Into That Rinsing Glare?: Field Day's Irish Tragedies

Into That Rinsing Glare?: Field Day's Irish Tragedies SHAUN RICHARDS At a symposium named "Writers on Stage" (Peacock Theatre, Dublin, July 1997), Seamus Deane commented that while many contemporary Irish playwrights may refer to the political situation in works that "can have great emotional appeal," they are still limited in that "they do not involve, or the manifestation of such feeling does not involve, an analysis of the power situation ." Deane used the Field Day Theatre Company's production of Stewart Parker's Pentecost (1987) as an example of his overall point that while such works may make audiences feel pity for the onstage victims of the political system, they do not inform them as to the extent to which "[t]he political system isn't something that is separate or apart from them. They are the inhabitors of it and they are the creators of it in many ways."I But when riot and sectarian violence erupt in the province. the term adopted by commentators is "tragedy" - a term that functions equally as a description of political situation and theatrical genre. In both instances, powerlessness in the face of suffering is dominant. As George Steiner defined the theatrical form, Tragedy would have us know that there is in the very facl of human existence a provocation or paradox; it tells us that the purposes of men sometimes run against the grain of inexplicable and destructiv~ forces that lie "outside" yet very close. To ask of the gods why Oedipus should have been chosen for his agony ... is to ask for reason and justification from the voiceless night. There is no answer.2 The inadequacy of the term, when applied to the political situation and the theatre through which it is imaged, is that the world evoked is one in which analysis is replaced by "expla[nation]" based on a "myth of atavism" and "a special historical curse." In this context, we are given only the idea of "a luckless and predetermined fate."3 However, and despite Deane's implicit call for a theatre of "Brechtian" Modern Drama, 43:1 (Spring 2000) 109 110 SHAUN RICHARDS intention, if not technique, what has characterised many of the Northern Irish plays that have attempted to confront the political system is a tum to tragedy. There has been a preference for the fonn that "the Philosopher" in Brecht's The MessingkamfDialogue critiqued as lacking social efficacy: "The ancients thought that the object of tragedy was to arouse pity and terror. That could still be a desirable object, if pity were taken to mean pity for people and terror terror of people, and if the serious theatre accordingly tried to help eliminate those circumstances which make people fear and pity one another,"4 Deane's analysis of the inadequacy of contemporary theatre's engagement with Northern Ireland's political situation was made at the end of a decade that opened with a marked tendency towards Irish tragedies. Two of them, interestingly enough, were written by Deane's fellow directors on the board of the Field Day Theatre Company, which saw itself as "contribut[ing] to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths, and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause of the current situation."5 The analysis that follows focuses on these two plays: Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (1990) and Tom Paulin's Seize the Fire: A Version of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (1990). They show that after Deane the critical concern has been with the political implications of the choice of the tragic fonn and source; these too often convey an image of Northern Ireland as a contemporary House of Atreus in which, as in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, "The race is welded to its ruin.,,6 Heaney's intention in The Cure at Troy is clearly to suggest an answer to the question asked by Aeschylus's chorus, "Who can tear from the veins/ the bad seed, the curseT' by entering what John Keyes defines as "the realms of classical comedy where things are restored and the world is engulfed in golden possibility.'" [t...