“We've All To Grow Old”: Representations of Aging as Reflections of Cultural Change on the Celtic Tiger Irish Stage

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Christopher Austin Hill B.A., M.A.

Graduate Program in Theatre History, Literature, Criticism The Ohio State University 2013

Dissertation Committee:

Chair: Dr. Joy Reilly

Dr. Jennifer Schlueter

Dr. Ray Cashman

Copyright by

Christopher Austin Hill

2013

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the work of four Irish playwrights:

Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson, and Elaine Murphy.

Specifically, it investigates the inclusion, by these playwrights, of

“elderly” characters in their plays written between 1995 and 2010—a period of economic and cultural change known as the “Celtic Tiger.”

This study argues that the way that aging and senescence—defined jointly as the process of aging and as the state of being “aged”—are represented on stage reveals a broader cultural negotiation of “new” and “old” Ireland. Into their representations of “old” characters, the playwrights discussed here have embedded a reflection of destabilized cultural narratives, which resulted from intense societal change in

Ireland.

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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Allison and to my amazing children. Without them, this work would have been impossible. Their unfailing support and love were a constant force of strength, which drove me throughout my research. Thank you—I love you.

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Acknowledgments

There are many people who I wish to thank, and far too little space in which to do it. First, my most heartfelt thanks to Dr. Joy Reilly for her unbounded support and encouragement. Thanks also to Dr.

Jennifer Schlueter for her wonderful help and guidance, and to Dr.

Ray Cashman for his encyclopedic advice, and for taking me to

Ireland.

Thank you to my parents, Denis and Charlene Hill who taught me about the power of goal-setting and whose support of me never wavered. Thanks to them, also, for their help in getting me to Ireland for research.

Thank you to those who have been forced to help me fight through this material, including Jill Summerville, Allison Brogan,

Elizabeth Harelik, Damian Bowerman, and Dr. Nicholas Dekker at

The Ohio State University, and Cormac O’Brien at University College

Dublin.

Finally, thank you to the faculty and students in The

Department of Theatre who have become such an important part of my life, your friendship and support means so much.

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Vita

September 14, 1977 ...... Born

2008 ...... B.A. Theatre, University of Utah

2008 ...... B.A. Speech Communication,

University of Utah

2010 ...... M.A. Theatre Studies, The Ohio

State University

2008 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate,

Department of Theatre, The Ohio

State University

Field of Study

Theatre Studies

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Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………….. ii

Dedication……………………………………………………………….. iii

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………… iv

Vita………………………………………………………………………… v

Introduction……………………………………………………………. 1

Chapter 1: The Storytellers: ‘Stars’ and ‘Seanchaithe’ of the Celtic Tiger…………..……… 21

Chapter 2: The Good Old Days?: Rethinking the Story of the Past ………………………………. 53

Chapter 3: “I’m Old. I’ll Die If I Don’t Drink This”: Alcohol, Aging, and Affluence,…………………………………… 80

Chapter 4: “The Old Hag, The Irish Mammy, and the Poor Old Woman………………………………………… 114

Conclusion……………………………………………………………… 157

Bibliography……………………………………………………………. 175

Appendix A: Synopses of Major Plays…..………………………… 183

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Introduction

Between 1990 and 2010 Ireland underwent a dramatic paradigm shift. This shift has centers around periods of tremendous economic growth—a surge known to economists as the “Celtic Tiger.” Partially as a result of the Celtic Tiger, there has been a dynamic movement away from the agrarian roots of Irish culture, and towards an urban and modern

Ireland. In conjunction with this urbanization, the Catholic Church’s hold over the Irish people waned, in part due to emerging reports of decades of sex abuses by clergy. The young Irish, who in the United

States of America we would call “Generation X” and the “Millennials,” have become further disenchanted with the Church, detached from their rural heritage, and even suspicious of alcohol as a means of escape.

Many Irish historians and social critics—such as Ivana Bacik, Fintan

O’Toole, and Rob Norton—regard this twenty-first century Ireland as

“New Ireland.” As the Tiger progressed, a palpable tension developed between this changed conception of Irishness and the traditions and attitudes that preceded it.

This dissertation explores the theatrical manifestations of this tension in the most literal sense—in the representations of aging, and of

1 “elderly” characters on stage. Through an examination of a selection of plays written, produced, and published between 1995 and 2010, ranging from the earliest days of the Celtic Tiger to just after the economic crash that ended it, the study argues that the way that aging and senescence— defined jointly as the process of aging and as the state of being “aged”— are represented on stage reveals a broader cultural negotiation of “new” and “old” Ireland. Into their representations of “old” characters, the playwrights discussed here—Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Conor

McPherson, and Elaine Murphy, all under 50 when the plays were written—have embedded a reflection of destabilized cultural narratives which resulted from intense societal change in Ireland.

There are a number of reasons that this study is significant at this time. As Ireland struggles to overcome the tremendous financial collapse provoked by the Celtic Tiger, understanding the time period and the cultural values that pervaded it, are of paramount importance. Studies such as mine, which explore the Celtic Tiger as a historical and finite time period, will contribute to the discussion of how Ireland came to be in the position that it currently finds itself.

To date, there have been relatively few books or articles published focusing solely on what was happening on stage during the Celtic Tiger.

Many of the most influential books on Irish drama, including Declan

Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1996), were published before the Tiger caught hold. Others, such as Christopher Morash’s A History of Irish Theatre

2 1601-2000 (2002), do not account for the Celtic Tiger as a discrete time period, and therefore do not delve into the resultant cultural conditions that color the dramatic literature. The books that do discuss drama during the Celtic Tiger, such as Patrick Lonergan’s Theatre And

Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (2009) and Eamonn

Jordan’s Dissident Dramaturgies (2010), have been invaluable resources in my study, even though our emphases are not the same—these books look more comprehensively at trends across Celtic Tiger Irish drama.

Where this work diverges from the current literature is in its analytical framework. Rather than seeking to define broad tendencies in

Irish drama as Lonergan and Jordan do, or exploring the work of an individual playwright as in Lillian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan’s edited volume The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’

(2012), this study identifies a single literary trope—the inclusion of

“elderly” characters in plays—and attempts to explain it. Here, aging is used as a lens for analysis, but it should be noted that this dissertation is not a study in literary gerontology. This study does not seek to explore the cultural meaning of age in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger. Instead, it focuses on the ways that aged characters are used to reflect other meanings. I am dealing as much with appropriations of aging as with representations of it.

This work is fundamentally one of literary criticism. My study will look at the Celtic Tiger period from an historiographical standpoint,

3 attempting to reveal and extrapolate from the plays the cultural narratives which are being complicated through the aged characters.

Throughout, the study considers the origins of the narratives that are being discussed, and unpack the reasons that they found renewed significance during the Celtic Tiger—that is to say, these plays are read both diachronically and synchronically. A frequent theme is the connection between the representations in the plays and the folkloric traditions of Ireland. Through this approach, this dissertation attempts to reveal a picture of Celtic Tiger Ireland—a snapshot of the culture as a whole—as presented within the plays.

The Celtic Tiger as Historical Period

The primary relationship between all of the texts that are discussed, other than that they all feature “aged” characters, is the fact that they were all written in Ireland, about Irish characters, by Irish playwrights, and between 1995 and 2010. The labeling of these plays as representative of a single historical period is, of course, somewhat problematic. In Thomas Postlewait’s Cambridge Introduction to Theatre

Historiography (2009) he argues:

The period concept is our way of freezing a segment of time and giving it an identity. We must remember, though, that the concept is located within us, not within history itself. In short, it is a classification that we create and then project onto the past. (157)

4 With this in mind, the theatre historian must take care to look critically at the “period” being suggested. The definition of these as Celtic Tiger plays is not uncomplicated; however, by so categorizing them, we can provide the basis for constructing an examination of this period of cultural redefinition. There is evidence that each of the playwrights discussed in this dissertation were aware of, and identified themselves within, the Celtic Tiger, and that in some cases the plays discussed were written as conscious responses to a changing Ireland.

As an historical time period, the Celtic Tiger has rather ambiguous time parameters. Depending on whose account one reads the Tiger began roughly in 1994, though some say as late as 1996, and ended with an economic backslide that began in 2006 and was complete by 2008.

The term “Celtic Tiger” was coined in 1994 by Morgan Stanley’s Kevin

Gardiner as a comparison between the Irish economy and that of other

(largely Asian) “tiger” economies. Coulter and Coleman point out that:

Rarely can a metaphor spun by a financial analyst have such a dramatic impact on popular discourse. In the years since it was invented, the term ‘Celtic Tiger’ has become a common feature of every day speech in the Irish Republic. (3)

My use of the term to describe this time period is not unique. To compensate for the lack of consensus in the starting and ending dates, this study will examine plays written between 1995 and 2010—reaching from early in the Celtic Tiger to shortly after. In the case of Elaine

Murphy’s Little Gem, the sole play in this study written after the

5 economic collapse, the playwright openly identifies her play as a reaction to the Celtic Tiger making its inclusion here appropriate.

To understand the features of the Celtic Tiger period, one may look at the dramatic ways that Irish life changed as a result of it. In 2005,

Andrew Kincaid described Dublin:

Contemporary Dublin is bursting at the seams. Simultaneously crowded and sprawling, the city tosses up new upscale apartments as fast as the suburbs can absorb more countryside. Industrial cranes are everywhere. The city's streets are jammed with tourists and consumers. Something new has been happening to the city, to the nation: but what exactly? There has been a wave of unprecedented economic growth, immigrants from many different foreign countries are arriving, the Irish "diaspora" is returning, multinational companies are setting up factories, and Irish popular culture, whether on the big screen, theatre or music, is making some people very rich. To make sense of Ireland's putative success, politicians and cultural commentators have enthusiastically adopted the language and policies of economic globalization—privatization, free- trade, and cuts in public spending—along with the attendant cultural vocabulary of cosmopolitanism and post modernism: upscale worldliness, mobility, urbanism, and cultural hybridity. Ireland, it would appear, is now part of the wider European project of national fragmentation and continental consolidation, its economy no longer mired in the so-called dead-end of nationalism. (16)

As Kincaid adroitly explains, Ireland during the Tiger changed drastically. These social changes alone, even apart from the political and religious considerations that will be discussed later, make it possible and advantageous to speak of the Celtic Tiger as a discrete historical period.

Why advantageous? Many critics and scholars have implied, and some even stated outright, that the Celtic Tiger economic surge has helped—or as Ivana Bacik sees it, dragged “kicking and screaming”—Ireland into a

6 twenty-first century worldview. Even though the Celtic Tiger hinges on an economic framework, the ways that Ireland changed as a result expand far beyond economics. It stands to reason that the dramatic literature and theatrical performance would in some way, reflect—or refract, comment upon, or resist—these societal and cultural changes.

Cultural Considerations

In his essay “Theatre Events and Their Political Contexts: A

Problem in the Writing of Theatre History,” Thomas Postlewait begins:

The primary task for all historians, once they have finished their research and begun to write, is to describe and interpret the relations between events and their possible contexts. The abiding problem is to specify not only the defining traits of any context but also the causal features that contribute to the making of the event. (198)

One solution to this “abiding problem” is the focus by theatre historians on politics as defining feature (198). Kincaid’s description of the Celtic

Tiger condition, in addition to painting a picture of how things are or were in the latter days of the boom, also gives us several points of entry into the cultural elements that come into play for this dissertation. These elements include the following broad categories:

1. Religious change

During the Celtic Tiger the Catholic Church began to lose its once- firm hegemonic control over the Irish people. The escalating revelations that Father Brendan Smyth had repeatedly sexually “interfered” with

7 young boys in his parishes, that the church authorities had been aware of his serial offences for some forty years, and that the church had responded by simply moving Smyth to other parishes (with complete access to children and consequentially disastrous results at each stop), began to hit the press in 1994 (McGarry par. 10). The Smyth case proved to be only one of many that were revealed in subsequent years, and trust in the Catholic Church among the people of Ireland rapidly declined.

These problems have been compounded, Patsy McGarry says, by

“increased affluence and a better-educated population. With the events of the last few years, church leaders can no longer ignore the extent to which they've lost control of Irish society” (par. 8). In 2001, Conor Ryan wrote “Young people are well educated and the apparent strength of the

Church has caveats too: attendance at mass is "very important" to only

14 per cent of young people compared with 76 per cent of pensioners”

(par. 11).

Because there is a clear generational divide in the primacy of religion in Irish lives, an understanding of this collapse is significant to this study. Ireland is no stranger to religious “troubles”—from the arrival of the first Protestants onto the island in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and possibly even from the arrival of the proto-mythical Saint

Patrick himself in the fifth century—Irish identity has been closely tied to religious identification. During the Celtic Tiger, the shift has been away

8 from a negotiation of Catholic/Protestant, and towards Catholic/other.

In this dissertation, attention will be paid to the role that aging and holding to tradition play in this cultural conversation.

2. Economic change

The Celtic Tiger itself centers on an economic upsurge that saw a once-poor, largely agrarian, society thrust to the forefront of the world’s economic picture. As Fintan O’Toole explains in his book After The Ball

(2003) in 1960, farming, fishing, and forestry made up 37 per cent of

Irish jobs, but this had fallen to 14 per cent by 1987 (8). By the turn of the twenty-first century, Ireland’s economy was widely seen as the strongest in the world, and Ireland was at the top on an index of

“globalization” (4).1 This index ranking was based on “economic integration, technology, political engagement, and personal contact” (5).

Economy comes into play in many ways in the plays of the period, from the ever-presence of cranes on the Dublin skyline echoing Kincaid in

Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus (2007) to the inevitable class struggle at the heart of Marina Carr’s By the Bog Of Cats (1998).

Not everyone writing about the Celtic Tiger, even those writing during the boom itself, is convinced that these changes are a good thing for Ireland. O’Toole discusses the imbalances and false appearances of the financial picture—he focuses in part on those left behind in the wake

1 The United States was 11th on this index in 2003, and the UK was 9th.

9 of the surge. Ivana Bacik, in her book Kicking and Screaming: Dragging

Ireland into the 21st Century (2004), takes a similar position. And now, with the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy clearly in play, many Irish cultural critics, O’Toole among them, question whether the Tiger actually existed at all.

Representations of aging and senescence are salient to this discussion. First, the general aging of Ireland’s population resulted in societal demands to meet the needs of this increasing population in terms of social welfare programs and work-life issues (Fahey 46). During the Celtic Tiger, the growth rate of the over-45 working population outstripped that of workers under 45 by over two per cent), and “income gaps” between the former group and the latter grew wider and wider

(Fahey 46, 41). An aspect of this economic consideration centers on questions of tradition, history, and the economic “sins” of generations past in comparison to the successes of the current generation. There is certainly room for materialist readings of the plays selected, and of Irish culture during and after the Tiger (O’Toole and Bacik both do a fair amount of this in their books). Questions must be asked about what demographic is most frequently attending the theatre, what versions of themselves they are seeing once there, and who is crafting these representations.

In addition to looking at the discourse on economic factors within these plays, there is also mileage to be gained from a reading of the

10 economic factors surrounding these plays as theatrical events—that is to say, the plays in performance. Are these playwrights commodifying

Irishness? Where are the plays presented? Many of McPherson’s, for example, premiered in London. What is being bought and sold? From whom and from where is the money for productions of the plays coming?

In Ireland, there is frequently governmental funding for the theatre. All of this, too, in addition to the need to address the international popularity of all things Irish such as music, literature, and theatre opens the door to a look into the packaging and repackaging of “old” Ireland, and of the “old” Irish.

3. Migration

During the Celtic Tiger, Ireland saw a dramatic change in immigration patterns. Roisin Ni Mhaille Battel asserts that “Ireland now finds itself in the surprising and unsettling position of being a magnet for immigrants instead of the more accustomed generator of emigrants”

(104). Bacik explains further:

Few welcomes are offered to those who come here seeking asylum, or to those who simply have a different skin color from the majority “white” population. The myth of the hundred, thousand welcomes masks what different guidebooks have memorably summed up, in a warning to those intending to visit these shores, as “peculiarly naïve” and even “particularly lurid” brands of racism. (199)

Bacik’s description of the potential for xenophobic attitudes in Celtic

Tiger Ireland demonstrates some of the potential for the

11 emigration/immigration issue to come to play in this study—who is being rendered as other? What do we do with these newcomers, and what do we do with the memories of those that have emigrated? What of the shadows of the pasts that these immigrants left behind? And, how do differing generational attitudes towards both come into play?

