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Clever Blokes and Thick Lads: The Collapsing Tribe in Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark CLAIRE GLElTMAN When A Whistle.in the Dark premiered in London and later in Dublin in 1961 and 1962, its critical reception placed Tom Murphy in an exalted pantheon. Like Synge, O'Casey, and Joyce before him, Murphy discomfited his English audiences and enraged his Irish ones by endorsing Yeats's lament, in "September 1913," about "Romantic" Ireland.' Emphatically, A Whistle concurs, it's "in the grave.'" In fact, Murphy's characters have found Ireland so sepulchralthat most of them have abandoned it entirely, in search of better fortune on English shores. Not surprisingly, the results are bleak. Like Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! (which premiered just three years later in 1964), A Whistle depicts emigration as a delusory promise that only gets you, as the song says, "right back where [you] started from."3 But what distinguishes A Whistle from Philadelphia is Murphy's unflinching portrait of a class-based destiny that serves, ironically, to unite those age-old enemies, England and Ireland. In A Whistle, class becomes an inescapable fate pursuing Murphy's Carneys as they flee Ireland and try to remake themselves on British soil. But the Carneys are doomed to remain intractably alien, regardless of the island on which they pitch their tent. This is because, in Murphy's acerbic judgement, England and Ireland dole out economic and social success with an identical, parsimonious discrimination. Part of the problem for the Carneys is that their sense of self is founded on assumptions that are no longer operative in the mid-century landscape in which they reside. A bedrock of those assumptions is the view that an Irishman 's identity is rooted in his Irishness;4 this unites him with all other Irishmen and connects him to a rich storehouse of myths and traditions that have been passed down through the ages and continue to be revered in Ireland. Murphy traces the collapse of this in some ways vague but nonetheless potent version of Irish culture and identity. His play performs a critique of identity . politics that obscure from the victims the engines of their own oppression. A Modern Drama, 42 (Fa1l1999l 315 CLAIRE GLEITMAN Whistle interrogates the self-aggrandizing racial myths of Irishness, which reinforce the view that Irishness is a trans-historical, classless category linking all those who happen to have been born on a particular island. The play enacts the terrible consequences of this sort of identity politics, consequences that continue to bedevil not only Ireland but other troubled communities around the world. Throughout the play, Murphy implicitly contrasts the present circumstances of his characters with the absent, putative grandeur of Irish history and myth. The residue of that grandeur can be glimpsed in the faltering dance of death that the Carneys enact. Haunting the fringes of the action are the tattered traces of a cultural and tribal ethos that once animated the kinds of activities that the Carneys perform in degraded fashion. But this ethos is undergirded by notions of identity and power that prove woefully out of touch with the world in which the Carneys seek to thrive and prosper. The Carneys' problem is compounded, though it is not caused, by their immigrant status. The eldest son, Michael, left Ireland in hopes of becoming a model of bourgeois (British) respectability. To that end, he settled in Coventry , found a job, and married an Englishwoman. But the price of his attempted "self-fashioning" turns out to be the belittlement of his former working-class Irish self and all that that self entailed. When his wife, Betty, laments that she hasn't got enough cups to serve her father-in-law tea, Michael reassures her by amiably ridiculing his home counlry: We can drink out of the saucers; it's an old Irish custom. [...] [...] And we'll [...] grow shamrocks instead of geraniums. And turn that little shed ... into a hotel for the fairies and leprechauns. (intervening dialogue omiued)s Michael offers an almost textbook case of the "psychological ... patholog[y]" that Liam Greenslade has claimed is endemic to the migrant experience. Bereft of the source...

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