Domestic Troubles: Tragedy and the Northern Ireland Conflict

Domestic tragedy, conventionally associated with the sensibility of the emergent metropolitan middle classes, has never been held in very high esteem by Marxian critics. In recent times, many critics on the Left have tended to regard the whole genre of tragedy, with its supposedly elitist sensibility and leanings toward an apocalyptic conception of history, in a rather dim light. It was not always so, of course. Marx shared the enthusiasm of his age and class for classical Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, and some of the greatest Marxist cultural critics of this century, such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Raymond Williams, have written about tragedy in quite positive terms.

Here, I want to look at three dramas, all of a tragic character or design, that deal with the conflict in Northern Ireland: St. John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911), which can be considered a domestic tragedy; Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge (1960), which, although set in the more “masculine” space of the Belfast shipyards, tells a story about the way sectarianism impedes the development of class politics in Northern Ireland that is quite similar to Ervine’s; and The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone (1984) by Tom Paulin, which adapts one of the great Greek tragedies to the Northern situation. When considered in conjunction with each other, these plays demonstrate some of the different ways in which various types of tragic drama utilize the family and the distinction between public and private spheres as well as, more generally, suggesting some of the ways in which different types of tragic narrative structure our broad perceptions of class and sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.

Given the negative associations identified with tragedy in contemporary criticism, some commentators have suggested that a tragic conception of the Northern Ireland conflict will almost inevitably lend itself to a reactionary politics. Noting the bland facility with which the term “tragic” is applied to the Northern situation in the international media, Shaun Richards, for example, has argued that a tragic theatre will tend to construct a disabling sense of Northern Ireland as a cursed House of Atreus, fated to incessant cycles of violence, the origins of which remain incomprehensible and irrational. Such a theatre, Richards suggests, only bolsters an already entrenched conception of Northern Ireland as inexplicable, as a place doomed to play out its “luckless and predetermined fate” to some sort of grand catastrophic finale.¹

The argument against any conception of the Northern conflict in fatalistic terms is indisputable, but the idea that tragic form must automatically lend itself to a reactionary conception of the North can also be somewhat reductive. While Richards cites Brecht’s arguments against traditional tragedy to support his case, there is also a long Marxian tradition in which tragedy is conceived in quite positive terms as a form tending to emerge in periods when societies undergo a wrenching process of transition from one kind of social order to another. Moreover, where some critics automatically assume a link between tragedy and a worldview disposed to resignation and despair, others insist that this is only one element of the tragic schema. In commenting on tragedy and historical drama, Lukács writes that

the dramatic collision and its tragic outcome must not be conceived in an abstract pessimistic sense. Naturally, an abstract denial of the pessimistic elements in the drama given to us by the history of class society would be senseless. The horror of the conflicts in class society, the fact that for most people there is clearly no solution to them, is certainly one motif, and by no means an unimportant one, in the rise of drama. But it is by no means supreme. Every really great drama expresses, amid horror at the necessary downfall of the best representatives of human society, amid the apparently inescapable mutual destruction of men, an affirmation of life. It is a glorification of human greatness.²

Benjamin’s conception of tragedy, similarly dialectical, is of a contest between the ancient gods and the gods to come. For Benjamin, the death of the tragic hero does...