In addition to inward migration, Ireland experienced what PJ

Matthews calls “a fundamental reordering of social and cultural life” as

“patterns of settlement began to favor commuter towns in proximity to the larger urban centers, and this invariably led to a decline in remote rural towns and villages” (154). This urban/suburban migration,

Matthews explains, led to a rapid decline in the “civic infrastructure of rural Ireland” including the scaling back of state services such as post offices and Garda (police) stations (155).

4. Politics

While there is something of the political in everything mentioned already, the political climate in Celtic Tiger Ireland requires its own discrete category. The following political factors will considered:

A. The European Union. Although Ireland joined the EU in 1973,

some two decades before the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole says that

“the Irish boom would have been impossible without the EU. For

membership in the EU had one massive overriding effect on Irish

12 society […] that conflict could only be resolved in favor of

modernity” (19). Along with EU membership, however, came

questions about the impact of membership on Irish sovereignty.

Many Irish, including a large number of older people, were

concerned by the move into the EU, critical of the role that the

larger body played in Irish domestic politics, and resistant to the

requisite change that O’Toole describes above. The younger

generations frequently blamed these fears on adherence to a flawed

and overly romanticized past.

B. The changing landscape in Northern Ireland and with the UK. With

the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the road to the end of the

“Troubles” was laid. During the Celtic Tiger period, there was a

reduced need to pay close attention to the violence in the North,

and the Republic could focus on its own affairs. As with EU

membership, there was generational resistance to the political and

social changes brought about by the peace-building process, with

the older generations more skeptical than the younger ones.

C. Changes in education policy. Before the Tiger, the Catholic Church

controlled the majority of the public schools. During the Celtic

Tiger Many Irish started to question the efficacy of Church-

operated state-funded education. “When she was Minister for

13 Education between 1992 and 1997, the Labour party’s Niamh

Bhreathnach attempted to reduce the control of religious

denominations over the education system through legislative

reform of the composition of boards of management of schools”

(Bacik 41). Again, this move was seen by some, predominantly the

more conservative older generations, to be a challenge to tradition,

to cultural heritage, and altogether a suspicious move. In turn,

these resisters to change were viewed as antiquated remnants of a

bygone age.

The Irish Narrative

The guiding methodology of this dissertation centers upon locating aged characters in the selected plays, examining the ways that the characters are represented, and placing those representations into conversation with existing cultural narratives in Ireland. The idea of

“cultural narrative” as used here is closely related to the concept of metanarrative. In simple terms, cultural narratives are the means by which a group of people comes to understand and classify themselves.

Though there can be myriad narratives within any given culture their sources and topics can include religion, politics, socio-economic class, shared or disparate histories, gender identities and roles, ethnic stereotypes, biases, and comparative tales of origin. Whatever their genesis, cultural narratives are widely accepted by both members of the

14 group and by those who observe them. These narratives however, are subject to revision and change, but because of the relatively broad acceptance of them, that change can be very difficult.

In her preface to Robert J. Savage Jr.’s book Ireland in the New

Century: Politics, Culture, and Identity (2003), then President of the

Republic of Ireland Mary McAleese2 addressed the matter of Irish cultural narratives directly. Discussing the sweeping changes in Ireland at the turn of the twenty-first century, in the throes of the Celtic Tiger, she articulates:

Whatever the adventure that lies ahead, the story thus far has had its own fair share of drama. For much of the past century, Ireland was portrayed as a place where both the crasser and more sophisticated aspects of modern life had not fully penetrated. The craggy old man with the cap contemplating the sweet-faced turf-carrying donkey on a country bohereen3 in the sunshine, he of the well-known picture postcard images, was as carefully contrived as any modern digitized film. I should know: my grandfather was such a man, and he had such a donkey, and both had the bitterest tempers and dourest dispositions known to man or beast, albeit that they exercised both against a backdrop of photogenic rural idyll and stoically hidden, but nonetheless heartbreaking, poverty. Images and identities can miss each other by a mile. (24)

It is no coincidence that McAleese’s portrayal of romanticized Ireland contains—as do each of the plays that are discussed in this dissertation—the figure of an aged person. These representations of age

2 McAleese was President from 1997 to 2011. The President of the Republic of Ireland is a largely ceremonial position, elected by popular vote.

3 Irish slang for a narrow country lane

15 are common in Irish stories, in Irish folktales, and in the cultural narrative, especially when pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland is the subject.

McAleese continues her thought however, reiterating that the long- held conception of Ireland that she described no longer holds.

What, then, is a true reflection of Ireland and her people today, the one we are living out? Many of the words used to describe it are superlatives which set a scene quantum leaps forward, of an almost breathtaking catharsis. And it is undoubtedly true that our appetite for change and capacity to absorb change have been truly remarkable. (24)

But, she reminds readers, the changes may have been overstated, and are certainly still ongoing. McAleese then attempts a reflection of her

Ireland. She describes “a people who knew their nation when it was poor, [who] now know it as a place of wealth” (25). She touches on emigration, on booming employment, on peace. She lauds education, political reform, globalization, and a long cultural heritage (ibid). She finishes her essay by declaring:

Today’s Ireland is characterized by a buoyant faith in tomorrow. No generation has had such hopes nor such chances of their realization. The politics, identity, and culture of Ireland are no longer amenable to easy stereotypes, no longer fileable under simple labels. […] This is metamorphosis. Exciting for some, frightening for others. (27)

The character, the definition—the cultural narrative—of Ireland had changed, and the changes were predicated on the Celtic Tiger.

The plays discussed in this dissertation all echo President

McAleese’s assertion of change. They also incorporate the hope, the excitement, and the fear of that change. This study hopes to reveal the

16 ways in which the plays reflect this cultural metamorphosis, and how they depict a set of unstable cultural narratives.

Organization

This study consists of this introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Additionally, Appendix A includes a brief synopsis of each of the plays focused on in depth. Rather than taking a case study approach chapter-by-chapter, with in-depth readings of individual plays, or plays by individual playwrights, the chapters focus upon broad categories of representation which will be interrogated. In each of the chapters, the topics are discussed both synchronically, focusing on the socio-historical relevance at the time of creation, and diachronically, looking through time at antecedent but similar representations, as in folk traditions. I do not intend my selection of plays to be seen as all-inclusive; it is undeniably selective, focusing only on plays that have had productions at one or more major theatre, such as at The Abbey, The Gate, or The

Druid, and have been published. Similarly, the categories of representation, or the cultural factors that influence them, chosen in this study, should not be seen as exclusive; there is certainly room for other readings of these plays, and for other interpretations of the characters.

Chapter 1, “The Storytellers: ‘Stars’ and ‘Seanchaithe’ of the Celtic

Tiger,” deals with characters that can be read as representations of the seanchaí—a traditional figure in Irish culture, charged with the keeping

17 of cultural history and memory. This chapter, will focus on two very different seanchaí characters and demonstrate how, using the most traditional sources of cultural transmission, the plays reflect the changing narratives in Ireland. Part 1 explores the shifting relationships between rural and urban Ireland in Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997).

Part 2, will reveal changing relationships between the Irish and a traditional locus of authority—and the Irish government—as represented in Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland (2002).

Chapter 2 is called “The Good Old Days?: Rethinking the Story of the Past.” This chapter, will analyze two plays that engage with the past in different ways, but that have much to say about the impact of that past upon the present. It begins with a brief overview of how Irish plays have dealt with history, both in the past and during the Celtic Tiger. Part

1, looks at the collision of the familiar past with the indefinite future, through the eyes of the character Joe in Conor McPherson’s Port

Authority (2001). Part 2, will examine a critical inquiry into, and a deromanticization of, history itself with an analysis of the character

Thomas in Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (1995).

Chapter 3, ‘“I’m Old. I’ll Die If I Don’t Drink This”: Alcohol, Aging, and Affluence,” will discuss how the cultural discourse about “the drink” changed during the Celtic Tiger, and how, through the use of “aged” characters, this shifting narrative was represented on stage. It will begin with a short overview of the traditional stereotypes about drinking

18 culture in Ireland and the representations of drink and pub culture on the Irish stage. It will analyze two plays, Sebastian Barry’s Our Lady of

Sligo (1998) in Part 1, and Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol (2000) in Part

2, unpacking the discourse on alcoholism that lies within them. Finally

Part 3 will detail the cultural forces that have come to bear on both

Barry’s and McPherson’s work.

Chapter 4, “The Old Hag, The Irish Mammy, and the Poor Old

Woman,” focuses on the diverse representations of aging women on stage, demonstrating and discussing how each of these folkloric conceptions of women plays out during the Celtic Tiger. Part 1 looks at negative representations of women—that is, women presented at “hags,” and “witches,” especially how these play out in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998). Part 2 will examine the ways in which the stereotypical representation of the Irish Mammy was complicated during the Celtic

Tiger through a close look at Elaine Murphy’s Little Gem (2010). Part 3 searches for the traditional nationalist representation of women—the

Sean Bhean Bhocht.4

Finally, the Conclusion will synthesize the findings of this study, articulating a reading of Irish culture in the Celtic Tiger, and the period’s cultural narrative of change—including a discussion of the role that these playwrights have played in, as Declan Kiberd put it, Inventing

4 Irish for “Poor Old Woman.” This term is frequently spelled as pronounced Shan Van Vocht.

19 Ireland. Additionally, the Conclusion will discuss the state of Irish theatre at present—after the Celtic Tiger, and consider the future of Irish theatre moving forward.

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Chapter 1 The Storytellers: ‘Stars’ and ‘Seanchaithe’ of the Celtic Tiger

When ethnographer and folklorist Henry Glassie writes of his late friend and informant Hugh Nolan—which is often—he consistently uses several distinct, but deeply interrelated, terms to describe his place within his community. Glassie says that Nolan was a “historian,” a

“star” (Stars of Ballymenone 77-78). These titles, Glassie explains, are not those that he gave to his friend, nor ones that Nolan applied to himself, but rather those applied by members of Nolan’s own community to help them to situate his significance within it.

“Stars,” Glassie says, are “composers of stories” with such virtuosity that their skills “become the stock of other storytellers”

(Passing the Time in Ballymenone 38-39). While the term “star” is unique to the Northern Irish region where Glassie centers his fieldwork, the legendary nature of exemplar storytellers reaches across Ireland. In every community, every village, parish, township, and county the people know where to turn for the most brilliant stories. In Glassie’s

Ballymenone, it was to Hugh Nolan.

The title “historian,” however, invokes something larger, older, and more universally understood throughout Ireland. Glassie explains,

21 “Ballymenone’s ‘historian’ fills the role of seanchaí”(Stars 441). Seanchaí1 is a traditional title, in Ireland, that is applied to members of the older generations—usually men—that operate as keepers of tradition, bastions of history, cultural memory, and purveyors of knowledge. Glassie quotes

Seumas MacManus, a seanchaí himself, describing that once the title is granted, by the community at large, authority follows “as much because of the honor due to age, as to the superiority of wisdom that must accompany it. All questions of genealogy, chronology, and history are referred to you for settlement” (441). Glassie says that in Ballymenone, and certainly in communities throughout Ireland, “historians are male and they are elderly. […] These men are tasked to preserve the past of their place and tell the stories their neighbors must hear” (79).

The vast and sweeping cultural changes that the Celtic Tiger brought to Ireland caused a destabilization of traditional meta- narratives, such as religion and traditional gender roles, in the country.

This chapter, will focus on two very different seanchaí characters and demonstrate how, using the most traditional sources of cultural transmission, the plays in which they appear reflect the changing narratives in Ireland. Part 1 explores the shifting relationships between rural and urban Ireland in Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997). Part 2, will explore changing relationships between the Irish and a traditional

1 The plural form of seanchaí is seanchaithe.

22 locus of authority—and the Irish government—as represented Sebastian

Barry’s Hinterland (2002).

Part 1: Rural Folktales and Urban Legends: The Weir

The clearest representation of a seanchaí on the Celtic Tiger stage is Jack in Conor McPherson’s The Weir. Jack is the go-to source, in his community, for local histories and legends, and for advice and opinion.

This section looks closely at the two stories that Jack tells in the play, paying attention to both the content of the tales and to the circumstances of their performance. Jack’s monologues are then connected to a deep tension between rural (traditional, “old”) Ireland and urban (modern, “new”) Ireland.

The Weir2 is set in a small pub in rural Ireland. McPherson is intentionally vague about the exact setting in the script, but he says it is set in County Sligo, or County Leitrim (The Weir and Other Plays 5).3 The action of the play centers on a single night in which a new resident has moved to the area, and is being shown around by local businessman

Finbar, who is considered a blow-hard by his friends in the pub. The arrival of this new resident has caught the attention of the locals, Jack,

2 See Appendix A for Synopsis.

3 Although in his Afterword in this published version, McPherson specifies that he thinks the play is set in Jamestown, near Carrick-on- Shannon in County Leitrim, where his grandfather had lived (306).

23 Jim, and the owner of the pub, Brendan, for one reason. This new resident is “a fine girl. Single. Down from Dublin and all this” (10).

Finbar brings Valerie to the pub to meet the locals, and they engage in a nice evening of “craic” (Irish for lively conversation and community).

The Weir is a complex and powerful play. When it was new,

McPherson himself said “the play is a bunch of people sitting together in a pub telling each other ghost stories” (qtd. in Wood 143), which he acknowledges “didn’t sound like a good idea. It sounded like a pretty bad idea. But I thought it could really work” (ibid.). In reality, however, the play is about much more than ghosts. McPherson has said that the play is about death (Costa 83), and he has said, perhaps more profoundly, “it is about fundamental fear. And the powerful need people have for community, between two people, or three people, or a hundred and three people” (qtd. in Wood 143). Certainly the overtones of loss, death, loneliness, and fear ring throughout the play, but so do those of hope, community, compassion, and healing.

Structurally, The Weir is rather straightforward. Throughout the evening, the inhabitants of Brendan’s pub take turns telling ghost stories. Jack, the oldest of the characters, goes first (TWAOP 30-33), having been goaded into telling a story about a fairy road that travels straight through the house that Valerie has just moved into. As significant as the story itself is, the circumstances surrounding the

24 story’s telling are especially relevant in this discussion of the cultural role and authority of the storyteller.

Jack the Seanchaí

Just before Jack’s performance, he steps to the restroom leaving

Valerie alone with Finbar, Jim, and Brendan. Finbar (in his late forties)

(TWAOP 5), who has moved to nearby Carrick-on Shannon, begins to tell

Valerie a story of the fairies. He quickly realizes that he knows only pieces of the story, and appeals to Brendan for help. Brendan, in his thirties, the youngest man in the room, quickly says, “Ah, Jack’d tell you all them stories” (29). Finbar begins again, but is interrupted by

Brendan’s insistence that Jack is one to ask, and his appeal to Jim to step in to help. Jim, who is in his forties, defers saying, “Ah, Jack’d tell you better than me” (29). Jim does, however, step in to correct Brendan’s fumbled attempt at recounting the history of the townland (29).

Upon Jack’s return, Finbar asks him for the story, and Jack quickly makes it clear why he holds the authority to tell it. He says, “are you really interested? All the babies” (29), and asserts his status as the oldest man in the pub, though only “in his fifties” (5). Before he begins the tale, Jack repeatedly tells Valerie that “these are only old stories. […]

Old cod, like” (30). Finbar reinforces this idea, calling the tale “old shit” and saying “it doesn’t mean anything” (30).

25 Finally, Jack begins. This tale was told to him, he says, by Maura

Nealon, a “sprightly kind of a woman” all the way up until her death when she was “nearly ninety” (30). Maura, Jack tells us, was the youngest of her mother’s children, the only daughter of a woman—

Bridie—who was “a well known woman in the area. A widow woman.

She was a bit of a character. Bit of a practical joker and that, you know?” (ibid). Bridie loved to pull pranks on her older kids, and one of her favorite tricks was to shout that someone was knocking at the door, when she knew nobody to be there, and to laugh as the children went to look (30-31).

