the programme gave voice to
playwrights and critics who had been involved with Field Day almost since the
very beginning of the company in 1980. Thomas Kilroy, Marilyn Richtarik,
Luke Gibbons, Kevin Whelan and Nigel Playfair contributed to the programme
with articles on Stewart Parker and the condition of Protestant culture and
identity within the dynamic of Irish Studies. The main issues discussed in these
articles, that follow in the structure of the programme a listing of the “Field Day
Chronology 1980-1998”, rekindle the topics central to the Field Day critical
debate since the publication of the first collection of pamphlets in 1985 and
indeed even before that, since the first voicings of Field Day’s ideology with
 The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On… 221

the occasion of the company’s yearly theatre productions. Issues of identity,

history, meaning and cultural politics resurface in connection with Stewart
Parker’s play, providing, once again, the opportunity to link the power of
theatre with the political issues that defined the contemporary cultural history of
Northern Ireland.
Thomas Kilroy’s article “From Farquhar to Parker”1 underlines
the important position of Stewart Parker’s theatrical works within the history of
Protestant, Anglo-Irish drama. Kilroy observes the differences between what he
calls “the drama of Protestant Anglo-Irish” and the drama of “Catholic,
nationalist Ireland”. While the former celebrates “the intelligence of the
playwrights themselves, usually in the form of wit and verbal elegance but
often in the dramatising of ideas” the latter’s strengths lay elsewhere, “in its
passionate intimacy and its quest for transformation and miracle through stage
events”. In Kilroy’s view, Stewart Parker “helped to restore the creative
distancing and the play of intelligence” to contemporary Irish theatre. His
connection with Protestant, Anglo-Irish playwriting comes full-circle in
Northern Star, where the idea of Anglo-Irish sensibility is related to the issues
of hybridity and heterogeneity that defined Field Day’s view on identity
exemplified by plays like Kilroy’s own Double Cross or Terry Eagleton’s Saint
Oscar. However, with Parker, the focus changes from the point of view of a
mainly Irish, Catholic, nationalist search for identity, to the other face of the
same coin. The search for identity within a fractured culture is pictured in
Northern Star, reflecting an Anglo-Irish sensibility in its quest for a sense of
self within what Stewart Parker himself calls “multiplying dualities: two islands
(the ‘British Isles’), two Irelands, two Ulsters, two men fighting over a field”2.
The problematic issue of identity within the simulated, artificial space of
Northern Ireland, was discussed by Parker in 1976 when, looking back on his
youth in Northern Ireland, he observed:
“We were supposed to be British, but when you visited ‘the mainland’ (an insult
in itself) they took you for a Canadian or a Scot. We were also supposed to be
Irish, but when you went over the border to Dundalk or Dublin, they treated you
humorously, as an exotic alien. We didn’t have any country, we just had a
Province. A very, very provincial Province – politically corrupt, culturally

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

bankrupt, full of aggressive inferiority, sectarian, self-obsessed, and unutterably

dreary.”3

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

technique of re-discussing histories and mythologies through different theatrical

forms in order to address the present debate on these issues characterises both
the theatrical and the ideological enterprise of Field Day. With Northern Star,
Parker touches upon one of the central themes that concerned Field Day from
the very first production of Brian Friel’s Translations in 1980, the issue of
history and of writing about the established “historical truth” by using the
theatrical form of the historical play. In Chapter 1 I have discussed the
problematic of history plays within the history of contemporary Irish theatre,
with close analysis of some of the Field Day “history plays”, which revealed
Irish playwrights’ continuous interest in the topic of history and especially in
the challenging of this dramatic form. In the programme notes to the first
production of Northern Star, Stewart Parker recognises the difficulty of writing
an “Ulster history play”. This arises from the inherent difficulty of reading and
interpreting the history of Ulster. Parker observes:
“If you tune into any moment of Ulster history it immediately gets crowded with
all the other moments. Voices are coming at you from other decades and
centuries. There is no linear, orderly, rational narration with a nice ending. It’s
all happening simultaneously. You start speaking about an event that happened
in Derry last week and immediately voices of 1641 are clamouring to be heard.”

