The House Image in Three Contemporary Irish Plays

The famous cottage kitchen setting of many Revival plays and of their less original imitations, embodies—and, later, endlessly reiterates—the well-known Irish attachment to place. This setting has been so much overused in Irish drama since the beginning of the twentieth century that today, a playwright shows either laziness or great courage to set a play in a naturalistic house. When imaginatively deployed, however, this traditional setting may still serve the double force of the special Irish sense of place, and may also serve to determine the dramatic tension through the interaction of topophilia—which, in John Wilson Foster's definition, is in fact love of self—and topophobia, "hatred of place that ensnares the self."¹ Some contemporary plays—for instance, in Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964)—are steeped in the simultaneous double force of the home. In others, like Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985), the process of the transformation of one force into the other keeps ambivalences vibrant. The house as image of home has long been problematized. Anna McMullen is undoubtedly right in maintaining that "home in Irish theatre never seems to be a place, but a past memory or a future possibility."² Nevertheless, the house on the stage often becomes an emotional, psychological shell of the self, carrying both "past memory" and "future possibility"—or, if the house emphatically remains incarcerating, that very phenomenon enhances the theme of rootlessness and homelessness.

Three recent plays—Stewart Parker's Pentecost (1987), Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill (2000), and Tom Murphy's The House (2000)— each offers examples of how the house image can be deployed constructively to enhance the drama, as in Pentecost and The House, or how its enclosed space, if it remains static, may restrict "future possibilities" for both its dwellers and the play itself, as in On Raftery's Hill. These plays show a variety of manners—symptomatic of the contemporary Irish social climate—in which the setting of a house as theatrical and conceptual space and place forms and frames meaning.

Like the postmodern geography of literature in general, Gaelic tradition privileges the topographic relation of identity. This differs from Irish cultural nationalism of the last two centuries, which has been more concerned with identity in its temporal context, focusing on the past and history as determining factors in identity formation. Gerry Smyth, among others, calls attention to the nature of this paradoxical situation by maintaining that, while formal studies of Irish culture have concentrated throughout the modern period on

issues of chronology, duration, order, frequency, disruption, inheritance—in other words, issues of history—the subject-matter of that study has been invariably geographical, concerned . . . with the existence and influence of a 'special relationship' between community and environment permeating Irish life.³

Smyth asserts that in pre-Celtic and Celtic tradition, "landscape was the primary force in community life," and also a passport "to a different though accepted sphere of everyday life, the magical."⁴ This view of the dual function of landscape closely resembles Heidegger's concept of place and its relation to human life, uniting both horizontal (physical, communal, and social) and vertical (existential and ontological) dimensions of reality in a "primal oneness":

[H]uman being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth.

But "on the earth" already means "under the sky." Both of these also mean "remaining before the divinities" and include a "belonging to men's being with one another." By a primal oneness the four—earth and sky, divinities and mortals—belong together in one.⁵

From the Gaelic tradition of dinnseanchas—the lore of place—through medieval toponymic literature, in topographic tradition of Anglo-Irish poetry up to the present, Irish literature has shown such a deep embeddedness in place that place becomes "an unseverable aspect of self."⁶ This special Irish sense...