One night, Jack relates, in 1910 or 1911, Bridie asked if anyone has answered the door. Jack says:

And they were all, “oh here we go,” you know? But—Bridie came down and opened the door, and there was nobody there. And she didn’t say anything, and she wasn’t making a big thing out of it, you know? And Maura said, she was only young, but she knew there was something wrong. (31)

Jack continues telling Valerie, the others in the pub, and us, that Bridie did not send Maura up to bed that night, as was her norm, but instead wanted someone with her (ibid).

Then Jack reminds Valerie that there was no electricity in the area in those days, and he issues a kind of a warning to the Dublin transplant. He tells her:

There’s no dark like a winter night in the country. And there was a wind like this one tonight, howling and whistling in off the sea. You hear it under the door and it’s like someone singing. Singing in under the door at you. (31)

26 Jack goes on, telling Valerie that as Maura and her mother sat by that fire, in Valerie’s new house:

There was a soft knocking at the door. Someone. At the front door. And Bridie never moved. And Maura said “will I get the door, Mammy?” And Bridie said, “No, sure, it’s only someone playing a joke on us, don’t mind them.” So they sat there, and there was no more knocking for a while. (32)

Jack explains to Valerie that the architecture of her house had been different in those days, and that “where the extension is” is where the back door had been. And it was on this back door that the next knocking was heard, “very low on the door. Not like where you’d expect a grown man or woman to be knocking” (32). Bridie did not answer, and nothing more was said of the experience, but a few days later a priest came and “blessed the doors and windows” (32).

Finally, Jack brings the story home, telling us that:

It was only years later that Maura heard from one of the older people in the area that the house had been built on what they call a fairy road. […] a row of things from the old fort up in Brendan’s top field, then the old well, and the abbey further down, and into the cove where the little pebbly beach is, there. And the legend would be that the fairies would come that way to bathe, you see, and Maura Nealon’s house was built on what you’d call…that…road. (32-33)

Jack ends by telling Valerie that that knocking had only ever been heard one other time—when the weir was being built in the 1950s (33).

The function of this story in the text is to introduce Valerie to her new area, to operate as a piece of local lore and place-centered storytelling. The lesson from this story: change can cause unrest and

27 upheaval, and these residents tend to resist it. This moral is found in the fact that the fairies that Maura heard knocking on her door years ago had only been heard one other time—while the weir was being built in the 1950s. The construction of the weir, the biggest event in the village’s history (perhaps until the arrival of Valerie), had riled up the fairies in the area.

This is a type of story that Henry Glassie calls an “experience”

(“Passing the time” 66-69). Glassie explains, “evidence of the other world appears too rarely for knowledge to be limited by personal experience. So most stories of fairies and ghosts will come from others, and when told they will relate the experience of another, a known other […]” (69). He continues, “experiences—‘ghost stories’ and ‘fairy stories’—are true, true because they happened or true because […] they are fictions set in fact.

They tell the truth about the other world or about the little world of the community” (69). True to this form, McPherson’s Jack tells his story as it was told to him by Maura Nealon, a now dead well-known person in the area. The story invokes the fairies, and in the mention of the wind singing in under the door, the Banshee (or Bean Sidhe), a frightening figure whose cries are said to be a harbinger of death.

Jack’s story is full of references to the surrounding area, appeals to tradition, and historical specificity. Jack is the historian in Brendan’s pub; Jack is the seanchaí. As Glassie suggests, his authority comes from

28 his age. When he speaks, nobody interrupts—as Jack himself will when

Finbar tells his story later. His word is law.

A Personal History

McPherson also gives Jack, the seanchaí, the final story in the play, and the story could not be more different from the first (63-67).

This story is not a ghost story; it is a story of loneliness and pain, and rather than being rooted firmly in the local area, this story involves both

Jack’s village and Dublin. The circumstances of performance are also different than before. Where the first story took some goading, this one comes unsolicited.

After telling Valerie that he continually admonishes Brendan “not to end up like me […] a cantankerous old fucker” (63), Jack tells a very personal tale about the loss of the love of his life, not through death, but through bad decisions. He begins by painting a picture of his lonely life, down in his garage with a tin roof, which makes things very hot in the summer and very loud in the rain (64). Jack says that he is “on my own on that country road. You see, it was bypassed by that main road into

Carrick” (ibid). He says the only people that stop in are those that know the area well, and that “you’d definitely feel” the loneliness (ibid).

Jack says that he certainly considered marriage as a young man, as all “youngfellas” do, and that he’d had a girl who he was courting for three years—“1963-‘66” (64). He continues:

29 But she wanted to go up to Dublin, you know. She would have felt that’s what we should have done. And I don’t know why it was a thing with me that I…an irrational fear, I suppose, that, kept me here. And I couldn’t understand why she wanted to be running off up to Dublin, you know? And she did, in the end, anyway, like. And she was working up there waiting for me to come. But with me it was a mad thing, that I thought it was a thousand fucking miles away, hated going up. (64)

Jack tells us that he went a few times, mostly for sex, and that this aspect of their relationship became the only reason that he went at all

(ibid). Afterwards, Jack says, he was “all catty and moochy” (64) and

“breaking the poor girl’s heart” (65).

Jack does not know why he treated the girl the way he did. He laments, “ah, you get older and look back on why you did things, you see that a lot of the time, there wasn’t a reason. You do a lot of things out of pure cussedness” (65). He dreaded her letters coming, he stopped answering, and he let her go. He says:

I can’t explain what carry on I was up to. I had just…left her out. Being the big fella, me dad handing over the business to me. Me swanning around. A man of substance. And then I had the gall to feel resentful when she wrote and said she was getting married to a fella. And I was all, that it was her fault for going up in the first place. (65)

Jack continues to explain how he went to her wedding, very hung-over, as just another guest. All of the “culchies”4 “smelling of Brylcreem and wondering why she hadn’t “come home to get married” (65).

4 A slang term for someone from a rural area—from “agriculture”.

30 As his friend walked down the aisle, to marry her Guard5 fiancé,

Jack gave her a look as if to say “the future’s all ahead of me” (66). She did not respond, she just looked at him like he was “only another guest at the wedding” (ibid). He continues:

And that was that. And the future was all ahead of me. Years and years of it. I could feel it coming. All those things you’ve got to face on your own. All by yourself. And you bear it ‘cause you’re showing everybody that you’re a great fella altogether. (66)

Then Jack left the church and went into the city. He says that “it was a dark day. Like there was a roof on the city,” so he ducked into a pub

(ibid). There he met a barman—a businesslike barman, like Brendan

(ibid).

This barman asked if Jack was alright, and when Jack could not answer, he took it upon himself to make Jack a sandwich (66). When

Jack ate that sandwich, he says, “it fortified me like no meal I’ve ever had in my life. And I went to the reception. And I was properly ashamed of myself” (67). He says that he looked away, when his eyes met his friends at that reception. He says that this is what he does in his little garage— he looks away. The act of being alone in the country Jack says, “stops you thinking about what might have been and what you should have done (67). Still, he finishes, “there’s not one morning that I don’t wake up with her name in the room” (ibid).

5 A policeman. The police force in Ireland is called An Garda Síochána, which translates to “Guard of the Peace of Ireland”.

31 The meaning found here seems to be a lesson for Valerie to not throw her life away, and for Brendan the young pub owner to keep looking for love, however painful. It is because of Jack’s status as seanchaí that Brendan feels compelled to listen; Jack is an authority figure, but one whose authority was granted by his own community.

This type of tale is a genre of story that Glassie calls a “personal narrative” (Passing the Time 59). These stories, especially from a seanchaí, are, Glassie says, not common, and “when they do appear, they come cautiously, apologetically, carefully shaded so they will not reflect on the brightness of the narrator” (ibid). The people in Glassie’s

Ballymenone certainly have personal stories but, he says, their

“autobiographical details” get suppressed in order to highlight the narrator’s personal philosophies (742). Jack’s story does not function this way—it is rich in detail and sparse in philosophizing. Valerie and

Brendan are left to glean what they will from Jack’s story.

McPherson gives us a traditional seanchaí, he gets his authority from the community, he tells a traditional tale about iconic Irish folk characters, deeply rooted in place and locality. He functions as authoritative “historian” and “star.” But, at the end of the play, the narrative changes to something that Glassie calls unusual.

Because of the departure from more traditional modes of storytelling, highlighted because Jack began with a very traditional story, this story becomes a significant place to look for latent meaning and

32 substance. The final story presents a tension between rural Ireland, in the form of Jack’s village and garage, and urban Ireland, in the form of

Dublin. In this story, the country is a place of loneliness, the city one of cruelty. Neither is painted as “good” or “bad.” Both rural and urban space have their limits and their benefits.

Rural versus Urban Ireland In Context

The Weir was written at a time caught in a major cultural shift in terms of its thinking about matters rural. In 1993, John Waters wrote the following in The Irish Times:

One way of describing what has been happening to Ireland in the past 20 years or so would be to say that the country has been going out of fashion. 1 do not mean that it has become unfashionable to be Irish, but that the realities of what it is like to live in Ireland and the aspects of Irish life which might ensure the health and stability of future life here have all been rendered unfashionable within the public imagination of the State. […] The entity we have come to know as "rural Ireland" provides the most basic example. Even the most well-intentioned and sympathetic public responses to the situation of this entity can be observed to make the assumption that rural Ireland is, so to speak, a couple of bales short of a trailerload. We have come to characterize rural Ireland as a "problem" area undergoing a "crisis" of some kind. The tone of concern with which such diagnoses are delivered suggests that something will have to be done by someone or other, if this place is not to disappear altogether. (Par. 1-3)

Waters expands on his argument, explaining that:

"Rural Ireland" is a phrase that means whatever you want it to, depending on your perspective. Within the vocabulary of main-stream political debate, for example, "rural" has come to be used as a synonym for "conservative." "backward" and "reactionary." By means of an ideological drip-feed, the

33 public mind is gradually being conditioned with the notion that this place called "rural Ireland" is ipso facto sub- modern. (Par. 5)

This cultural attitude towards rural Ireland, coupled with the increased urbanization of the nation as a result of the Celtic Tiger, is a part of the cultural atmosphere surrounding McPherson’s writing.

Whether one agrees with Waters or not (his opinion columns are particularly controversial), what he says is true. In terms of Celtic Tiger conceptions of Ireland, rural Ireland equals traditional Ireland—“old

Ireland”—where urban Ireland is the picture of modern Europe. Moya

Kneafsey, in an article entitled “Tourism and Place Identity: A case-study in rural Ireland,” explains how the West of Ireland, and therefore rural

Ireland, has come to globally symbolize traditional Ireland and Irishness.

County Mayo, Kneafsey says, even advertises itself as the “most Irish part of Ireland” (114), and touts itself as a “journey into an historic past”, and the “final frontier of beauty and hospitality” (115).

It is not surprising, with this tension between urban and rural

Ireland, that McPherson wrote a play set in rural Ireland. What is remarkable about this play, however, is that it does not pit these key terms against each other as god/devil terms. That is to say, McPherson neither glorifies the urban nor romanticizes the rural. He presents a complicated and considered view of both. In both cases there are criticisms apparent—the fast pace and confusion in the city, the loneliness of the country—but neither is presented as better than the

34 other. Valerie has chosen the country for her own reasons, and they may be precisely the opposite of the reasons that Finbar chose the town.

Whereas Finbar desires the economic possibilities and hustle and bustle of the town, Valerie wants the quiet solitude that only the country can offer.

This treatment of rural and urban Ireland differ from Martin

McDonagh’s Leenane trilogy, for example, where rural Ireland is presented as backwards and remote, and from Enda Walsh’s Sucking

Dublin where Dublin is presented as filled with drugs, crime, and violence. McPherson is not making a political statement about class or power, he is not decrying the plight of the Irish youth. McPherson is reflecting, in his philosophical way, the attitudes of his countrymen, in all their complexity. His play exposes the destabilization of traditional narratives about rural and urban Ireland, simply by refusing to take sides. He places both arguments on the table, and allows, through his seanchaí, his audience to make their own conclusions.

35 Part 2: Shaky Authority: Hinterland and the Seanchaí in Crisis

Not every seanchaí that appeared on stage during the Celtic Tiger was as effective as Jack in The Weir. Many of them found themselves hindered in some way from being their community’s authority on histories or place-situated knowledge. Father Jack, for example in Friel’s

Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), cannot take his place as seanchaí, despite his minor celebrity status in Ballybeg, because his years of Catholic missionary work in Africa have rendered him a consummate outsider.

The Catwoman (discussed in Chapter 4) in Marina Carr’s By The Bog of

Cats (1998) cannot function as seanchaí because, as a woman, as a

Tinker, and as a witch, she is too marginalized by the community at- large to be granted the authority she may deserve.

This section, looks at a character that, because of his place within his community, should function as seanchaí, but is incapable of filling the cultural role because of long-term associations with, and a career within, the Irish government. Through exploring the impact on the cultural authority of Johnny, in Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland (2002),6 the destabilization of the authority of the government, as social institution, during the Celtic Tiger is revealed. The section begins with a brief overview of the play, including its critical response and biographical nature. The script reveals the evidence in favor of reading Johnny as a seanchaí character, and the reasons that he is unable to fill that role.

6 See Appendix A for synopsis.

36 Finally, the play is situated within its cultural context, with an analysis of the changing social narratives about the government in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger.

Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland presents the story of Johnny

Silvester, a former Taoiseach7 of Ireland. The play follows 70-year old

Johnny through his struggles with retirement, with his health, with allegations of corruption and a resultant inquest, with the memories of his former life in the public eye, with writing his memoirs, with his angry wife, and with his suicidal son. Johnny, we quickly learn, is struggling with the ghosts of his past—ghosts that sometimes appear in physical form and climb out of the cupboard. The play was not well received, critically or by audiences, when it opened. The outcry against the play, however, had less to do with Barry’s writing or the acting than it did with

Barry’s basing Johnny on a living historical figure. In his review Fintan

O’Toole said that Barry is “an extraordinarily gifted writer” (“Portrait” par.

14), and calls Patrick Malahide, who played Johnny, “extraordinary” as well (par. 7).

Barry based his lead character on Charles J. Haughey, a former

Taoiseach who remained very popular after his retirement, despite allegations of corruption and the revelation of a long-term extra-marital affair. O’Toole writes, “From the very first moments of Hinterland, you

7 Prime Minister.

37 realize that there is to be no teasing, no guessing-games about the identity of Johnny Silvester” (par. 5). He continues:

Moments later he talks of "my sweet interrogation at the hands of the nation." Then he trots out Haughey's now- infamous "I have done the state some service." This, then, is not a character inspired by Haughey. It is Haughey. The absolute identification is much more, however, than a matter of external detail. With his poet's ear, Barry has caught quite magnificently the patterns of Haughey's speech, that unique conjunction of puffed-up pomposity and vivid vulgarity. (Par. 6)

Barry’s choice to base his character on Haughey caused a stir. In a Time

Magazine article, James Inverne summarizes:

A dramatic figure, given to quoting Shakespeare, Haughey is reportedly not at all pleased to be stage-fodder; his lawyers are said to be scanning the text with litigation in mind. Nor were the Irish media any less sensitive when the Abbey presented the piece. "Haughey fury at Abbey play" blazed the front page of the Sunday Independent, while daytime TV and radio was full of Hinterland talk. Press comments — the Sunday Times (not a reviewer) called Hinterland "feeble, puerile, trite, dissociated, shallow, exploitative and gratuitously offensive" — might also make the Irish Arts Council reluctant to extend more funding to the Abbey, Ireland's national theater. (Par. 3)

While doomsday predictions about funding did not come to pass, the controversy bears analysis, and will be discussed later in the section.

Johnny Silvester: Seanchaí Failed

By all rights, Johnny should be a seanchaí. At 70, he is the oldest character in the play. He is wise and learned—he has even been granted honorary doctorates (although not from the National University of

Ireland-Galway). He has lived a life at the center of his community—of

38 all of Ireland. As Taoiseach, he had helped shape and define Ireland.

The position requires the trust and confidence of Dáil Éireann, the democratically elected government of Ireland, and by extension, the Irish people. Johnny was, by his own assessment, “the father of the nation”

(59). He should be an authority figure. As a shaper of history, he should be able to function as “historian.” Johnny, however, is no seanchaí.

When the play opens, Johnny is writing a memoir in the form of a letter to his aunts who live in Derry “where so many of my childhood memories reside” (7). He recounts, to his aunts, his father’s dismay at the Partition that separated Derry from “her own hinterland of Donegal”

(ibid). Quickly, however, Johnny finds his writing to be “stilted and formal” and that he must “get this historical angle out of my mind” (8).

