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Northern Ireland: Our Troy? Recent Versions of Greek Tragedies by Irish Writers COLIN TEEV AN "Each nation ... fashion[s] a classical Greece in its own image." - W.H. Auden l It is, perhaps, only after one has written something that onc begins to see not only one's own personal motivations for doing so, but also the broader social environment and forces that contributed to the making of the text. In 1994 I undertook a translation and, ultimately, an adaptation of Iphigenia in All/is by Euripides for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.' At the time I had a variety of personal reasons for choosing this particular text - not least my attraction to both Iphigenia's notorious change of mind,J and the equally notorious suspicions concerning the authorship of certain passages in the text we know as Iphigenia in Aulis.4 The first gave me a great dramatic character, the second allowed me the freedom to play with the structure of the text.' However, it was only after completing my version that I began to see those broader social forces that I and my text had been subject to, and through this I began to see the relationship of recent versions . of Greek tragedies by Irish writers to recent developments and debates in Irish history. In her article "When Despair and History Rhyme," Professor Marianne McDonald of The University of California, San Diego lists eleven translations /adaptations of Greek tragedies by Irish writers wrillen since 1984. They are: Tom Paulin's The Riot Act (1984), based on Sophocles's Amigone, and Seize the Fire (1989), based on Aeschylus's Promethells BOllnd; Aidan Carl Mathews' Antigone (1984) and Trojans (1994), based on Euripides's Troiades ; Brendan Kennelly's Antigone (1985), Medea (199 1), and The Trojan Womell (1993); Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (1990), based on Sophocles's Phi/octetes; Desmond Egan's Medea (1991: a translation); Derek Mahon's The Bacchae (1991); and my own Iph, after Euripides's Iphigenia ill Aulis (1996).6 To this list can be added Frank McGuinness's Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 77 COLIN TEEVAN Electra (1997), which is, unfortunately, unavailable to the writer at the time of writing. While Professor McDonald does consider these texts in relation to current social debates in Irish society, she stresses that all of them in some form address "the Irish Question" and that taken as a whole they signify a reappropriation of classic texts of Western Civilisation by a colonised people once construed by the British coloniser as the savage. She argues that "Ireland is England's Trojan Women; its Medea, exploited by Jason; its Antigone, who in the face of insufferable odds does not falter but retains a sense of justice."7 While I agree that much of this veritable explosion of new Irish versions of Greek tragedies has much to do with the always topical debate in Ireland, North and South, concerning identity, it perhaps does not do full justice to the intricacies of that debate to see it primarily in terms of the old binary oppositions : Britainnreland, authority/victim, coloniser/colonised. The debate concerning identity in recent years has taken place on several fronts; not only between Ireland and Britain, but between North and South, and within those geographical areas between Nationalist and Unionist, between conservative and liberal, revisionist and traditionalist, man and woman and even between adult and unborn child. And, in the period since 1984, which has seen some of the most remarkable changes in the recent history of the island - socially in the Republic of Ireland and politically in Northern Ireland - the debate, both in reality and as reflected through these adaptations of Greek tragedies, has developed from plays which follow the them and us, victim and oppressor paradigm, to plays that examine the dichotomies in various constructions of Irish identities. In a short survey it is impossible to examine each play in depth - besides which, this is done in other articles cited - however, it is possible to determine certain patterns and common concerns which reflect patterns and concerns in Irish society. One of the most striking patterns of the plays listed above is the fact that in 1984, within...

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