The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights

Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781408113462
• eBook ISBN: 9781408132685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights is an authoritative guide to the work of twenty-five playwrights from the last 50 years whose work has helped to shape and define Irish theatre. Written by a team of international scholars, it provides an illuminating survey and analysis of each writer's plays and will be invaluable to anyone interested in, studying or teaching contemporary Irish drama.

The playwrights examined range from John B. Keane, Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, to the crop of writers who emerged in the 1990s and who include Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Emma Donoghue and Mark O'Rowe. Each essay features:

• a biographical sketch and introduction to the playwright
  
• a discussion of their most important plays
  
• an analysis of their stylistic and thematic traits, the critical reception and their place in the discourses of Irish theatre
  
• a bibliography of texts and critical material
  

With a total of 190 plays discussed in detail, over half of which were written during the 1990s and 2000s, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights is unrivalled in its study of recent plays and playwrights.

1 SEBASTIAN BARRY

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Jürgen Wehrmann

Boss Grady’s Boys ; Prayers of Sherkin; White Woman Street ; The Only True History of Lizzie Finn; The Steward of Christendom; Our Lady of Sligo; Hinterland; Whistling Psyche; The Pride of Parnell Street ; Dallas Sweetman

Introduction

Sebastian Barry was born on 5 July 1955 in Dublin. Since his mother was the well-known actress Joan O’Hara, the Abbey Theatre formed an important background to his childhood, and already by the early 1960s he had watched such Irish classics as Cathleen ni Houlihan with his mother in the leading role. His first novel, Macker’s Garden, and his first collection of poetry, The Water-Colourist, came out in 1982. Before his breakthrough in the theatre, he published another collection of poetry, a book for children and increasingly experimental prose. Barry is one of the very few Irish dramatists who have also been recognised as eminent poets and novelists: none of his plays but several of his poems were included in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, and his two latest novels, The Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Although he had written some unpublished plays before, one of which, the monologue The Pentagonal Dream, had been staged in 1986, Barry looks at conceiving Boss Grady’s Boys and its acceptance at the Abbey as the decisive departure in his life – both aesthetically and privately: the success of this and his later plays allowed him to start a family with actress Alison Deegan in 1992.

Since 1988, Barry’s prose and poetry have been closely connected to his series of plays about his family. While some of the poems in Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever (1988) encapsulate the plot and imagery of later plays, Annie Dunne (2002) and The Long Long Way can be considered, respectively, as sequel and prequel to The Steward of Christendom (1995).

The Plays

Boss Grady’s Boys (1988)

Sebastian Barry’s first published play, Boss Grady’s Boys, is set in the 1950s and deals with two brothers – bachelors in their sixties and seventies respectively – who live together on a small farm in the south west of Ireland. Rather than depicting their hard everyday life realistically, the drama focuses on the brothers’ dreams and memories in an anti-mimetic theatrical style, which blurs the boundaries between past and present, dreaming and waking, reality and fantasy, and even self and other. To their father, Mick and Josey indeed seemed to embody two different, conflicting parts of himself:¹ since the elder brother, Josey, who might be slightly mentally handicapped, easily gets lost in his dreams, feelings and sensual perceptions, Mick has adopted the role of the rational, practical and responsible one. In contrast to the traditional Irish peasant play, the myths that feed Josey’s fantasies are not derived froman old oral tradition but from Hollywood. Mick once believed in the promise of the Irish revolution to improve the miserable situation of subsistence farmers such as Josey and himself and to make them belong. As this promise has never been fulfilled, the disillusioned Mick accuses Irish nationalism of hypocritically using the rural west as the image of a ‘true’ Ireland while marginalising it at the same time. Despite the lyrical language and the emphasis on the loving and caring relationship between the brothers, there is a strong undercurrent of violence in the play, comprising allusions to political killings and torture, Boss Grady’s threats of domestic violence and the possibility of sexual violence as a reaction to suppression and frustration. Both Mick and Josey are haunted by the memory or fantasy of a neglected girl that Josey might have raped and who probably drowned herself afterwards.