He demonstrates, in this statement, some tension between the story he wishes to tell and “history”—a theme that will haunt Johnny throughout the play.

Johnny does have a story, a history, and he is being asked to tell it, regardless of his own comfort with the truth. He tells his servant

Stephen that, come spring, he will (again) face “sweet interrogation at the hands of the nation” (9). A man, Stephen reminds him, “must do right by his own people” (ibid). It is not until later that we learn that what

Johnny faces is not his community asking for stories of their cultural history, but an inquest into allegations of “impropriety” (14) and “careless financial dealings” (15). The revelation of the nature of Johnny’s tribunal

39 is made to one of the man’s oldest friends—Cornelius—a former political ally who would fit right in in Brendan’s pub in The Weir. Cornelius, though he appears on stage, is dead (12).

As Johnny and his late friend talk, the topic of “truth” comes up.

Truth in Ireland, Johnny says, “is the tripes of the animal. The thing the butcher cannot sell” (13). He continues, telling Cornelius that there are places (“Belfast and Derry”) where “truth is the thing that will get you killed” and that “the only people that survived Stalin’s purges were the sick and the mad. What killed the others? The Truth” (ibid). This is not the sort of sentiment one wishes to hear from their political leaders, or from their seanchaí.

The men discuss the sacrifices that Johnny made in the service to his country—including Cornelius’ political career—and then they return to Johnny’s inquest. He explains:

Of course I have denied everything, every charge of impropriety, and years ago that would have sufficed. The word of an Irish gentleman of the old school. But in this dishonest era, everything you say is questioned. They won’t play the game now. These fucking Supreme Court Judges. (14)

Blame for Johnny’s downfall is deflected—it is the fault of the judges who

“won’t play the game”, the fault of the “dishonest era,” and the fault of journalists. The latter, Johnny says, is who is to blame for Cornelius’ death, both political and actual.

Johnny explains that it was his work that moved the Irish from

“under the rock of the British economy” and demands that, regardless of

40 the carelessness of his government regarding finances, the “fucking banks [were] on our side” (16). He says that “they [the courts and the press] are trying to hang us now—they are tying to hang me. It’s ancient history!” (ibid). Cornelius reminds Johnny that he got very rich, even as he “prescribed the hair shirt for everyone else” (ibid). The problem, it would appear, is that Johnny underestimated the authority of the people to “go back through all that and say this and that was wrong” (ibid).

Finally, in desperation, Johnny exclaims:

I made this country, whether they like it or not. They all voted for me when they thought it was to their advantage. […] They will not give me my due now. I am to be ritually disemboweled in my own country, by my own countrymen. This is my fate now! (16-17)

Johnny thought he could tell half-truths, cook the books. He thought he wouldn’t have to answer to the people. But Glassie calls a “historian,” a seanchaí, “a teller of factual tales” (“Passing the Time” 70). Johnny’s truth will destroy his life.

While Johnny’s relationship with history and truth in this exchange with Cornelius is interesting and complicates any attempt to read him as a seanchaí, it is another visitor that completes the picture of

Johnny as a failed seanchaí. Early in the play we learn that, over the weekend in which the play is set, a student will be coming to visit the former Taoiseach for an interview. This student, Johnny says, is “a PhD on the domestic history of Derry. Whatever that is” (20). His wife Daisy says that she thinks the visit “very unwise,” in part because of the

41 impending tribunal, and in part because matters domestic are, she tells

Johnny, “not your area of expertise” (ibid). Johnny waves off his wife’s concern, saying:

I think we’re safe with the domestic history of Derry. My heavens, Daisy, it will be a relief to talk about something other than my bloody bank accounts. Stephen gave me the low-down. The very brightest of the bright at UCD,8 he says. At work on a very important chapter in the social history of the North. Probably a book in the long term. “It will be recreational for you,” he says, “and an honor for her.” I’m looking forward to it. […] It will delight me to expatiate on these old matters. (20)

The student is visiting specifically to call upon Johnny to act as seanchaí—to ask him questions about place and history and society.

This student is more than just a student. Her name is Aisling, and

Barry makes it very clear that we are to understand her not only as a contemporary scholar from UCD—we are meant to read her as Ireland personified. A few moments before Johnny’s visitor arrives, he rebukes his wife for treating him cruelly, for refusing to forgive him for decades of marital infidelity. He says “now it’s the old hag9 act again, cursing at me.

Like some decrepit Cassandra, some vengeful Aisling” (45). His son Jack seems to recognize the reference to Cassandra, the archetypal mad seer from Greek tragedy, but not Aisling. Johnny explains:

8 University College Dublin

9 For more on the “old hag act” please see Chapter 4.

42 An Asling, Jack, is Ireland personified by a young woman, in many a plaintive Irish poem of the eighteenth century, when the number was up with the old order of chieftains and kings. (46)

The Aisling is closely related to the Sean Bhean Bhocht discussed in

Chapter 4.

That Jack would recognize the Greek mythological reference, and not one from the mythology and folklore of his own country is striking, but not entirely surprising. Johnny has spent the play citing historical precedent and literary references from across Europe, from England, from the Americas, but never from Ireland. One of the lone references to an Irish historical figure, Ireland’s first Taoiseach, Eamonn De Valera, made by Cornelius, is quickly dismissed. Johnny asks “would De Valera be proud of his country now?” (16). The answer, Johnny determines, is a firm no, and the matter is dropped. This Aisling, once she arrives, will reenact the function of the Aisling from the poems; she will question the fallen Taoiseach—which translates, roughly, to chieftain.

Aisling is visiting Johnny’s house, in the hinterlands of Dublin, to ask “a few questions about Derry, in the thirties, when [Johnny’s] father was young” (50). She tells Johnny that her “suspicion is, the condition of

Derry before the Troubles was the ground on which the Troubles were erected” (51). She asks after Johnny’s father, the Derry man. He replies:

He was certainly. Apprentice boys, siege of Derry, history of tempest and discord. Old days. (Nothing for a little) The ragged trousers…bones in the stew, good Northern cabbage from the farm, where the slugs disported themselves. Hearth of the cricket, the zinc bucket by the door, muslin,

43 summer heat, the black boatmen skittering about, a mirror for a young face, a cold mirror from the bowels of the earth. […] Poor. You know. (52)

This scattered and disjointed “narrative,” full of cliché and platitudes, is all Johnny can tell Aisling about Derry in the thirties. He tries to invoke

Yeats, but cannot remember the words (52). He tries a bit of family history, but, apart from telling Aisling that he “had about three hundred cousins in Derry” (53), there is not much story. He tries to quote

Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh, but is unable (ibid). This is not the seanchaí that Aisling had hoped to see.

Aisling decides to “extemporize” and go away from her prepared questions (53). She asks about the contrast between Johnny’s father’s poverty and Johnny’s own wealth—reminding him that he has a private jet (ibid). Johnny sees in this question a chance to tell the only history he knows—not that of Derry, but his own. He says:

In fact, the story of the jet is—well, I don’t know if funny is the right word. Because I’m not a rich man, Aisling. I have seen very little money in my time. Held it in my hand. Money is a state of mind. Modern money exists philosophically. May I illustrate? It’s not the domestic history of Derry, as such. It is just my history. […] Well, I have a phone in my car that is paid for by the state. This concession is linked to a larger group of concessions, except the other things I never utilize. So they appear as zeroes on the accounts, which people like. There was, until recently, an understanding that occasional exceptional spending might also go on this bill, and it was accepted that these things might now and then be quite large, especially when I was head of the country. This arrangement reached into an account I held as a partner in a dairy farm enterprise in the midlands, that supplied an enormous quantity of milk into the European surplus, and in recognition of this the Central Milk Board allowed the company a concession of three per

44 cent on every second container of milk that went into intervention. This money was computed as a boon to the Irish economy and therefore enshrined more or less in a larger body of funds directly enhanced by the state at quarterly intervals. Out of this I paid my expenses vis-à-vis my private jet. Therefore the position was that my private jet was paid for ultimately by the mobile phone. You see? It’s all innocent enough. I keep telling them that. Modernity. (54)

This story, though, is not a history—it is an excuse. Johnny has explained the case against him, he has demonstrated that he knows the story, but he professes ignorance of the consequences of his actions.

Glassie says that the most important tales that a historian can tell “are those deepest in truth, unimpeachably true, the stories called ‘history’”

(“Passing the Time” 69). Johnny’s “history” fails by this measure, just like Johnny’s credibility as seanchaí.

In a final blow to any positioning of Johnny as “historian,” as purveyor of truth, he and Aisling have an argument regarding her father’s position as Lecturer of Modern Irish History. Johnny insists that this makes her father interested in “revisionism,” and that he must a weak grasp of political science (57). As she tells him that her father feels that “with all of the tribunals, you know, something has been lost” (57),

Johnny says, citing Brendan Behan (this time correctly) “fuck the begrudgers” (58). Johnny decries his critics, both academics and journalists. Finally, Aisling tells him:

you know, you’re not accused by begrudgers, really, but the people that loved you. I suppose that’s worse. My father used to think you were a hero, a political genius. […] He

45 doesn’t any more, alas. I’m afraid he feels betrayed, greatly betrayed. (59)

The disgraced seanchaí turns on the Aisling. He says:

You’re subtle. You’re kind, but you are like a dagger. Look, I made this country. How you live, how you are, the clothes on your pretty back, even your damned confusion in the face of reality—you owe it all to me. I made you, Aisling Dwyer. I asked the hard questions long ago. The father of the nation. Do you understand? I have the whole country against me now. Do you know what that’s like? They will never understand. It’s because they are comfortable, afflicted by comfort. It has softened their brains. No one remembers the hard days. Derry made me, Dublin undid me. (59)

Aisling explains that the only thing that Johnny Silvester ever gave her was “shame” when she reads about his actions. She laments the politicians who lack “moral grandeur,” that lack “political love” (60).

Finally, Aisling, this undeniable embodiment of Ireland, mourns the lack of “good men” in the political system (ibid). Ireland herself insists, “the funny thing is, I love my country” and the best that Johnny

Silvester, former Taoiseach—chieftain, king, father of the country, can say in reply is, “The funny thing is, I do too” (60). The interview is over.

Johnny is not the seanchaí that Ireland had hoped him to be. He is not the source for truth or history. He is not the place to turn for place histories or moral judgments. As an elder statesman, as the former leader of his national community, Johnny should have easily filled this role. Corruption and impropriety, what Johnny defines as the very nature of the Irish political system—the game that the judges will no

46 longer play—have rendered him incapable of acting as keeper of tradition, bastion of history, cultural memory, and purveyor of knowledge.

Corruption in Context: Irish Politics and The Celtic Tiger

It is no overstatement to say that the Celtic Tiger was conceived, birthed, nurtured, and ultimately killed by the political and fiscal policies of the political party Fianna Fáil.10 The party, situated center to center- right on the spectrum, was the predominant party in power for decades— both before the Tiger and during. As Alex Massie wrote following the

2011 general election:

For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, Fianna Fail has been the natural party of government. Socially conservative and keenly nationalist (branding itself the "Republican Party" in a country where that term has acute patriotic resonance), Fianna Fail has frequently conflated party with country. Its brand of clientalist politics has been uncannily well-suited to a country as tightly knit as Ireland: Nearly everyone in Ireland qualified as a connected special interest for whom the party had performed favors. As the party of small businessmen and the aspirational lower- middle classes alike, Fianna Fail has been in power for nearly 60 of the past 80 years. In that way, the party's political successes and failures are synonymous with modern Ireland's: Fianna Fail presided over the best and the worst of times. (Par. 4)

The leader of Fianna Fáil from 1979 until 1992 was Charles Haughey, the man on whom Sebastian Barry based Johnny Silvester.

10 The party name translates to "Soldiers of Destiny."

47 In the words of The Guardian’s Dublin correspondent, Joe Joyce,

Haughey “survived a succession of scandals “in his more than 30 years at the top in Irish politics” (8). Joyce provides a laundry-list of the scandals. He says, “The most serious of the scandals to challenge his political life was his sacking from the cabinet and arrest on arms smuggling charges in 1970. […] Mr Haughey denied that he had known anything about it” and was aquitted (8). In 1979:

He achieved his ambition of becoming Fianna Fail leader and Taoiseach […] His government, however, proved to be a disaster, piling up foreign debts and accusations of falsifying budget figures while Mr Haughey courted popularity. Defeated in 1981, he was back again in 1982 for his by now infamous 10-month minority administration. Riddled with scandals, it collapsed in the welter of a still potent controversy over phone tapping and bugging. After five years as opposition leader, he returned again in 1987 with a highly successful minority government which brought the economy back on the rails. But then Mr Haughey made one of his periodic misjudgments, calling an election which left him with fewer seats and forced Fianna Fail into its first coalition. With the Progressive Democrats riding shotgun, Mr Haughey seemed to have put his old ways behind him. But a spate of financial scandals broke last autumn and holes began to appear in his new image. He was found to have had meetings which he seems to have previously denied. (Ibid)

Finally, in January 1992, Haughey’s scandals got the better of him and he was forced from his position as Taoiseach. As the Washington Post’s

Glenn Frankel explains:

The scandal that forced his departure was over government wiretapping of two journalists. Sean Doherty, the former justice minister who for the past 10 years had taken the blame for the surveillance, charged in a press conference last week that Haughey had approved it. Haughey denied the allegations, but they were too much for the Progressive Democrats, who had split from Fianna Fail in 1986 over the

48 wiretap affair. They issued an ultimatum: Either Haughey leave, or they would bring about the collapse of his government. (A20)

Unfortunately for Haughey, the wiretapping scandal proved only the tip of the iceberg. A series of tribunals, one that concluded in 199711 and another that began in 1997 and concluded in 2006,12 found that

Haughey had taken bribes, had embezzled large sums of money, and had made himself very rich, whilst advocating austerity in Ireland (“Former

Taoiseach”).

In short, as it turns out, Charles Haughey had committed, at least, all of the crimes that Barry accuses Johnny Silvester of committing, even though it was written some four years before the findings of the final tribunal were released. In his review of the play, Fintan O’Toole wrote:

Barry has too much respect for the truth to pretend that Haughey really is a tragic figure. He is alive to the reality that the thread of true tragedy is interwoven with lurid strands of farce and buffoonery. And he is therefore forced to sacrifice the formal coherence of a tragedy which he achieved so superbly in The Steward of Christendom13 to the deep incoherence of Haughey's own story. Hinterland is, in other words, too true to life. (Par. 8)

Nevertheless, O’Toole, long a critic of the Irish government’s cronyism, lauded the play. He said:

Hinterland remains rather like Haughey himself: deeply flawed but utterly compelling. It is hard to think of a piece

11 The McCracken tribunal. 12 The Moriarty tribunal.

13 Which I will discuss in Chapter 2.

49 that is at once so problematic and so unmissable. Here after all, is a national theatre doing what it should be doing: engaging with a figure who, for good and ill, is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Here is an extraordinarily gifted writer working his way inside a language that has dominated public discourse in the Republic for three decades. Here is, above all, a performance from Patrick Malahide that embodies with breathtaking skill the state of the public realm. Beneath all the carefully orchestrated histrionics of his character, all the precision of his manoeuvring, Malahide stares out at us, hollow-eyed and disconnected, a haunting emptiness that is a chilling image of the State. (Par. 14)

Hinterland is, O’Toole says, reflecting a shifting attitude about the government in Ireland.

The emerging understanding of and impatience with political corruption that occurred during the Celtic Tiger represents a change in the country’s master narrative. In his book After the Ball O’Toole writes:

Long before the Irish political landscape was dominated by tribunals and inquiry into the corrupt practices of the 1980s and 1990s, Irish people understood quite well that they lived in a democracy where influence and power could be bought. (50)

O’Toole goes on to cite a poll from 1991, before the Celtic Tiger, that showed that 89 per cent of responders believed that Ireland had a

“Golden Circle of people who are using power to make money for themselves”, that 81 per cent believed that this Circle was comprised of an “equal measure of business people and politicians,” and that 83 per cent felt that the scandals that were beginning to emerge were only the

“tip of the iceberg” (50). O’Toole is explaining that the political narrative of Ireland before and during the early parts of the Celtic Tiger is one of

50 corruption, that the Irish people know that this is the case, and—by the continued reelection of Fianna Fáil-led governments from 1997-2011— there is little interest in stopping it.