In order to counteract these voices, Parker decided to employ a dramatic

structure that combines different voices from different times through the
narrative of one character, Henry Joy McCracken. The seven years of
McCracken’s political career are presented as the seven ages of man in as many
types of theatrical renderings. The dramatic styles of Goldsmith, Boucicault,
Wilde, Synge, O’Casey, Behan and Beckett are combined in a united,
comprehensive image that tells not only the history of the private McCracken,
but also ties into the fabric of contemporary Irish history. The pastiche of these
different styles creates a structural framework that connects metatheatrical
devices – changing costumes in front of the audience, changing voices, theatre
within theatre – with the notion of revolution as staged event. Parker explains
the use of the different dramatic styles by linking them with the futility of
history. The looped characteristic of the history of Ulster, the fact that it
revolves around the same events, re-creating them over and over again, not
being able to escape from the grip of a “continuous past” towards a possible
brighter future, prompted Parker to “borrow the voices of his predecessors”, to
show the paradox of history, the fact that the forms of representation might
change but the event, the historical problems seem to be always the same.
Field Day’s choice to return to theatre once again by staging
Northern Star in 1998, might point, besides the familiar subject matter, to a
subconscious attraction for this particular dramatic structure of the play.
224 Epilogue

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

Once again after Pentecost, Field Day follow Parker by moving

away from Derry to Belfast. The play opens with the image of a half-built
cottage on the slopes of the Cavehill, outside Belfast. The description of the
cottage, “half-built and half-derelict”7, reminds one of the cottage in Brian
Friel’s farce The Communication Cord, or it can also be viewed as the
predecessor of the haunted house in Parker’s other “Field Day play”, Pentecost.
The atmosphere of decay, the expectation of an eventual final destruction of the
cottage are reinforced by the rope, “coiled round the massive main roof beam,
just above the stair well” (Northern Star, p. 13) and tied in a noose by
McCracken himself, as a reminder of the doom that is yet to come.
“McCracken: It’s a gag to think of this place as a safe house, isn’t it? [Shaking
a loose timber] We’re in more danger of the masonry here that we are from the
yeomanry, one good belch would bring it down round our ears.” (Northern Star,
p. 15)

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

Questions of identity, government and history become the

framework for McCracken’s story, introducing the tale of his life against the
background of the drama of history:
“McCracken: Haven’t we always been on stage, in our own eyes? Playing to the
gods. History, posterity. A rough, hard audience. Thundering out our appointed
parts, the Mudler’s Club, God help us. A bunch of wet-lipped young buckos,
plotting how to transform the world from Peggy Barclay’s back room.”
(Northern Star, p. 18)

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)

The different styles that define McCracken’s history, from the

innocence of childhood, through the Idealism of adolescence, cleverness,
heroism and shame are punctuated by Harry’s comments on the issue of role-
playing and the determining importance of theatre in the shaping of history.
While historically, the end of McCracken’s story is well-known, the way in
which this story id represented on stage opens up a refreshingly original view
of history and a new interpretation of the established images that emerge from
the past. The flurry of different characters that that appear on stage is cleverly
 The Field Day Enterprise Twenty-Seven Years On… 227

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?

[He places the noose round his neck]

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

Citizens of Belfast…” (Northern Star, p. 76)