Prayers of Sherkin (1990)

Prayers of Sherkin is the improbable love story of Patrick Kirwan, a Catholic lithographer from Cork, and Fanny Hawke, one of the last descendants of a millenarian community on Sherkin Island that forbids intermarriage with other denominations. Set in the 1890s, the play surprises with the absence of any open conflict between the various religious groups or the two generations of the millenarian community. Instead, a complex local symbiosis is represented, based on economic exchange but also characterised by mutual respect and esteem: John Hawke, Fanny’s father, makes candles from the wax provided by nuns living on the mainland. Thus, John Hawke is proud of illuminating the town; light and darkness are the central metaphors of this drama, structuring both the dialogue and the stage directions. Fanny decides to leave her family after the intervention of Matt Purdy, the founder of her community, appearing in the play as a ghost and acting throughout as a narrator who describes the beginnings of the group. In a literature abundant in ghosts that symbolise a relentless repetition of the past in the present, Matt Purdy’s sending Fanny ‘into a century of unlucky stars’ can be understood as the allegory of an alternative, liberating potential of the past. Prayers of Sherkin is the first of Barry’s plays on distant and often almost forgotten members of his family.

White Woman Street (1991)

In White Woman Street, an Irish emigrant and veteran of the Indian Wars faces the closing of the American frontier at Easter 1916. Trooper O’Hara is the boss of a strange, multicultural gang of outlaws, consisting of an Englishman, a former Amish, a man from Brooklyn of Chinese and Russian parentage, and an African-American from Tennessee. In order to obtain the means to return to Ireland, O’Hara persuades his men to raid a gold train near the little town White Woman Street in Ohio. Yet White Woman Street was also the scene of a traumatic experience of his. The town was named after a famous prostitute, the ‘only white woman for five hundred miles of wilderness’, to whom Trooper O’Hara once went. He found out that the woman in the dark bedroom was actually not white at all but a very young Native American girl. After he had slept with her, she cut her throat before his eyes. By confessing this story to the former Amish Mo, O’Hara approaches a moment of forgiveness. The train robbery, however, fails, and Trooper O’Hara is killed.

Despite being widely neglected by literary criticism, White Woman Street might be Barry’s most complete realisation of the potential of poetic drama: complex, multifaceted imagery pervades the play and exploits all the sign systems of theatre. Such a poetic theatricality conflicts with the audience’s expectations of the Western genre, dominated by American films. Parallel to this intermedial dialogue, the American and Irish national narratives are superimposed in the story of the ‘white woman’, varying and criticising both the Irish myth of sovereignty and the American frontier myth.

The Only True History of Lizzie Finn (1995)

Although references to the theatre and other arts, especially to films, can be found in almost every one of Barry’s plays, The Only True History of Lizzie Finn is his only drama with a professional performer as protagonist and contains the most explicit and extensive metadramatic reflections among his works to date. Lizzie Finn has already been touring the music halls of Great Britain as a dancer and singer for many years, when she meets Robert Gibson, a shell-shocked ex-soldier, who has just lost his three brothers in the Boer War. They fall in love, and Lizzie agrees to marry Robert and return to Kerry with him, where both grew up. In Ireland, however, Lizzie, the daughter of Presbyterian travellers, learns that Robert belongs to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, whose members, most prominently Robert’s mother Lady Gibson, welcome his new wife only reluctantly. When Robert tells his Ascendancy neighbours that he changed sides during the Boer War and fought in the nationalist Irish Brigade for the Boers, even his mother is shunned. Already suffering from her diminished wealth and status in the wake of the land reforms, Lady Gibson cannot cope with this isolation and drowns herself. Robert and Lizzie decide to leave the family seat on its eroding cliff to the sea, which symbolises the powers of change in the play. They start a new life in Cork, where a music hall is about to be opened. In The Only True History of Lizzie Finn, theatre is celebrated as transcending social differences as well as spatial and temporal distances. By focusing on music halls and the spectacles of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the play rejects any distinctions between high and low art, which could impose the hierarchy of social stratification on artistic expression and reception. Buffalo Bill in particular epitomises the transforming power of performance in the play, its ability to create new identities and to open up new free spaces: during the last dialogue between Lizzie and her husband, the south west of Ireland is turned into a Wild West.