But, as O’Toole notes, the narrative was changing. The culture of tribunal and inquest continued. Blatant corruption was no longer being tolerated. The game, as Johnny Silverster called it, was over. In the

2011 general election, voters who blamed Fianna Fáil’s fiscal policies, and the party’s relationships with business and banks, for the financial collapse of the Irish economy, and who were outraged at the apparent mismanagement in negotiations for a bailout from the EU, handed

Fianna Fáil a defeat that was in the words of Diarmaid Ferriter “the most devastating defeat for a dominant party since 1918” (18). The Irish

Times’s Miriam Lord attributes the crushing defeat, in which Fianna Fáil saw a 75 per cent reduction in voter support, to the destabilization of the

Irish political meta-narrative. She says:

The general election of 2011 will be remembered as the one which shattered another of the three great pillars of old Ireland. It was always a proud boast of the faithful multitude that they belonged to the Untouchable Trinity of the Catholic Church, Fianna Fáil and the Gaelic Athletic Association. (1) Now, Lord says, only the GAA remains unscathed. This shifting narrative is precisely what Sebastian Barry is reflecting in Hinterland, and he does so by invoking, and then denying, the traditional source for cultural transmission—the seanchaí.

51 In this chapter I have discussed changes to some dominant cultural narratives in Ireland. These types of changes are unsettling but they do not happen immediately in most cases. During the Celtic Tiger, many different narratives were challenged. In a 2003 interview with Paul

O’Connor, Fintan O’Toole said:

One of the things I deeply believe is that we all have kind of official versions of ourselves, which are uncomplicated and simple and straightforward. And then we have hinterlands, which can in many cases contain all sorts of swamps and marshes and untrodden ground, where we don’t examine assumptions. And that’s the way most people’s experiences are, especially Irish people. […] Of course, many peoples of Europe have had much more complicated experiences than we have, but I do think there are quite extreme versions of it in Irish people. This is to do with our failure to recover from our past. (Par. 12-14) Change, the type that Ireland saw during the Celtic Tiger, caused people to examine their primary assumptions, to interrogate as O’Toole says, echoing the title of Barry’s play, their hinterlands. Next, I will examine the last part of O’Toole’s assertion—the past.

52

Chapter 2 The Good Old Days?: Rethinking the Story of the Past

As noted, Fintan O’Toole thinks that the building of Ireland’s ideological “hinterlands,” “where we don’t examine assumptions” (qtd. in

Paul O’Connor par. 12), comes from a “failure” in the Irish cultural psyche “to recover from our past” (par. 14). In other words, O’Toole is saying that the Irish tend to be uncritical about their assumptions because the past and its consequences looms over them. O’Toole is only partly correct, however. Indeed past failures, past tragedies, past ideologies, and past horrors have rendered cultural memory painful, and therefore there is a very real attractiveness in placing these in a collective bog, where they can go critically unexamined. But the inverse is also true—the building of barriers in collective memory, hinterlands wherein assumptions go unexamined, undoubtedly hinders the recovery from that same past. If we cannot bear to examine our past in a critical way, how can we ever learn from it and move on?

In addition to reflecting changing cultural narratives, plays during the Celtic Tiger became a locus for the critical examination of the history of Ireland, and for the exposition and complication of long-held assumptions. In this chapter, two plays will be examined that engage with the past in different ways, but that have much to say about the

53 impact of that past upon the present. This begins with a brief overview of how Irish plays have dealt with history, both in the past and during the Celtic Tiger. Part 1, examines the collision of the familiar past with the indefinite future, through the eyes of the character Joe in Conor

McPherson’s Port Authority (2001). Part 2, is a critical inquiry into, and a deromanticization of, history itself with an analysis of the character

Thomas in Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (1995).

In his brilliant essay “Tradition,” Henry Glassie says that “history is not the past; it is an artful assembly of materials from the past, designed for usefulness in the future” (395). The examination of this

“artful assembly” is the basis for historiography, but also for the study of folklore. In another essay “History’s Dark Places,” Glassie describes two histories:

One was full of dates, names, and foreign places. It was the history of other people, carefully taught in school. The second was a history of darkness, the unspoken, unknown murk out of which the local people emerged. (2)

Folklore attempts to give voice to the inhabitants of this “darkness.” Irish theatre has, in its past, served both of these conceptions of history.

Irish theatre has a long tradition of speaking about the inhabitants of Glassie’s “dark places” of history. Some of these plays were aimed at glamorizing and romanticizing both Irish historical and mythological characters, and frequently conflating the two for political reasons, while

54 others presented those histories in ways that overtly challenged the status quo.

Many of Yeats’ and Lady Gregory’s plays, particularly at the Abbey, were aimed at rousing nationalist sentiment by presenting alternative histories that challenged British rule. Synge and O’Casey challenged those same nationalist sentiments by presenting deromanticized versions of Irish life. Many of Friel’s plays, including Freedom of the City (1973),

Translations (1988), Making History (1988), and Dancing at Lughnasa

(1990), complicate accepted historical narratives. Tom Murphy, also, took up the mantle of critical engagement with history in plays such as A

Whistle in the Dark (1961), Famine (1968), and Conversations on a

Homecoming (1985).

This trend continued during the Celtic Tiger. During the Tiger, a number of plays were aimed at encouraging an examination of those unspoken assumptions that O’Toole describes. Some of these plays took on and challenged traditional representations of women, as discussed in

Chapter 4. There were also plays that examine the stories of history themselves, either by complicating representations of the socially authorized seanchaí/historian, as noted in Chapter 1, or by giving voice to others who specifically lack that authority.

The characters here both bear some similarities to those from the previous chapter. Both Joe in Port Authority and Thomas in The Steward of Christendom have stories to tell, they are men, and they are “old.”

55 What they lack, however, in their respective worlds, is the social centrality necessary to render them seanchaithe. They have not been approached by anyone requesting their historical knowledge, they have not been called upon as authorities, and, though they will both offer them, nobody has asked for their opinion or philosophy. Both Joe and

Thomas dwell to varying degrees in “history’s dark places.”

56 Part 1: Ireland In Those Days: Joe in Port Authority

Conor McPherson’s Port Authority1 presents three Dubliners from different generations. Joe is described in the script as “seventy-odd” (Port

Authority 5), Kevin is said to be “maybe twenty” (5), and Dermot is in his

“late thirties? Mid-Thirties?” (5). The play features the three men telling stories, and the monologues are interwoven with each other.

Joe, the oldest character in the play, is the last to speak. From his first narrative we learn that he lives in a rest home with twenty other people. Joe’s story unfolds, and we learn that he had been married to

Liz, and had two children (35-37). Joe talks explicitly about the differences between Ireland in the 1960s and Ireland today. Breaking down this statement about the past is very revealing. Joe laments the changes in his country—or at the very least, he tells us that the way things had been had suited him better.

The past that Joe remembers is presented in opposition to the present. Now there are “issues” that cause everyone to be on “valium because they’re all confused about who they are” (37). This confusion, it seems, stems at least in part from questions of traditional gender roles.2

Joe says that in the past, the men worked and made money and the women quit their jobs and cooked (ibid). Joe favored this patriarchal definition of gender roles—they “suited him down to the ground” (ibid).

1 See Appendix A for synopsis. 2 An issue I explore extensively in Chapter 4.

57 Also in the past, baby names came from family—from tradition, but this is no longer the case. His daughter Tania had been named after a character in a film. The name is not even Irish, it is Russian in origin.

This breakdown of tradition and history was a solid indicator to Joe that

“the times were a changing” (37).

To Joe’s credit, he is not willing to overtly vilify the present in favor of the past. He says “Listen, I’m not saying that things were better then than now, only different, and you didn’t need to be asking all the questions you do now” (37). He continues:

And to tell you the truth that suited me. That suited me down to the ground. Because when the time came for me to have to start asking questions, let me tell you at the time, I could’ve done without it. Or maybe I’m glad it happened. You see? I’ve no idea about myself. I don’t even know if I’m happy or sad! (37)

Joe is acutely aware that the current Ireland is different than the old

Ireland he knew, and even if he claims to be uncertain how he feels about the changes, he seems to have preferred the old version.

About halfway through his story, Joe brings up the past again.

While telling about a dinner party at the home of his new neighbors, Joe says that they went and had a warm conversation “even though we didn’t know anyone at all, you see in those days you just spoke to people. Even though then it was like it was now and people had a few bob” (50).3

3 Bob is a slang term for money.

58 Here “old Ireland” is presented in the play as a friendlier place where those that were working had enough money that they did not need to worry about it.

Near the end of the play, Joe steps forward with a commentary on the way life was for working men in Ireland in those days. He says:

In those days, a lot of us could just about boil an egg. Those of us who worked a lot. There just wasn’t the time. There just wasn’t the need. Breakfast with the kids. Soup and sandwiches at your lunch. And off home to your shepherd’s pie or your few chops for your tea. Sure you spent half your time trying to get it into the kids, any way you could. (66)

Again, the domestic sphere is the domain of the Irish Mammy (see

Chapter 4). There was no need for a working married man to learn to cook. Clearly, to Joe, this version of the past is over, but dearly remembered.

The Old Curmudgeon

Joe’s place in the “dark places” of history comes, largely, from his place on the margins of life. He is not, like Jack in The Weir a part of the social life of his community at large. He is not, like Johnny in

Hinterland, a public figure whose legacy—for good and bad—will live in infamy. Joe is, he reminds us, “always just like everybody else” (Port

Authority 35), and he “is not that popular” (18). He says that if “you saw me with a bunch of people, you wouldn’t notice me” (35).

Though McPherson does not provide specific reasons, Joe lives in a nursing home. Even there, in his small community of twenty people, Joe

59 is not terribly popular. He says that Sister Pat, one of the attendants at the home, is “the closest thing I had to a friend, really”(17). In his first monologue, Joe tells us that Sister Pat has brought him a present that arrived in the mail at his son’s house, and that his son’s wife had dropped it by on her way to work (17). This confounds both Joe and

Sister Pat, because “who’d be sending an old curmudgeon birthday presents? And not on his birthday”(18). Even Joe’s family has placed him on the margins—his daughter-in-law did not stay to say hello, and

Joe says that he “hadn’t had a birthday present in years, sure!” (18). At breakfast, Joe sits with Jackie Fennel and Mary Larkin, with whom he

“spoke about the weather and Mary Larkin’s son, Peter, who was a guard and whose wife was expecting a baby” (20). But even though Joe and

Jackie would “often wander round to the bookies and get a bottle of stout in Tighe’s” (ibid), these were not close friends.

Joe says that “after breakfast when everyone began to mooch off for a chat or do their own thing, I sat there by myself having a cup of tea”

(20). Joe prefers to keep to himself. He explains:

When you live in close proximity to people in a home like me, and you’re fairly private, you don’t let on if you’ve got news. Especially if it’s of a highly personal nature. (86)

Joe keeps himself to himself, in part out of self-preservation, which is tied to his worldview. Joe says:

I saw the world as a very organized place that was easy to negotiate. I saw people as generally good and if there were blackguards around the place—well that’s what they were. Blackguards. (35)

60

Privacy is a way to steer clear of those blackguards.

This conception of general goodness, however, does not extend to

Joe’s self. Before telling the story of how he met Marion, a woman that he had feelings for several years into his marriage to Liz, Joe says:

You want a tip? When you dream in the night, just wake up, forget about it, get on with it, get up in the morning and have your breakfast and go to work. Be courteous in your job and use your manners. ‘Cause if you dream that someone’s loving you and you wake up looking for them and sending signals to all and sundry around you in the daytime, saying, “Was it you? Was it you who loved me?” You’ll fucking find them, mark my words. (48)

Marion and her husband invited Joe and Liz over to their home for a birthday party, and Joe and Marion found themselves in the kitchen together, talking (51). While the conversation was entirely innocent, Joe had had a dream the previous night about a woman that loved him unconditionally, and while Marion looked nothing like this dream woman, Joe became convinced that it must have been her (51). When he went home that evening, he says, he felt terrible guilt about the whole thing, even though nothing happened (52).

It is in his guilt that the foundation of Joe’s worldview is revealed.

Joe says “and you fool yourself that God hasn’t seen you. […] But of course, it was impossible for him not to. God had seen me” (ibid).

Though their exchange had been entirely innocent, God—Catholic God— had seen into Joe’s heart and would pass judgment. It would have been

61 better for Joe to just forget about his dreams, keep his head down, and keep life going as it is.

Reconciling the Past

Throughout the play, Joe struggles to reconcile the Ireland he sees with the Ireland he knew as a young man. In his essay on “Ireland in the

Twentieth Century,” Diarmaid Ferriter characterizes the historical period that Joe is remembering as follows:

The prosperity that accrued in the 1960s and the decline in unemployment and development of a robust export trade indicated the merits of a more open economy. With de Valera’s retirement in 1959, Seán Lemass began to implement change and Ireland engaged in a successful game of catch-up with many of the economies of Western Europe. The introduction of free secondary education in 1967, by linking greater access to further education with future economic and social development, demonstrated a commitment to change Ireland’s education system that had been dominated by an unsuccessful mission to restore the Irish language. The 1960s and 1970s were also notable for the emergence of a women’s liberation movement which successfully challenged some of the laws that discriminated against women and ensured the formation of a Council for the Status of Women. (Par. 17)

For better of worse, Ireland in the 1960s was financially successful, and that success, unlike what Joe sees during the Celtic Tiger, came without the need to “ask questions” about self. That need, Ferriter says, grew through the 1960s and 1970s, and Joe met that kind of change with skepticism. Now, Joe’s Ireland bears little resemblance to the Ireland he had known.

62 Social psychologist Malcom MacLachlan, et al, provide further insight into this struggle:

Ireland in the last 10 years has witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ characterized by unprecedented levels of immigration, increasing secularization, economic prosperity and a general liberalization of social attitudes. As such, Ireland may be seen to offer a particularly good case for the study of the effects of rapid social change. Not only does this have acculturation implications for those people entering the nation but also for those within the nation, who already call it ‘home’. (345)

MacLachlan and colleagues were writing particularly to defend their notion of “temporal acculturation:”

People who have for years existed in one culture into which they have been socialized and from which they derive (to some extent at least) their sense of self and who are then faced with a newly emerging culture to which they must adapt, must surely undergo some form of acculturative experience. This is what we term temporal acculturation. (346)

In particular, the group was looking at the cultural perception of this acculturation. They found that, among their test group, most respondents advocated for a reconstruction of social reality that involved rejecting “old” Ireland and accepting “new” Ireland. They note:

Interestingly, it was the assimilationist strategy of rejecting the old Ireland and identifying with the new Ireland that was most strongly associated with good mental health” (349).

Ireland’s “reality” had changed. The decision to be made was, as the

MacLachlan study indicates, whether to hold on to the old reality or to accept the new one.

63 Joe’s decision on this seems to be made clear at the end of the play. Joe “lay back on his bed” with a picture of his late friend Marion in one hand, and with his wife’s “rosary beads in the other,” Joe was thinking about “worry and regret” (90). He says:

And when you get to my age, you give up on them because they don’t help anything. And you generally get tired of regret. And you’re usually just whacked out from worrying. So I brought these two things together on my chest. The picture and the beads. On my heart if you like. And I did what any Christian would do. I turned out the light and went to sleep. (90-91)

To Joe, as he makes clear throughout the play, Liz (symbolized by her rosary beads) has always been a reminder of that precious past, and a figure of some deep regret, and Marion, who Joe barely ever knew, has represented an uncertain and exciting future, but one ripe with worry.

As the play ends, Joe decides that it is best not to choose as the

MacLachlan study suggests he must between that past and that future.

Instead, Joe opts to keep both close to his heart.

If, as the MacLachlan report suggests, the rejection of “old Ireland” in favor of “new” Ireland was the picture of “good mental health,” Joe falls outside that mark. In fact, Joe’s attitude about social change echoes the most startling results of the study:

Only the ambivalent acculturation strategy was associated with significantly poorer mental health than the assimilationist strategy. Thus it may be better to have some sort of acculturation strategy, even if one is not aware of it, than to be unsure of one’s attitudes towards temporal change. (349)

64 While there is no indication, in the play, that Joe is mentally ill, his ambivalence towards change may explain why he is relegated to the margins of Irish society. Here, in the figure of a solitary old man who opts not to pick between the old and the new, is found a picture of the tension alive in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger.