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

moving the discourse of criticism from postcolonialism towards a new type of

colonialism that some define as globalism.
When asked about the pressures and needs to write criticism in
the 1980s, Seamus Deane replied that the period covering the end of the 1970s,
the decade of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, was determined in
Ireland by what he called the “Camus syndrome”. Discussing Conor Cruise
O’Brien’s work on Albert Camus12, Deane observed that the Irish critic in
general, was suffering from a deeply corrupting paradigm that opposed locality
to the need of belonging to the wider spectrum of the imperial influence, be that
literary, critical or social, of the British canon. He reminded the audience of
Camus’ dilemma: being Algerian, but belonging to the established literary
society of France, Camus found it difficult to decide on what steps to take in the
eve of Algeria’s independence. Should he continue to write for the French
literary canon or, on the contrary, should he concentrate on the locality of
Algerian reality? Within the discourse of postcolonial criticism emerging at a
period when former colonies were struggling to define their own identity, the
combination of these two positions was not regarded as a real option. Deane
considered that Irish critics and writers were marked by this paradigm in
relation to the British establishment, and their struggle became a defining aspect
of the Irish studies discourse in the 1980s. He also mentioned the fact that now,
twenty five years on, the critics and writers involved in the Field Day enterprise
from the very beginning can sit back and analyse their achievements in the
context of the pressures they were subject to, in hindsight, also recognizing the
deeply corrupting cultural circumstances that defined the period when the
company was most active, the decade of the 1980s. Having these views in mind,
it seems appropriate to discuss, as a conclusion to this analysis of the plays and
productions of the Field Day Theatre Company, the role that the company
played in initiating a new chapter in the discourse of Irish studies.
The economic, social and political environment of the 1980s in
Ireland was determined by what Michael Cronin called in the opening of the
already mentioned conference “the idea of death”. The society was under
extensive pressure both in the Republic and in the North, the intensification on
the Troubles bringing only more heartache and political dissent in Northern
Ireland. However, the same period saw the emergence and the establishment of
a new language within the framework of international criticism, a language that,
on the one hand, reacted against the post-structuralism of French criticism and,
on the other hand, reflected the revolutionary movements that enveloped the
majority of former colonies belonging to the imperial past of Britain and France.
Critics like Homi Bhabha, Edward Said or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak were

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:
Gallery Books, 1981)
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)
—. The Freedom of the City (London: Faber and Faber, 1974)
Fugard, Athol, Boesman and Lena, and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1978)
Heaney, Seamus, The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1991)
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)

Secondary Texts
Adams, Hazard and Leroy Searle (eds.), Critical Theory Since 1965
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Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory (London: Athlone Press, 1997)
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)
Andrews, Elmer, The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Dreams Nor Reality (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995)
Andrews, John, Brian Friel and Kevin Barry, “Translations and A Paper
Landscape: Between Fiction and History” in Mark Henderson and Richard
 Bibliography 233

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Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida (London: Cape, 1982)
Baudrillard, Jean, Art and Artefact (London: SAGE, 1997)
—. Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983)
—. Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage Publications, 1993)
Beckerman, Bernard, Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience and Act
(London: Routledge, 1990)
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1957)
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Ulster from 1902 Until the Present Day (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972)
Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (London and Cambridge Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2002)
Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception,
(London: Routledge, 1997)
Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)
—. (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)
—. “Caliban Speaks to Prospero: Cultural Identity and the Crisis of
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1990
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Blonsky, Marshall, On Signs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985)
Bolger, Dermot, The Journey Home (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1990)
—. (ed.), Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face of Irish
Theatre (Dublin: New Island, 2001)
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Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996)
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234 Bibliography

Bryant-Bertail, Sarah, “Gender, empire and body politics as mise en scène: Les
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Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(London: Routledge, 1990)
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Carroll, Lewis, Alice Through the Looking Glass (New York: Norton, 1999)
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Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish
Literature and Popular Culture (Cork: Cork University Press in association
with Field Day, 2001)
Daniels, Stephen and J. Cosgrove (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Dawe, Gerald, The Rest is History (Newry: Abbey Press, 1998)
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Hutchinson, 1985)
 Bibliography 235

—. “Remembering the Irish Future” in The Crane Bag, Ireland: Dependence

and Independence (Dublin: Crane Bag, 1984)
—. “Canon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland” in Jean Lundy and Aodán
Mac Póilín (eds.), Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster
(Belfast: Lagan Press, 1992)
—. “Irish Theatre: A Secular Space?” in Irish University Review, 28:I (1998)
—. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990)
—. “Field Day’s Greeks and Russians” in Marianne McDonald and J. Michael
Walton (eds.), Amid Our Troubles – Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy
(London: Methuen, 2002)
—. “Civilians and Barbarians” in Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson,
1985)
—. “Introduction” to Brian Friel, Brian Friel: Plays (London: Faber and Faber,
1996)
Deane, Seamus and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Contemporary Irish Culture and
Politics (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2004)
Delanty, Gerard, “Negotiating Peace in Northern Ireland” in Journal of Peace
Research, Vol. 32, No. 3, August 1995
Derrida, Jacques, The Other Heading – Reflections on Today’s Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)
Diamond, Elin (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge,
1996)
Dubost, Thierry, “Kilroy’s Theatre of the Conflicted Self” in Irish University
Review, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring – Summer, 2002
Duncan, Dawn, Postcolonial Theory in Irish Drama from 1800-2000 (Lewiston,
N. Y.; Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004)
During, Simon, Foucault and Literature – Towards a Genealogy of Writing
(London: Routledge, 1992)
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
—. “Unionism and Utopia: Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy” in Eamon
Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre
(Dublin: The Carysfort Press, 2000)
—. Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Cork: Cork
University Press, 1998)
—. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: NLB,
1976)
Eco, Umberto, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1976)
—. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979)
236 Bibliography

