"Like Father, Like Son": Someone Who’ll Watch over Me and the Geopolitical Family Drama

“LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON”: SOMEONE WHO’LL WATCH OVER ME AND THE GEOPOLITICAL FAMILY DRAMA CLAIRE GLEITMAN as one of its characters observes ruefully, Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me has all of the ingredients of a bad joke: “There were three bollocks in a cell in Lebanon. An Englishman, an Irishman and an American” (17). One of the three “bollocks” (the American) is a doctor ; another (the Irishman) is a journalist; the third (the Englishman) is a professor of Old English literature. Together, they have been taken hostage by a group of terrorists whose motives they cannot fathom and whose eventual plans for them they hardly dare to ponder. Hamstrung as far as movement is concerned, as they are chained to a wall, and oppressed by boredom , the prisoners are slaves to the whims of an absent and inscrutable force. In short, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me bears an unmistakable resemblance to Waiting for Godot, as Frank Rich pointed out in a peevish review of the New York production: “Not even Beckett,” wrote Rich, “always succeeded in keeping plays about boredom from being boring. And Mr. McGuinness, if a charming writer in spurts, is no Beckett” (13). Yet the situation that McGuinness dramatizes is recognizable as a horrifically common late-twentieth-century phenomenon, and it is in this respect that Rich’s review misses the point. McGuinness mobilizes the Beckettian predicament in the service of a play that is deeply conscious of its political and historical horizons. It stages the “realities” of the so-called New World Order by representing the old world antagonists—Irish and English —in the company of their new world accomplice, the American. Beset by complex postcolonial relationships and locked in endless games, the men are held captive by an invisible “Third World” that they barely attempt to understand. Thus, Someone teases with the possibility of what might be called absurdist allegory, while also resisting the allegorizing impulse with its “LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON” 78 stubborn specificity. Hence it can be said to demonstrate Linda Hutcheon’s point about postmodern discourse: it subverts the grand Beckettian gestures that it also installs (Hutcheon 63). Yet this apparent foray into genre deconstruction also can be described as something else: as a realistic play about men who come to understand each other and whose ability to do so hinges upon recognitions regarding their personal pasts. In its thematic and structural development, McGuinness’s drama conflates a series of issues of family, political, and postcolonial relations. These conflicted sites are gathered under the figures of father and son, and more generally of parent and child. The three protagonists in Someone are emblematic figures of the major constituents of Ireland’s present situation. Each one, at some moment in the play, defines himself in connection to a troubled memory of his father. As the action develops, each struggles to overcome the legacy of formative parental relationships, which are inflected through the vexed relations among England, the United States, and Ireland. As these issues are interrogated and (on the level of the personal) tenuously resolved, the play both confronts and does not confront its most troubling problematic: that is, the status of the force that lies behind the wall. Behind the wall— watching, waiting, never materializing—are the terrorists who seem to give precise shape to Beckett’s Godot but whom the on-stage characters cannot imagine except through terms derived from their own tortured family dramas. The three men whom McGuinness has chained to a wall are among the dramatist’s richest characterizations to date. At the same time, and paradoxically , they tread perilously close to caricature. In fact, the author hinges his personalities on the most essentialized versions of national and racial character imaginable. The American is named Adam, a choice that seems almost laughingly obvious: he is the new man in the New World. But the Edenic force of the name is undercut by the fact that Adam is black, which conjures up the historical serpent (the virulent tradition of racism) in the Eden of America.1 At the same time, Adam represents an “LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON” 79 1 Although the script does...