65 Part 2: “Topsy-Turvy”: Thomas in The Steward of Christendom

In his play The Steward of Christendom4 Sebastian Barry presents a portrait of a man at odds with history. This section will discuss the play and the titular character of Thomas Dunne in relation to Glassie’s notion of the “dark places” of history. It begins with a brief overview of the play and the history that it is complicating. Next it presents a close reading of the character of Thomas and the ways that Barry complicates existing narratives. It concludes by situating The Steward of

Christendom in the Celtic Tiger period.

Barry’s play is set in 1932, and tells the story of the birth of the

Irish Free State through the eyes of Thomas Dunne—an Irish, and

Catholic, loyalist who had been in the service of the British crown. In the words of Emilie Pine:

The Steward of Christendom goes some way toward wrenching “a life from the dead grip of history and disgrace, to strike a bit of light into the forbidden room” by unsilencing the (imagined) story of a man treated ill by history, shut away by shame. (230-231)

Barry’s play presents a figure from Glassie’s “dark places,” and seeks— very intentionally—to give him voice. She notes:

Reactions to Barry’s play speak of a tradition of silencing and repressing stories and feelings that were somehow deemed shameful and kept hidden in the shadows. This play seemed to catch a zeitgeist, a felt need for narratives of Irish

4 See Appendix A for synopsis.

66 history and identity to be reexamined, to have pieces added and put together differently to form a new patchwork. (222)

This zeitgeist is tied in with the changes that grew out of the Celtic Tiger.

While Barry’s play “adds to an already large canon of Irish history plays,” discussed at the beginning of this chapter, she comments:

Is also evidence of a recent and more general concern with the past in Irish culture; Indeed, to paraphrase Terence Brown, over the past two decades we have been curiously obsessed with the past; our past and, thus, also ourselves. (222)

It is natural in a culture that is renegotiating itself, as Ireland was during the Celtic Tiger, for there to be critical inquiry into the accepted histories.

In The Steward of Christendom, Barry’s efforts to interrogate this historical narrative centers on those elements that have been rendered silent. Pine elaborates:

Every country—especially one such as Ireland, which is relatively new to independent statehood—will have divisive moments in its past, events that are so fraught with tension, both political and personal, that they seem to resist representation. Such resistance can lead to a sanitized rendering of the event or, in the case of events that are still problematic to recall, a silencing. This discomfort has led to what R.F. Foster has called the “intentional amnesia” of Irish history, where traumatic events that do not fit a straightforward or nationalist version of the Irish past are excluded from the historical narrative. (223)

It is tempting, perhaps, for the Irish to accept a “sanitized” version of the history of the Irish Revolution but to do so demands ignoring those whose experience cannot fit the story—people like Barry’s Thomas

Dunne.

67 “National” History

The “sanitized” rendering of this narrative, the one that excludes

Thomas Dunne, as Pine suggests, primarily follows a nationalist bent, pitting the oppressed Irish against the colonizing British. Those on the side of Ireland were, in this simplified version of the tale, Catholic and nationalist, fighting for freedom from the oppressive British rule. Those opposed were Protestant, British Loyalists who would keep Ireland in chains.

In his Inventing Ireland Declan Kiberd summarizes the major historical movements that led to the Easter Rising in 1916, to the Irish

Revolution and to the Irish Civil War. Although there had previously been several political pushes towards Irish “home rule,” the motion towards war began in 1913 with the lockout of 24,000 members of the

Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. This organization had been founded in 1908 by Jim Larkin and James Connolly in an attempt to

“challenge [the] inequities” in Dublin at the time (192). Kiberd explains that in the cities:

Things were bad. Dublin’s poor were among the worst-fed and worst-housed in Ireland, and the death-rate was actually the worst of any major European city. (192)

The union quickly grew in membership and power until in 1913 a federation of employers, led by William Martin Murphy “resolved to break it” (192).

Over the eight months that followed, families starved; other workers went on supportive strikes; there were mass-

68 meetings, riots, and deaths. An Irish Citizen Army was established under Connolly to protect the workers, whose insurrection was effectively crushed. The Catholic hierarchy, on hearing that the children of some Dublin dockers were to be shipped to sympathetic families in England, intervened to condemn the plan; and Larkin was widely denounced as a troublemaker. However, the new mood of agitation survived the Lock Out. (192)

After the start of World War I, all discussion of Irish Home Rule was tabled in England.

England’s focus on the war in Europe, however, offered an opportunity for revolution in Ireland (192-193). Kiberd explains:

The Rising came eventually on Easter Monday 1916 and lasted less than a week. Patrick Pearse, appalled by the slaughter of civilians, surrendered on the Saturday after Easter: over three hundred citizens had been killed in bombardment and fighting, as well as over one hundred and thirty British soldiers and seventy rebels. (193)

As Kiberd notes, “the Rising was probably doomed,” but the “overreaction of the British authorities […] gave the insurgents the retrospective status of people’s heroes” (ibid). The arrest and summary execution of fifteen rebel leaders “despite a strong consensus that they should have been treated as prisoners-of-war” further agitated a primarily Dublin-centered public who had otherwise had mixed reactions to the Easter Rising (193).

Kiberd says “martial law was imposed and 3,500 people were arrested, more than twice the number which had actually taken part in the Rising”

(193).

In 1918, Sinn Féin, the nationalist political party, swept the elections and established Ireland’s own parliament, Dáil Éireann. Irish

69 courts were established in 1919 illegally “in opposition to British courts”

(193). The War of Independence began in 1919 and lasted until 1921.

Kiberd describes this “brutal affair”:

The rebels shot civil servants and policemen, raided and bombed barracks, ambushed British forces and ranged across the countryside in “flying columns.” Their opponents executed suspects without trial, terrorized republican families and, on several occasions, burned out entire townships or communities by way of reprisal for alleged disloyalty (the notorious Black-and-Tans were particularly guilty in this regard and are still hated in Irish folk memory). (194)

The war ended with the signing of a Treaty in December 1921 that

“offered dominion status, but only to twenty-six southern counties: the six northern counties of Ulster would remain in British hands” (ibid). In

1922 Dublin Castle, which had been the seat of British power in Ireland, was handed over to the Irish people. The Irish forces during the short war were led in part by Michael Collins, who understood that, in signing the Treaty and in the eyes of many Irish nationalists giving away the six counties in the North, he was “signing his own death warrant” (ibid).

The Partition of Ireland led to “a civil war of unparalleled bitterness,” as the country was torn between republicans who refused to accept that a divided Ireland was a free Ireland, and others who believed the Treaty (and Partition) to be, as Michael Collins had called it, “the freedom to achieve freedom” (Kiberd 194). Collins was assassinated, and the war lasted until May 1923, when the republican “die hards” were

“comprehensively defeated” (195).

70 Kiberd’s history is entirely accurate, but primarily demonstrates the nationalist version of the events—not surprising in his post- colonialist book. While Kiberd’s version of the story is neither romanticized nor reductive, there are still “dark places.” What of those who are undeniably Irish but who would have preferred Ireland to remain part of Britain? What of those who had worked to preserve the peace in

Ireland against Connolly and Pearse, against Collins? In short, what about Thomas Dunne? Where Kiberd stops, Sebastian Barry begins.

Shadows of the Past

When we first meet Thomas, it is 1932, he is in his “early to mid seventies,” and he is a resident in the “county home in Baltinglass,

County Wicklow” (Plays 236). This home, we quickly realize, is not the peaceful rest-home of Port Authority, but rather an inpatient psychiatric facility. Thomas is, by his own assessment, “mad as a barking stone mason” (240). As the play opens, Thomas is in his bed ranting about his

Ma Ma and Da Da, stuck in an incoherent memory of his childhood.

After a short time, however, he returns to lucidity and remembers that he is in Baltinglass, in the home, because he was “uncivil” to his daughter and because he was “ranting” and “raving.”

As the scene progresses we learn that Thomas had been a policeman, a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP). In fact,

Thomas had been Chief Superintendent of the force. Thomas’ past is

71 related by Smith, an orderly in the home who does not care for Thomas.

Smith says that Thomas had been a “Castle Catholic,” that is to say, a

Catholic Irishman who worked for the British Government (243). Smith tells his cohort Mrs. O’Dea that it had been Thomas’ men that “killed four good men and true in O’Connell Street in the days of the lock-out”

(ibid). Smith calls Thomas “a big loyal Catholic gobshite killing poor hungry Irishmen” and says “if you weren’t an old madman, we’d flay you”

(ibid). Smith it would appear is a nationalist and, as we learn later, “one of his brothers was shot in the Twenties” (245).

Once Mrs. O’Dea has run Smith off, she asks a lucid Thomas about his police service. She says “you must have been a fine policeman, if they made you all of a Chief Superintendent” (245). Thomas replies:

Maybe so. But to tell you the truth, I was forty-five years in the DMP when they did so, and the promotion was really a matter of service. Not that they would put a fool to such a task, when you think of the terrible responsibility of it. I had three hundred men in B Division, and kept all the great streets and squares of Dublin orderly and safe, and was proud to do it well. The DMP was never armed, not like the Royal Irish Constabulary. The RIC could go to war. That’s why we were taken off the streets during that rebellion at Easter time, that they make so much of now. We were mostly country men, and Catholics to boot, and we loved our King and we loved our country. They never put those Black and Tans among us, because we were a force that belonged to Dublin and her streets. We did our best and followed our orders. (245)

Thomas talks of a monument to DMP men who were killed “in the line of duty,” and then talk turns to the place of those same men in history. Thomas says:

72 Just ordinary country men keen to do well. And when the new government came in, they treated us badly. Our pensions were in disarray. Some said we had been traitors to Ireland. Though we sat in Dublin Castle all through twenty-two and tried to protect the city while the whole world was at each other’s throats. While the most dreadful and heinous murders too place in the fields of Ireland. With nothing but our batons and our pride. Maybe we weren’t much. You’re thinking, of course he would speak well for his crowd. Yes, I’ll speak well for them. We were part of a vanished world, and I don’t know what’s been put in our place. (245-246)

Thomas’ inability to understand the new regime in his country comes not from his madness, but from the fact that his world changed overnight and he was found on the wrong side of history.

When Smith returns with Thomas’ dinner their debate, though rather one-sided, resumes. Smith mentions Robert Emmet, a “patriot killed years past in Thomas Street, outside the church of St. Thomas, in the City of Dublin” (249). Smith recounts the death of Emmet, who was executed for treason in 1803:

They hung him there and the people cried out against the soldiers and the peelers,5 and after they dragged his body over the parade ground till it was bleeding and broken in its bones, and they got a loyal butcher to cut him into four pieces. He was dead then. […] I suppose you held the day of Emmet’s death as a festive day. A victory day. I suppose you did. I suppose you were all very queer indeed up there in the Castle. (Ibid)

5 Slang for police officers—after Robert Peele who founded modern policing in Ireland and England.

73 Smith continues, decrying a time in Irish history when Catholic Priests were tortured (250), and blaming Thomas firmly for these tortures even though they had happened long before his birth.

When Smith leaves, Thomas tells us of his undying love for Queen

Victoria. He says that he loved her “as much as I loved Cissy my wife, and maybe more, or differently” (250). He says:

When I was a young recruit, it used to frighten me how much I loved her. Because she had built everything up and made it strong, and made it shipshape. […] And men like me were there to make everything peaceable, to keep order in her kingdoms. She was our pride. Among her emblems was the gold harp, the same harp we wore on our helmets. We were secure, as if for eternity the orderly milk-drays would come up in the streets in the morning, and her influence would reach everywhere, like the salt sea pouring up into the fresh waters of the Liffey. Ireland was hers for eternity, order was everywhere, if we could but honor her example. She loved her Prince. I loved my wife. The world was a wedding of loyalty, of steward to Queen, she was the very flower and perfecter of Christendom. (250)

And Thomas was Victoria’s steward; The Steward of Christendom.

Through the next few scenes, Thomas has several memories. In the first, he is visited by a young police recruit and he recalls the interview process for his police force (251-53). Next, Thomas sees his young son Willie who, we will learn later, was killed in World War I (253).

Finally, Thomas recalls the day of the turnover of Dublin Castle—the very seat of Christendom in Ireland—to Michael Collins. In his vision, he sees the morning of the momentous day as he is getting prepared to go, assisted by his daughters (253-256). To his daughters, Collins is not a gentleman (254); he is a criminal (256). Thomas, ever the dutiful

74 steward, ever the patient policeman, sees things as not quite as black- and-white as his daughters. He tells Mrs. O’Dea later that Collins when they met “was very courteous and praised Wicklow and said a few things to me that rather eased my heart” (262). He says that he remembers the sorrow that accompanied Collins’ death.

Late in the play, after some personal memories of his daughters and moments of dementia, Thomas’ memory returns to that fateful morning when he handed off Dublin Castle to Michael Collins. He says:

I could scarce get over the sight of him. He was a black- haired man, but with the big face and body of a boxer. He would have made a tremendous policeman in other days. He looked to me like Jack Dempsey, one of those prize-fighting men we admired. I would have been proud to have him as my son. (285)

For Thomas, the thought that Collins would have made a fine policeman is a high compliment, and his admiration for Collins stands in sharp contrast to Thomas’ daughters’ assessments of Collins. To Annie, in particular, Collins is a “murderer” and a “renegade,” his assuming control of the Castle is “no doubt the death of all good things for this country” (285). Thomas says of Collins:

I felt rough near him, that cold morning, rough, secretly. There was never enough gold in that uniform, never. I thought too as I looked at him of my father, as if Collins could have been my son and could have been my father. […] I knew that most of my men were for Collins, that they would have followed him wherever he wished, if he had called them. And for an instant, as the Castle was signed over to him, I felt a shadow of that loyalty pass across my heart. But I closed my heart instantly against it. We were to have peace. On behalf of the Crown the chief secretary wished him well. And indeed it was peaceful, that moment. The savagery and

75 ruin that soon followed broke my heart again and again. My streets and squares became places for murder and fire. All that spring and summer, as now and then some brave boy spat at me in the streets, I could not hold back the tide of ruin. (286)

Near the end of the play, we learn that it was this “tide of ruin” that finally broke Thomas, and not the handing-off of Christendom to Michael

Collins.

In a vignette of memory, Barry shows us the day that Thomas learned of Collins’ assassination. Thomas, now retired and living with his daughter Annie in Wicklow, becomes very distraught and demands that Annie bring him his sword. When she refuses, he explains:

There’s fellas roaming the countryside seeking out the maiming of this man and the death of that man, old scores must be settled, they’re whispering and conspiring in the dark. […] I can smell them. Dark boys in black suits bought off the back of carts in county fairs, with old guns that might as soon blow off their own fingers when they fire. They won’t get us. You must bring the sword. (297)

Thomas’ greatest concern is that he will “lose my last daughter to ruffians and murderers” (298).6 As the scene concludes, Thomas destroys

Annie’s house with his sword as he descends into madness.

For Thomas Dunne the country was no longer what he had known, not the place that he had loved and served. Ireland had changed from the orderly and peaceful place that Victoria had ruled over into a lawless place of war and murder and anger. For a lifelong keeper of peace, one

6 His oldest daughter Maud has married, and the youngest, Dolly, has emigrated to Ohio.

76 who came through the ranks in the service to the Victorian ideals of stability and law, the changes were simply too much to bear.

“Varieties of Irishness”

A central feature to the changes in Irish culture during the Celtic

Tiger era was a questioning of dominant narratives. These narratives included history. As Willy Maley wrote in 1996, “Recently, there have been efforts to think in terms of' varieties of Irishness', rather than conceiving of Irishness as a unified essence, as something secure and fixed” (34). Maley says:

The historian and Oxford Professor Roy Foster, himself a Southern Irish Protestant, a member of a minority culture, has written of 'varieties of Irishness' as a way of encouraging an inclusiveness that was arguably absent from some manifestations of nationalist discourse. Of course, it is useful and necessary to see Ireland as a multicultural and multiracial society, with diverse traditions, English (Old and New, that is pre-Reformation Catholic and post-Reformation Protestant), Anglo-Irish, Scottish, Protestant, Catholic, Northern, Southern, metropolitan (urban), pastoral (rural, seeing the spirit of the nation as bound up with the countryside), expatriate, diasporic, and so on. It is also important to acknowledge patterns of dominance and subservience. (Ibid)

Barry’s play echoes this movement. In The Steward of Christendom,

Barry demonstrates that essentialist readings of even Ireland’s most defining nationalist moment are insufficient. Thomas Dunne works for the Crown but is not Protestant. He is a loyalist but does not despise

Michael Collins nor lionize those that would have him killed. He sees himself as Irish but finds no problem seeing himself as also British.