Eisenstein, Sergei M., “Word and Image” in The Film Sense (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975)
Esslin, Martin, The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning
on Stage and Screen (London: Methuen Drama, 1988)
Field Day Theatre Company, Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985)
Fischer, Gerhard (ed.), “With the Sharpened Axe of Reason”: Approaches to
Walter Benjamin (Oxford: Berg, 1996)
Fogarty, Anne, “The Romance of History: Renegotiating the Past in Thomas
Kilroy’s The O’Neill and Brian Friel’s Making History” in Irish University
Review, Spring – Summer, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Dublin: 2002)
Foster, R. F., The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland
(London: Allen Lane, 2001)
Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-memory, Practice – Selected Essays and
Interviews (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977)
—. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1979)
Friel, Brian, Volunteers (London: Faber and Faber, 1979)
—. Aristocrats in Brian Friel: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
—. The Freedom of the City (London: Faber and Faber, 1974)
—. Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
—. Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1999, edited and introduced by
Christopher Murray (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Reason in the Age of Sceince (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1981)
Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(London: Penguin, 1993)
Gibbons, Luke, Transformations in Irish Culture, Field Day Essays-Critical
Conditions (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996)
Gilloch, Graeme, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996)
Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation (London: Phaidon, 1977)
Gordimer, Nadine, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places
(London: Penguin, 1989)
Graham, Colin and Richard Kirkland (eds.), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The
Mechanics of Authenticity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Letters (London: Zwan, 1988)
Grant, Patrick, Literature, Rhetoric and Violence in Northern Ireland
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)
—. Breaking Enmities: Religion, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999)
 Bibliography 237

Greenlee, Douglas, Peirce’s Concept of Sign (The Hague: Mouton, 1973)

Hall, Edward T., The Hidden Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday and
Company, 1969)
Harrington, John P., and Elizabeth J. Mitchell (eds.), Politics and Performance
in Contemporary Northern Ireland
Hayward, Katy, Europeanisation and Hyphe-Nation: Renegotiating the Identity
Boundaries of Europe’s Western Isles (Dublin: Institute of British-Irish
Studies, University College Dublin, 2002)
Heaney, Seamus, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot
Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber and Faber,
1989)
—. Preoccupations – selected prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1984)
—. “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)
Hederman, Mark Patrick and Richard Kearney (eds.), The Crane Bag Book of
Irish Studies Vol. 1, 1977-1981 (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982)
Henderson, Lynda and Paul Hadfield, “Field Day – The Magical Mystery” in
Theatre Ireland No. 2, January 1983
Herman, Edward, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media (London: Vintage, 1994)
Hohenleitner, Kathleen, “The Book at the Centre of the Stage: Friel’s Making
History and The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing” in Stephen Watt,
Eileen Morgan and Shakir Mustafa, (eds.), A Century of Irish Drama:
Widening the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)
Holub, Robert, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen,
1984)
Hutcheon, Linda, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989)
Ingold, Tim, “The Temporality of the Landscape” in The Perception of the
Environment. Essays on livelihood, dwelling, skill (London: Routledge,
2000)
Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London:
Routledge, 1978)
Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies – Special Issue Thomas
Kilroy (Dublin: Irish University Review, 2002)
Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies – Special Issue Brian Friel
(Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1999)
Jameson, Fredric, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Modernism and
Imperialism (Derry: Field Day, 1988)
—. Postmodernism: or the cultural logic of late capitalism (London: Verso,
1991)
238 Bibliography

—. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London:

Routledge, 1989)
Jauss, Hans Robert, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, translation from
German by Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester, 1982)
Johansen, Jorgen Dines and Svend Erik Larsen, Signs in Use – An Introduction
to Semiotics (London: Routledge, 2002)
Jordan, Eamon (ed.), Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish
Theatre (Dublin: The Carysfort Press, 2000)
Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1964)
Kearney, Richard, Postnationalist Ireland – Politics, Culture, Philosophy
(London: Routledge, 1997)
Kearney, Richard and Mark Dooley, Questioning Ethics: Contemporary
Debated in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999)
Kearney, Richard, Transitions (1988)
—. Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge,
1997)
—. “Myth and Motherland” in Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985)
Kenneally, Michael (ed.), Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in
Contemporary Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1988)
Keogh, Dermot (ed.), Northern Ireland and the Politics of Reconciliation
(Washington D. C.: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, 1993)
Kerr, Adrian, Perceptions: Cultures in Conflict (Derry: Guildhall Press, 1996)
Kerwin, William (ed.), Brian Friel: a Casebook (London: Garland Publishing,
1997)
Keyes, John, Going Dark: Two Ulster Theatres (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2001)
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland-the Literature of the Modern Nation
(London: Vintage, 1996)
—. “Anglo-Irish Attitudes” in Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985)
Kilroy, Thomas, The Seagull – a version after Anton Chekhov (Loughcrew: The
Gallery Press, 1993)
—. “A Generation of Playwrights” in Eamon Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff:
Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: The Carysfort
Press, 2000)
—. “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
Kirkland, Richard, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965:
Moments of Danger (Harlow: Longman, 1996)
—. “Questioning the Frame: Hybridity, Ireland and the Institution” in Colin
Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds.), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The
Mechanics of Authenticity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
 Bibliography 239

Lanigan, Richard L., Speaking and Semiology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s

Phenomenological Theory of Existential Communication (The Hague:
Mouton, 1972)
Laver, James, Dandies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968)
Lernout, Geert (ed.), The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in
Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991)
Lloyd, David, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press in association
with Field Day, 1999)
Lojek, Helen, “Brian Friel’s Plays and George Steiner’s Linguistics:
Translating the Irish” in Contemporary Literature 35, No. 1, 1994
Lonergan, Patrick, “Martin McDonagh, Globalization and Irish Theatre
Criticism” in Modern Drama Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Winter 2004
Longley, Michael, Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Arts Council of Northern
Ireland, Belfast, 1971)
Longley, Edna, “The Old Myth of Ireland” in The Times Literary Supplement
October 6-12, 1989
—. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-upon-
Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994)
—. Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986)
Loughlin, James, The Ulster Question Since 1945 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998)
—. Ulster Unionism and British National Identity Since 1885 (London: Pinter,
1995)
Lundy, Jean and Aodán Mac Póilín (eds.), Styles of Belonging: The Cultural
Identities of Ulster (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1992)
MacDonagh, Oliver, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780-1980
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1983)
McCann, Eamonn, War and an Irish Town (London: Pluto, 1993)
McDonald, Marianne and J. Michael Walton (eds.), Amid Our Troubles – Irish
Versions of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002)
McGrath, Francis Charles, Brian Friel’s (Post) Colonial Drama: Language,
Illusion and Politics (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999)
Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press,
1965)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Signs, translated with an introduction by Richard C.
McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964)
Miller, Joseph Hillis, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1995)
Mongia, Padmini (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory – A Reader
(London: Arnold, 1996)
240 Bibliography

Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre 1601 – 2000 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Mulhern, Francis, The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics
(Cork: Cork University Press, 1998)
Murray, Christopher, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, States of Ireland (London: Hutchinson, 1972)
O’Faolain, Sean, The Great O’Neill – a Biography of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of
Tyrone 1550-1616 (Cork: Mercier, 1997)
O’Toole, Fintan, “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)
O’Toole, Fintan, “Northern Star by Stewart Parker”, 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)
Paolucci, Anne and Henry (eds.), Hegel On Tragedy (Smyrna, Del.: Griffon
House Publications, 2001)
Paulin, Tom, “A New Look at the Language Question” in Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985)
—. Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1984)
—. “Antigone” in Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (eds.), Amid Our
Troubles – Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002)
Pavis, Patrice, Languages of the Stage – Essays in the Semiology of Theatre
(New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982)
—. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (London: Routledge, 1992)
—. (ed.), The Intercultural Performance Reader (London: Routledge, 1996)
Peacock, Alan J. (ed.), The Achievement of Brian Friel (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1993)
Pharies, David A., Charles Peirce and the Linguistic Sign (Philadelphia: J.
Benjamins, 1985)
Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993)
Pilkington, Lionel, Theatre and State in Twentieth Century Ireland: Cultivating
People (London: Routledge, 2001)
Pine, Richard, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: University College
Dublin Press, 1999)
Reinelt, Janelle G. and Joseph R. Roach (eds.), Critical Theory and
Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992)
 Bibliography 241

Richards, Shaun, “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)
—. “Throwing Theory at Ireland? The Field Day Theatre Company and
Postcolonial Theatre Criticism” in Modern Drama 47:4 Winter 2004
—. “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 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999)
—. “Into That Rising Glare?: Field Day’s Irish Tragedies” in Modern Drama
No. 43, Spring 2000
Richtarik, Marilynn, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre
Company and Irish Cultural Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)
—. “Stewart Parker and Northern Star” in Programme Notes to the 1998
performance of the play
Ricoeur, Paul, “Memory and Forgetting” in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley,
Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debated in Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 1999)
—. “Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds” in Mark Patrick Hederman and
Richard Kearney (eds.), The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies Vol. 1, 1977-
1981 (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982)
—. The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)
Roche, Anthony, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness,
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995)
—. “Ireland’s Antigones: Tragedy North and South” in Michael Kenneally
(ed.), Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish
Literature (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1988)
Rokem, Freddie, Performing History (Iowa: Iowa City University, 2000)
Rolston, Bill (ed.), War and Words: The Northern Ireland Media Reader
(Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1996)
Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994)
—. Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)
—. “Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature – Yeats and Decolonisation” in
Field Day Pamphlets No. 15 (Derry: Field Day, 1988)
Sampson, Denis, “The Theatre of Thomas Kilroy: Boxes of Words” in Richard
Cave and Jacqueline Genet (eds.), Perspectives of Irish Drama (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, On Theatre (London: Quartet Books, 1976)
Schmid, Carol L., The Politics of Language – Conflict, Identity and Cultural
Pluralism in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001)
242 Bibliography

Seale, David, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (London: Croom Helm, 1982)
Shakespeare, William, King Richard II (London: Routledge, 1989)
—. Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
Smith, Gerry, “Decolonisation and Criticism: Towards a Theory of Irish
Critical Discourse” in Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds.), Ireland
and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999)
Sophocles, Philoctetes (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Goldsmith Press, 1998)
Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London:
Oxford University Press, 1975)
—. Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
Suleiman, Susan R. and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays
on Audience and Interpretation (Guilford: Princeton University Press,
1980)
Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988)
Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-
Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
Tudor, Henry, Political Myth (London: Macmillan, 1973)
Vattimo, Gianni, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-
Modern Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 1988)
Yeats, William Butler, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001)
Young, Robert, Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
Walker, Brian, Past and Present: History, Identity and Politics in Ireland
(Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, 2000)
Watt, Stephen, Eileen Morgan and Shakir Mustafa, (eds.), A Century of Irish
Drama: Widening the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)
West, Rebecca, The Meaning of Treason (London: Macmillan, 1949)
Westwood, Sallie (ed.), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory (London:
Routledge, 1997)
White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)
—. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
Williams, David, Collaborative Theatre: the Théâtre du Soleil Sourcebook
(London: Routledge, 1989)
Williams, Raymond, Drama in Performance, (Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 1991)
 Bibliography 243

Articles and Reviews

(The following articles have been consulted in the Field Day Theatre Company
Archive in Newman House, University College Dublin.)