The Steward of Christendom (1995)

The Steward of Christendom looks at the Irish revolution from a provocatively unfamiliar angle: through the memory of Thomas Dunne, a Catholic unionist and formerly chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, who faces madness and oblivion in a county home for the insane at the time of action, in 1932. For Dunne and his daughters, the establishment of the Irish nation state meant the destruction of Ireland as they knew and loved it. Since Dunne has difficulties in distinguishing past and present, the play moves between scenically depicted memories and the harsh reality of the county home. This institution might be seen as an instrument of the new state’s exclusion and disciplining of groups and historical narratives that cannot be contained in national identity and remembrance. At the same time, Dunne’s brutal treatment by the orderly Smith mirrors the baton charge during the Dublin lock-out, for which Dunne was responsible and during which several people died. Both are instances of the sheepdog attacking the sheep, as in the childhood memory that concludes the play. Dunne only feels guilty towards his son Willie, whom he sent to his death in the First World War, and towards his maiden daughter Annie, slightly disfigured by a bowed back, whomhe abandoned by his retreat into madness. Yet although Dunne never accepts his political guilt, the play does not justify his actions nor adopt his political position; it is not revisionist in the sense of simply reversing the nationalist evaluation of events, as some critics have maintained.² Instead, it allows us a glimpse of the complexity of history and of the workings of historical consciousness.

Our Lady of Sligo (1998)

Of Barry’s series of plays on his family, Our Lady of Sligo is the one that comes closest to tackling his own lifetime: it is set in 1953 and deals with the last days of his grandmother in a Dublin hospital, the end of a life in the hell of alcoholism. Mai O’Hara and her husband belong to a Catholic elite that intended to gain Irish autonomy by constitutional means within the British Empire and whose expectations have been frustrated in the aftermath of the Irish revolution. Whereas merely a few scraps of information provided by family legends or historical documents inspired the earlier plays, in the case of Our Lady of Sligo, eye witnesses, most importantly the author’s mother, and much more material were available. As to form, Our Lady of Sligo is quite similar to its predecessor: it is a memory play like The Steward of Christendom, a montage between scenes set in a confined present and scenes staging key episodes of the protagonist’s life, but Our Lady of Sligo contains a few more monologues in which characters relate the past or are transported into it. The closeness of the plot to the author, while accounting for the play’s emot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 SEBASTIAN BARRY: Jürgen Wehrmann
• 2 DERMOT BOLGER: Christina Wald
• 3 MARINA CARR: Aleks Sierz
• 4 ANNE DEVLIN: Enrica Cerquoni
• 5 EMMA DONOGHUE: Cathy Leeney
• 6 BRIAN FRIEL: Nicholas Grene
• 7 MARIE JONES: Catrin Siedenbiedel
• 8 JOHN B. KEANE: Jürgen Kamm
• 9 THOMAS KILROY: Anthony Roche
• 10 HUGH LEONARD: Emilie Pine
• 11 MARTIN LYNCH: Tom Maguire
• 12 OWEN McCAFFERTY: Mark Phelan
• 13 MARTIN McDONAGH: Martin Middeke
• 14 FRANK McGUINNESS: Eamonn Jordan
• 15 TOM Mac INTYRE: Daniel Shea
• 16 CONOR McPHERSON: Clare Wallace
• 17 GARY MITCHELL: Paul Devlin
• 18 TOM MURPHY: Gerold Sedlmayr
• 19 DONAL O’KELLY: Patrick Lonergan
• 20 MARK O’ROWE: Michael Raab
• 21 STEWART PARKER: Eberhard Bort
• 22 CHRISTINA REID: Christian Große
• 23 J. GRAHAM REID: Jochen Achilles
• 24 BILLY ROCHE: Peter Paul Schnierer
• 25 ENDA WALSH: Lisa Fitzpatrick