77 In his introduction to Barry’s collection Plays 1, Fintan O’Toole says:

Sebastian Barry’s plays are about history, but not in any very obvious or familiar sense. Much of Irish theatre since Sean O’Casey has had a direct relationship to public events. Either directly or indirectly virtually all of the major plays written in Ireland this century have reflected on the large- scale public conflicts that have shaped individual destinies on the island. First the conflict between Britishness and Irishness (or Protestantism and Catholicism) and then the conflict between tradition and modernity in independent Ireland echoed through the theatre. The plays themselves tended, inevitably, to be full of the resounding clash of epic forces. We came to expect an especially turbulent kind of drama in Ireland, and we were not disappointed. (viii)

O’Toole goes on to explain that Barry’s plays are very different, and with good reason. By the time Barry came into his own in the theatre, “the old conflicts were losing their grip” (ibid). Barry, O’Toole notes “fills the stage with prodigal people, long lost to the wider world. They are history’s leftovers” (vii). In other words, Barry’s stages are full of inhabitants of history’s “dark places.”

Christopher Morash explains that so deep were the changes in

Ireland during the 1990s, that even many “Irish jokes became obsolete when the endemically dysfunctional Irish economy unexpectedly began out performing many of its European counterparts” (262). He continues:

Within a few years, job shortages became labour shortages, and a nation of emigrants became a destination for immigrants. This is not to say that there was no more poverty or crime in what became known as “The Celtic Tiger,” nor even that the island was now one big, happy community. […] As the old grey certainties of Irish culture faded into the past, new questions became visible. “Gradually,” wrote Fintan O’Toole, “there ceased to be

78 dramatic conflicts between tradition and modernity in Ireland. What we got instead were fragments, isolated pieces of a whole story that no one really knows.” (262)

Morash then situates The Steward of Christendom firmly in this historical moment:

[Thomas] Dunne’s private world in 1932 parallels that of the audience in the 1990s, a place of discontinuities and broken traditions, where even the linearity of the past and present cannot be assumed. (267-268)

Barry’s play seeks to fill in some of the gaps or, at the very least, ensure that in the story of Irish history, Thomas Dunne’s voice is heard. Joe in

Port Authority and Thomas in The Steward of Christendom, as isolated men left out of the history books, allow some access into the assumptions that compose the bogs of Irelands ideological hinterlands.

Chapter 3 will examine another set of assumptions—attitudes and stereotypes about alcohol.

79

Chapter 3 “I’m Old. I’ll Die If I Don’t Drink This”: Alcohol, Aging, and Affluence.

One of the longest standing and most pervasive stereotypes about the Irish centers on alcohol and drunkenness. This chapter will explore how the cultural discourse about “the drink” changed during the Celtic

Tiger, and how through the use of “aged” characters this shifting narrative was represented on stage. A short overview of the traditional stereotypes about drinking culture in Ireland and the representations of drink and pub culture on the Irish stage is followed by an analysis of two plays, Sebastian Barry’s Our Lady of Sligo (1998) in Part 1, and Conor

McPherson’s Dublin Carol (2000) in Part 2, unpacking the discourse on alcoholism that lies within them. Part 3, will detail the cultural forces that have come to bear on both Barry’s and McPherson’s work.

In a 1995 article, Liam Greenslade, Maggie Pearson, and Moss

Madden discuss the stereotypical link between Irishness and drunkenness. They say “this stereotype seems to render the terms 'Irish' and 'alcohol' almost synonymous” (407). They then set out to investigate the history of this association. This is no easy task, because:

80 The stereotypical association of the Irish with alcohol has existed for centuries. MacLysaght (1950) provides us with a number of accounts from visitors to Ireland in the early seventeenth century which comment upon a native predilection for alcohol. From a later period Bales reports the remarks of an Irish priest writing about his countrymen just before the famine of 1845—49: 'Whisky was everywhere regarded as our idol.' (408)

They go on to explain that “the image of the Irish as a nation of inebriates” followed the Irish everywhere they went from Britain and

Australia to America, and colored the perception of Irish immigrants

(ibid).

Greenslade and his colleagues explain that the perception of the drunken Irishman (and generally it was, in this stereotype, a man) included both the “poor or laboring masses” and other sectors of Irish society, including clergy. (408). They note:

From contemporary accounts it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which reality conditioned the image or vice-versa; i.e. it is clear that wherever they emigrated many, if not most, Irish people encountered conditions of poverty, hardship and discrimination. What is less clear is whether, given the popularity of alcohol as an explanation for social problems during the nineteenth century and the long standing association of the Irish and alcohol, contemporary commentators simply focused upon accounts which derived from the stereotype, thus further reinforcing it, or if that alcohol abuse was in reality widespread amongst Irish people. (Ibid).

Whatever the relationship to reality, they conclude, “it is clear that the association between Irish people and alcohol has persisted into the present. In contemporary popular culture and media the Irish are invariably depicted as hard, if not pathological, drinkers” (408).

81 The ubiquity of the stereotype is reflected in many places, for example, in Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in the United States, where drunkenness is frequently excused, on T-shirts with slogans such as “It’s

Okay, I’m Irish.” The drunken Irishman is seen on television, in programs such as The Simpsons and Father Ted. He appears in popular films such as The Quiet Man, In Bruges, and many others. He is sung in songs, told in tales and jokes and celebrated in pubs. The Irish drunk also has a long tradition on the Irish stage.

Beginning, at least, with Sheridan’s St. Patrick’s Day (1775),

Irishmen have been depicted on stage as drinkers. Dion Boucicault included the drunken Irishman in his The Shaughraun (1874). Shaw’s

John Bull’s Other Island (1904) tells us that the dreaming of Irishmen is necessary because “It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a torture that you can't bear it without whisky” (125).

Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907) takes place in a rural pub in

County Mayo and the publican, Michael Flaherty and his friends, drink hard at a wake. Captain Jack and Joxer in O’Casey’s Juno and the

Paycock (1924) live their lives defined by their drinking habits. The drunk appears in The Hostage (An Ghiall) (1958) by Brendan Behan who famously described himself as “a drinker with a writing problem.” The stereotype appears in the work of Brian Friel in Translations (1981), for

82 example, and in Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1961), and The

Gigli Concert (1983). In short, the drunk Irishman is everywhere.

During the Celtic Tiger, drink and pub culture was constantly on stage. Rhona Trench writes “the role of the pub in Irish theatre has been inextricably linked to other area of life in plays, particularly related to community life” (168). Eamonn Jordan explains:

the pub functions symbolically as a fantasy and community locus, and as a narrative space, where inebriation offers a sense of relaxation and gives a certain kind of license. (Qtd. in Trench 168)

Just a handful of examples of drink culture on stage from the Tiger era include Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill (2000), and By the Bog of Cats

(1998); Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996),

Lonesome West (1997), and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001); Enda

Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996), Sucking Dublin (1997), and The Walworth Farce

(2006); and Conor McPherson’s Rum and Vodka (1992), This Lime Tree

Bower (1995), The Weir (1997), Port Authority (2001) and The Seafarer

(2008).

Trench explains that “in Ireland, the pub has been seen as a social problem and as an expression of national identity” (168). The pub, then, takes on a sort of mystical and ritualistic identity. Trench says:

The pub setting is possessed of a suppressed romanticism and idealism, shaped by broader structural elements such as issues of culture and gender, that disguises a deep-seated pain, exposing the fissures of a society dejected by Celtic Tiger values, reaching beyond its theatrical limits into worlds of otherness. (169)

83 Diane Watson explains pub culture:

When individuals enter a particular pub they are purchasing far more than a particular product, such as a drink or a meal. They are also purchasing an experience or ambience, which is associated with desire, and the creation and expression of identity and lifestyle. What is important is not so much the actual products that are consumed but the meanings attached to those products. (Qtd. in Trench 169).

The real product then, in the Irish pub, is the community. The Irish term “craic” means, roughly “an entertaining chat” or a “good time had in conversation”—it is not overstatement to say that pubs are “selling craic.”

But if Watson is correct and pub culture is not necessarily about alcohol itself then why does the stereotype of the drunken Irishman persist—inside and outside of Ireland? Marcus Webb provides an answer:

Alcohol percolates through our social structures and influences family relationships, recreation, cultural life, working efficiency and hospital and prison statistics. We use alcohol for celebration and for softening sorrows, for relaxation and to give courage, for cementing commercial agreements and for loosening artistic expression. (Qtd. in Greenslade, et al, 408)

It persists because drinking, and not just the culture of “craic” in pubs, is pervasive in Ireland. During the Celtic Tiger period, as explained in

Part 3, this narrative was, as were so many others, brought to the forefront and complicated.

84 Part 1: “A Cesspit of Alcohol”: Mai in Our Lady of Sligo

Sebastian Barry’s Our Lady of Sligo1 is set in 1953. The play centers on the last days in the life of Mai O’Hara, a 53 year-old woman who is dying of liver cancer, which was brought on by years of alcoholism. In an interview with The Guardian’s John Cunningham,

Sebastian Barry explained that, while Our Lady of Sligo is a play about alcoholism, “it's not about Mai being drunk” (qtd. in Cunningham 14).

The play, Barry says, is:

about her in that in-between world, between drunkenness with morphine and finishing her life. It's the first time in maybe 15 or 20 years that she's had to reveal to herself things that she's most severely buried - the death of her child, her behavior with a certain doctor, things that alcohol is so useful for in concealing. If you take the lid off that, not only by not drinking, but by being close to death, then you either submit to your own mortifying mess, or you try and look at it as accurately as you can before you go. (Ibid)

In this section, I unpack the play’s discourse on drink in order to demonstrate how it functions outside of the stereotypical representation of the Irish drunk.

When the play begins, Mai is in “a private room in Jervis Street

Hospital” in Dublin (7). She is in and out of lucidity as her pain is being treated with morphine. In the first moments of the play, Mai talks with

“the presence of [her] dead father” and is visited by her husband Jack and her daughter Joanie, and attended by a young nun. We learn that

1 See Appendix A for synopsis.

85 her father had been a gentleman and that Mai does not care for Dublin.

Suddenly, the lights change and reveal a flashback: a drunken fight between Mai and Jack. Mai calls Jack a “drunken mewling useless man,” and Jack calls Mai a “drunken, foul-mouthed bitch” (10). Mai calls

Jack a “bastard” with a “filthy bastard mother and a filthy father and lousy cabbage-eared brothers.” She “drunkenly” continues:

I want to tell you how much I hate you, I want another hour of the day to tell you how much I hate you, how much I detest you, I mean, Jack, to describe the sick feeling in my belly I get when I see your mewling face and hear your whining and your stupid, stupid concerns, oh yes, Jack, that’s what gives me pleasure now, letting you know what a bucket of something you are. (10)

As the play progresses we understand that in the lives of Mai and Jack this type of fight has been all too common.

Once the scene returns to the present, Mai’s treatment of Jack is no better—she tells the Sister that he is “lying about there in

Dunseverick2 in a cesspit of alcohol and sardines” (11). Mai is not much more gentle in her treatment of herself. She calls herself a “disgusting old woman” who is, “as the crow flies, a hundred and two” although she is only 53 (13).

Mai tells us that she began drinking heavily during World War II,

“while Hitler was going about and Jack was away fighting him” (15). We learn later that she had been a drinker for some time before that. She says that while Jack was away she had “freedom to drink and laugh with

2 A village in Northern Ireland, 160 miles from Dublin.

86 my friend Queenie and shout and forget and wake in the morning with the night a wonderous blank” (ibid). Mai drank in the beginning to forget. She explains that she sat in a “panic” when the war ended. She describes the day Jack came home:

And I know I was reeking of alcohol, it was sitting in the dress colourless and strong, the heat making it reek up into my nostrils. It was a strange moment. Friend Queenie was gone because Jack was due home any second now from the war and our nights of terrific drinking were over. And I was sitting there, and I felt in my heart even for my own sake that I should bestir myself and have a wash at least and maybe clear the kitchen of bottles and maybe even change the sheets on the marriage bed by God why not. (15-16)

She says that as she sat there she thought of Jack “in the twenties” and how attractive he had been. This thought, though, was “the aftermath of the drinking, the strange sobriety, the little leaking time of strangeness that comes after the hangover” (16). Jack was delayed in returning from the war, and Mai “was being careful not to drink, though every bottle on every shelf in town was singing out drink me, drink me. I was getting crazy with it” (17).

Mai knew, however, “what would happen now when Jack got home” (17):

The poor man, he hated to drink alone. We would be in a good way at first and then there’d slowly slowly be drinking and then the old music-hall of sickness and roaring again. And I remembered that time in the mid-thirties when the drinking was at its worst, the first time, and I had bundled Joanie into the Ford and crossed up into Cavan in it, and fled to Omard for to see Maria and Nicholas. But now it was 1945, Nicholas and Maria are dead and the roof taken off Omard and there was simply nowhere to go. (17)

87 This shifts into a flashback to that visit with Maria, when Mai was 35 years old. Maria, we learn is Mai’s second cousin and Mai had visited her often as a child. Mai apologizes for the surprise visit and explains her predicament:

I’ve sort of run away, Maria. I was very sick for three days in a row and it gave me a terrible fright and Jack was due back today and that frightened me too because I knew when he came I’d be sick all over again and he’d be sick too, and I can’t see any good road into the future and I’m very scared, Maria. […] Sick. I am sick. I am getting sicker. And can’t escape. I should never have married him. I miss my Dada. Sick. Drunk. (20)

Even then, some 18 years before being in the hospital dying, Mai knew she had a problem.

Maria reminds Mai that her father “never took a drink in his born days,” a fact that Mai knows well. Maria then explains why; Mai’s grandfather had “drank away three beautiful farms, and a fine house in each one, finer than Omard, they say” (20). Mai replies, “It’s not so hard to drink a house. Jack drank Grattan House3 and I suppose that’s a terrible thing when you think it was my father’s house” (ibid). As Mai explains, Jack’s drunkenness and the resultant debt caused the loss of the family home, just as her grandfathers had before. Barry presents the audience with a series of terrible patterns—drink, debt, cruelty, and loss.

3 In county Galway.

88 The First Woman in Sligo to Wear Trousers

Back in the present, in the hospital room, Jack and the nun discuss Mai’s current state of health, and the sad contrast with the way she had been. Jack says “oh, if only you knew how things have been for her” (23) and then regales the young nurse with a story of Mai’s past. He tells her that Mai had been “so brave,” and that she “is not an old woman. Fifty-Three” (23). He says that he does not “know what I will do without her” (ibid). Mai, he says, was “the first woman to wear trousers in Sligo” (ibid). Jack reminisces about Mai having been “Junior

Champion of Connaught at the tennis” and a talented musician (ibid).

Mai graduated from Galway University, and was to be a “teacher and be in the world strongly” (23).

Jack had gone into service in the British military and Mai stayed behind, she “never wandered far. Beyond Sligo and maybe the Galway of her girlhood no one knows her” (24). Jack says this may have been Mai’s undoing. He says “it wasn’t just the drink got her, but the sheer boredom of Ireland, the sheer provincial death grip that lies upon the land (25). Jack explains that the isolation of Ireland due to conservatism of Eamon de Valera stifled Mai’s spirit, until finally:

What to sustain her, put in the gob, for food of a kind? Nothing, nothing, and yet, even now, when she has me reduced to a glorified builder, hating me to rise in the world, because she was sinking herself” (25)

For Jack, Mai drank because her society had limited her growth.

Moments later Mai tells us explicitly how her drinking started and why.

89 After Jack leaves, following a pleasant conversation wherein Jack points out how nice it is “not to be drinking and arguing” (29), Mai sits alone. She looks through a basket of old photographs—one of her sister

Cissie, and one of her son Colin. About this last, Mai says “and I suppose that was all my fault. Drinking. All my fault. But I don’t want to think about that now, I am too tired” (32). Mai will revisit this sad story a few moments later but first, it seems, she wants to explain to us the history of her drinking habit.