Anonymous, “Seeking a Sense of Ireland” The Times, 5 October 1981

Anonymous, “Review of Boesman and Lena”, The Londonderry Sentinel, 21
September 1983
Anonymous “Review of Brian Friel’s Making History”, The Ulster Herald 15
October 1988
Billington, Michael, “The man in the ironic mask”, The Guardian, 12 March
1990
—. “Review of Brian Friel’s Making History”, The Guardian, 7 December 1988
Cook, Mark, “From Troy to Birmingham”, The Hampstead and Highgate
Express, 31 March 1991
Curtis, Anthony, “Review of Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar”, The Financial
Times, 2 March 1990
Dawe, Gerald, “Thomas Kilroy”, Theatre Ireland 3
Downey, James, “Review of Brian Friel’s Making History”, The New Nation,
November 1988
Edwards, Christopher, “Review of Brian Friel’s Making History”, The
Spectator, 10 December 1988
Eagleton, Terry, “Interview”, The San Francisco Review, Spring, 1990
Fitzgerald, Treacy, “Review of Stewart Parker’s Pentecost”, Dublin Opinion,
1987
Friel, Brian, “Interview” for The Irish Times, 18 September 1984
—. “Interview” for The Sunday Press, 30 August 1981
—. “Interview”, Magill, December 1980,
Gray, John, “Field Day Five Years On”, The Linenhall Review, Summer 1985,
pp. 4-9
Hadfield, Paul, “Review of Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar”, Theatre Ireland,
No. 15, 1990, Belfast
Harris, Claudia W., “Review of Stewart Parker’s Pentecost”, Theatre Ireland,
November 1987
Harris, Mitchell, “Field Day and the Fifth Province”, An Gael, Summer 1985,
New York, p. 11
Heaney, Seamus, The Irish Times, December 1988
Henderson, Lynda, Theatre Ireland, No. 7, Autumn 1984
Jackson, Kevin, “Interview with Terry Eagleton”, The Independent, Friday, 15
September 1989
—. “Running Wilde on the Road”, The Independent, 15 September 1989, p. 18
244 Bibliography

Keyes, John, “Review of Stewart Parker’s Pentecost”, Fortnight 1987

Lysaght, Charles Edward, “Bracken: The Fantasist Whose Dreams Came
True”, The 2001 Brendan Bracken Memorial Lecture, Churchill College,
Cambridge.
McKeone, Gary, “Review of Brian Friel’s Making History”, Theatre Ireland,
1988
McMinn, Joe, Theatre Ireland, No. 15, 1990, Belfast
Nowlan, David, The Irish Times, 20 September 1984
O’Toole, Fintan, “Review of Brian Friel’s Making History”, The Irish Times,
24 September 1988
—. “Review of Stewart Parker’s Pentecost”, The Sunday Tribune, 27
September 1987
—. “Heaney Goes Back to the Roots”, The Irish Times, 10 November 1990
Rea, Stephen “Interview”, The Irish News, 21 September 1989
Toibin, Colm, “Dramatic Seduction of a Premier Poet”, Sunday Independent, 4
November 1990
“Editorial”, The Crane Bag, Spring 1977 Vol. 1., No. 1, pp. 3-5
“Programme Notes” to Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Field Day Theatre
Company production, September 1981.

*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

1981 – Brian Friel, translation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, directed by

Stephen Rea

1982 – Brian Friel, The Communication Cord, directed by Joe Dowling

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

1986 – Thomas Kilroy, Double Cross, directed by Jim Sheridan

1987 – Stewart Parker, Pentecost, directed by Patrick Mason

1988 – Brian Friel, Making History, directed by Simon Curtis

1989 – Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar, directed by Trevor Griffiths

1990 – Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (a version of Sophocles’s

Philoctetes), directed by Stephen Rea and Bob Crowley

1991 – Thomas Kilroy, The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, directed by

Jim Nolan

1992 – Play reading of David Rudkin’s radio play, Cries from Casement as His
Bones are Brought to Dublin, directed by Judy Friel

1995 – Frank McGuinness, translation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya,

directed by Peter Gill
246 Field Day Productions

1998 – Stewart Parker, Northern Star, a collaborative production of the Field

Day Theatre Company and Tinderbox Theatre Company, directed by Stephen
Rea