Mai says that she was visited years ago by a man from the bank,

Mr. King, who had come to collect on a debt. Mr. King tells Mai that

Jack had written a check to cover a terrible gambling loss, and that the bank was owed a sum “to the tune of many hundreds of pounds” (32).

Mai explained that she did not have the money but that Mr. King may put her house—her father’s house—up for sale. Mai also learns that

Jack had no memory of writing that particular check, as he had been drunk at the time (ibid). Mai says:

But Grattan House was to go now and I sat there in the bentwood chair alone and looked a the windows with their old curves of glass and the noise of the gulls outside because there was a storm far out at sea that day, and something in me changed. Joanie must have been two or three, I was thirty-two or –three. There was a bottle of whiskey under the lid of the window seat that Jack had put there for evening use and I went over and lifted the lid and opened the bottle. It was the first drink I ever took and I took it because I thought if I was to live like that in the world of Jack I had better have some anesthetic, and why not the same one he used. And when he came home I had drunk three glasses of

90 whiskey and I was extraordinarily dazed and I told him about the house being sold for his debts and I laughed. (32- 33)

Mai says that Jack cried and drank and that she hit him in the head, though she did not know why at the time (33).

Mai marks this event as the turning point in their lives. The house was sold and they moved to Harbour House “in bloody Sligo” (33).

“Everything was darker and worse then,” Mai says. She describes the decade she spent in Harbor House as “truly death”:

Drinking, running out into the street naked, and whipping and cutting and slashing at Jack like there was no tomorrow. And there was none. Night, filth, and darkness. Because I became the devil in my own house and the soul was gone out of me and my child was afraid of me. (33)

Some five or six years into that decade of drink, Colin was born “out of the secret pains and terrors of his mother” (34).

Colin lived only seven weeks, during which Mai “never drank a drop” (35). Suddenly, though, he “grew cold and still and didn’t move,” the midwife who was called said “perhaps it was to be expected” (ibid).4

Though the doctor insisted that Mai “was not to worry and that it was all in the intentions of God” (36), the death of Colin was devastating for her and for her family:

I drank for a year after that like a demon and one night when Jack was a drunk as me—he must have been home on furlough from the war—and we were shouting and banging about in the bedroom as in days of yore, with terrible things said and the air all knives and hurt and evil, I suddenly saw

4 There is further discussion of midwives in Chapter 4.

91 Joanie in the door, and not more than nine I should think, but as wise and broken as a dog, with that look of murdered sleep in her face. And he shouted at her, you see this mother of yours, look at her, look at her that killed our boy, and when he said that I was as sober as God. What to you mean, Jack, I said, in a voice so normal it shocked him. With this foul drinking, he said, that killed our boy you're your drinking and your filthiness and your slime, he said, and went staggering from the room, bawling and crying like a fool, and I looked at Joanie. And I knew that she believed him and I knew that I believed him and I was sentenced to death on that ferocious night. I did kill that little baby with his hands opening and closing, with my drinking. (36)

This is the image with which Barry ends Act One. It would seem that

Colin died of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the blame is on Mai.

Saints and Sinners

When Act Two opens Mai is deteriorating. She is, again, visited by the ghost of her father who beckons her home (38). She tells the nun that her family has a history of liver disease, and cancer, and tells her that she know that death is coming for her (39). When the young nun leaves, Mai’s thoughts return to the day she fled her home and went to visit Maria. She says that, the following morning, she “knew that laying in that bed was only the demon I had become” (40). The problem, Mai says is that “a drinker likes to have a poor memory, it’s the armour and the barrier to home truths, but I could remember everything” (ibid).

As Mai lay there she saw:

The cluttered dark of my room in Harbour House, and the deep nights of drinking there alone, after I would get Joanie to bed. Come nightfall and the child asleep, out happily with the bottles and get that good drink into me. Fill me up with

92 it and the divil take the lingerer. And if I wasn’t good at the living, I was a dab hand at the drinking, I could drink a bottle and a half and still be standing, and then at the turn of the second bottle, I’d be leaning, and at long last go over like an old oak and lie at peace on the ruckledy bed. (40).

Mai describes, then, the fourth night of the week she ran away. Dr. Bird came to see her because Joanie had not been to school for several days.

The teacher was Dr. Bird’s wife. Mai and the doctor chatted for a while and had a drink—and then they had an abrupt sexual encounter (40-41).

Mai says that she turned her head and saw Joanie peeking though the door watching (41).

Mai next experiences a vision of Joanie coming to confront her. In the vision Joanie says that she had been awakened by her father every night after Jack and Mai had fought and she had been sent from her bed so that Jack could sleep in it (41-42). This Joanie tells her mother that she sang, that she had become an actress, to purge her memory of the

“stinking glasses” and the “ sad corpses of bottles” (42). Joanie recalls several folk and liturgical tales of “broken mothers” and tells Mai that she was “Our Lady of Sligo except you had lost your little boy and instead you had the sliver of your tattered girl, a coin of fear and sleeplessness” (42). Mai’s guilt at the destruction of Joanie’s life has manifested itself on stage. Late in the play, when Mai is unconscious, the real Joanie echoes this vision. Joanie says “I never had a week of her sober that I remember. It was always the old twisted terror and muttering and useless nonsense” (56).

93 Just before Mai’s death at the end of the play, Jack shares a memory with his unconscious wife. He tells her that he, too, remembered the day that Mai described at the end of Act One:

I couldn’t remember much about the day we buried [Colin] in Sligo because I had drank a lot of whiskey in the morning. But I did remember what I had said to you that night in the cold sober ice of grief, and the face you turned to me when I said it. Our boy had just died and I was saying to you that it was your fault, that the drinking had killed our boy. As if somehow I was a separate being, a shining being in your company, a kind of suffering saint. And I remembered that. (58)

But Jack says “in the ferocious parade of wrongs that was the worst”

(58). He continues to explain that reliving that memory had caused him to realize how terrible they had been to each other, and to wish that “out of the savage nonsense of our life together something might be gleaned”

(58). What Jack wants is that “something might be winnowed out of the mess” (58). This seems to be Barry’s wish as well for Our Lady of Sligo— that out of the shambles of Mai and Jack’s lives, some lesson might be learned.

Barry had a very personal reason for hoping that something may come from the sharing of Mai’s story—she was his real-life grandmother, and Joanie, the well-known actress Joan O'Hara, was Barry’s mother.

John Cunningham explains that:

Mai died before Barry was born, and he knew of her only through the traumatized tales his mother told him. The other half of the story he knew directly: his grandfather Jack (Mai's husband) was as indestructible as his wife was fragile.

94 “As a boy, we often shared a bed together and he'd tell me stories,” says Barry. “He was quite an epic sort of a man on a very ordinary scale. He was a kind of world traveller, with lots of drinking years behind him.” The couple were part of a small outward-looking Roman Catholic middle class, well integrated with the British. “They were born British and their traditional route was the services. Jack was in the navy as a young man, and fought in the second war as major. Later he built canals across Africa. That was his route to glory, and de Valera just chopped it in two. They didn't have a function in this new Ireland.” So Jack and Mai holed up in Sligo, in the harbour master's old house just outside the town. Gradually, Mai stopped going out, except to shop, and took to the bottle. She'd never taken a drink before she was 30: Barry attributes his grandmother's plight to the suffocating joylessness of de Valera's regime. (14)

As Barry makes clear in the play, Mai’s downfall was the Ireland that came to life during de Valera’s leadership of the government. As the founder and long-time leader of Fianna Fáil, a political party discussed at length in Chapter 1, de Valera envisaged a capitalist Ireland. Barry says that this “idea of Ireland - everyone with tiny bits of money - was disastrous for people like Mai and Jack” (qtd. in Cunningham 14). Mai lived in an Ireland that bore little resemblance to the one in which she was born.

Barry’s play was written in 1998, in the midst of the Celtic Tiger— another period of drastic cultural change and redefinition. Mai’s plight can be read as a kind of warning of the dangers of the excesses of alcoholism. As Cunningham says, “Our Lady Of Sligo doesn't portray

[Mai] as a traditional Irish drunk” (14). Instead, Barry bucks the stereotype, and Mai demonstrates the changing narrative about drink.

95 Part 2: “That Special Alcoholic’s Hangover”: John in Dublin Carol

Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol5 places the stereotype of the drunk Irishman firmly center stage. However, unlike several of

McPherson’s other plays, which critics have accused of glorifying and glamorizing drink culture and consequently of reinforcing the stereotype to be discussed later, Dublin Carol is a play that deals explicitly with the effects of alcoholism on family life. This section, explores the discourse on alcohol, drink and pub culture, and alcoholism in Dublin Carol.

Dublin Carol is set in the present (presumably 2000), in the “old and musty” Dublin office of an undertaker named John Plunkett. The office is comfortably furnished and features “terribly scrawny Christmas decorations. A few fairy lights. A foot-high plastic Christmas tree on one of the desks” (9). An Advent calendar with several unopened doors tells us that Christmas has yet to come. The door opens and a damp young man, Mark—who is about twenty—enters, dressed in a black suit and overcoat. A moment later John, who is in his late fifties, comes in, similarly dressed, and “not quite as wet” (9). After they take off their wet coats, John puts on the kettle and praises Mark’s work although it is not yet clear to the audience the line of work.

After a few minutes of “farting around with the tea”, John “takes a small bottle of whiskey from a drawer and pours some into a cup” (10).

5 See Appendix A for synopsis.

96 John tells Mark “I’m not gonna offer you any of this, son. Your ma’d kill me. I’m old. I’ll die if I don’t drink this” (10). After a moment, he repeats, “I have to have a sup of this” (ibid). Whiskey is not to be offered to the twenty-year old, even though it is perfectly legal,6 but for John, who is “old,” the drink is compulsory.

John tells Mark that there is a pub across the road, called The

Strand, and seems surprised when Mark tells him that he had already been there with his girlfriend (10-11). Mark explains that his girlfriend knew of the place and took him there. John says of the pub “a lot of people would know it. Your man does give the regulars a Christmas drink and all this” (12). Mark says that the pub had been fairly busy with “a lot of people going home from work” (ibid). John replies:

Ah yeah, they do a, they used to always do a nice lunch, and you’d get all the people going in there for their nosh. You used to see a lot of priests going in. And that’s…did you ever hear that, that’s a sign the food is good, you know? Because they know what side their bread is buttered on. That’s a little hint for you there now. (12)

This account seems to echo Greenslade’s assertion that the stereotype of the high consumption of alcohol included Irish Catholic clergy (408). As

John said, regulars in the pub were treated to a free drink. Rhona

Trench elaborates on this idea:

Pubs have much to do with habit and repetition: as expressed in the term “a regular” or a frequent customer. They [pubs] may offer a sense of community, regularity and

6 The legal drinking age in Ireland is 18.

97 order that is fundamental to a sense of place, of time, and of security. (168)

It is good to be a regular—both for the publican who can count on repeat business, and for the customer, who can count on the community of their local pub.

As the scene continues, John talks of Mark’s uncle Noel, who is currently sick in the hospital. Noel owns the undertaking business where the men work, and, John says, it was Noel who gave him a second chance at life:

He was great for me. I was very very messy at one time, you know? And he gave me a start here. Got me back into a normal…he’s a good man. (21)

Before explaining exactly what he means by “very messy,” John wants to chat. He apologizes to Mark for this desire, saying “I’m sorry. Hangover.

Has me chatty” (15). The men talk about Mark’s future, about the business of undertaking, and about Christmas. John says that he used to be “worse than the kids” about Christmas, “hiding presents all over the place. Leaving out cake and a drink for Santy. I spent on hour one

Christmas Eve telling them that Santy didn’t like sherry. He liked

Macardles” 7 (24-35). As we will soon learn, Christmas like the rest of

John’s life centered around alcohol.

7 A local ale.

98 John explains that, though he always does so now, he did not always eat breakfast. He says that it was Noel that got him in that habit

(25). John tells Mark the story of meeting Noel.

I was at a time, in my life, where I was very dependent on drink. […] Not that I don’t drink now. I still drink. You know? But not in the way that I used to. And the way I was then, Jaysus you’d wake up in the morning and you’d still be very pissed.8 But horrible. […] you’d want to die. All you could do, this’d be the routine, was hang on till opening time, in you’d go. One or two lads in the same predicament. The big red faces, and the big swollen fucking heads. God the first one or two pints’d knock the fucking head off you, but then one or two more, and you’d be feeling a bit better, head home or wherever you call home, you’d probably be able to lie down and get a bit of a kip9 then. Up you’d get, six or seven and off out into the night. (26)

This routine was not occasional, nor seasonal. John says that he did this in the winter and in the summer.

John, he tells Mark “wasn’t always like that, and I haven’t been like that since,” a recovery he owes to Noel (27). The two men had met in

The Strand, the pub across the street, (though it had been called

“Hannigans then”) and Noel had helped get John “sorted out” (ibid). Noel had bought John a drink and they got to chatting—as one does in a pub.

I began to tell him a bit about myself. Not in any fucking- stupid-pisshead-very-sorry-for-myself- way or anything, like that. But I explained that I was in a bit of a mess. I had gotten myself into a terrible mess. This is many years ago. And I had gone to the stage there I was down to the very last bit of my savings, and I was out of work because I’d basically, no two ways about it, I’d hit the bottle goodo. And

8 Drunk.

9 Nap.

99 I was in and out of my house and I was going to end up on the, the, fucking skids, you know? Be a tramp, you know? (28)

John explains that he was not looking to Noel for answers, that he was only “getting things off my chest,” but Noel bought him dinner and offered him a job. John worked hard and got cleaned up because he

“didn’t want to let [Noel] down” (28), and Noel would take John and his coworkers out for “pints a few nights a week. It was like a supervised drink” (29).

By the time that Mark leaves and the scene ends, McPherson has made it clear that John is not the stereotypical Irish drunk. He is a drinker, he had been very out of control, drink had dominated his life, but John understands the consequences of alcoholism and drunkenness.

In the second scene in the play, we learn the extent of these consequences.

“It’s All Been Awful”

In Part Two of Dublin Carol, John interacts with his adult daughter

Mary. Mary is “in her thirties and seems very tired” (35). John and Mary have not seen each other for ten years (43), but she has returned to give her father some very “shocking news” (35); Mary’s mother, John’s wife

(the two are not divorced, even though they have been estranged for a very long time), Helen, is dying of cancer. John greets this news in a predictable way—with a drink (35). He offers one to Mary, who resists at

100 first, saying, “it’s a bit early” (ibid), but later agrees to “a little bit” of

John’s whiskey. He replies, “yes, I’m glad. Not drinking on my own”

(ibid).

As the two chat and catch up and drink, Mary tells John that his son, Mary’s brother, Paul has moved to London, and “is getting like”

John, especially in the way Paul “says things and nods” and “the way he stands in the pub and things like that” (39). Mary tells John that he looks “much older.” He explains that he is older, and offers her another drink. She refuses, but he pours himself another “smartener” (ibid).

They reminisce about the past, a bit painfully. Mary recalls a night when, at her aunt’s house in Limerick, John did not come home. He says he “went to the pub” (42), and lost track of time:

I used to get caught down in the country. Up home they kick you out at eleven. But you’d be chancing a quick one like that, those boys’ll (i.e., barmen in the country) serve you till two o’clock in the morning. So you’d think you were catching them for a quick one after going to the pictures. But the door’d be locked and it was just getting going. (43)

Mary sees right through John’s excuses. She has heard them before, like on a night when her mother was “in hospital having Paul” and John

“slept in with” her. She awoke to find him “sitting down against the radiator” with “a bottle of something” (44). He tells her that he was unable to sleep but “of course there’s an excuse. You think I’d deliberately want to hurt you? I wish it was different. But that’s what I needed to do” (ibid). John is very troubled by the pain he has caused his daughter and the others. He says, “I’m not going to just say ‘I’m sorry’—

101 because of the fucking enormity of all the fucking things I did. It’s not enough” (45).

Mary reminds John of the weekend that he left the family and moved in with a woman named Carol. She says that she understands that Carol “didn’t take [John] away” but that she “looked after” him. (48).

John tells her that Carol “kept me going” and that her undying love for him “was the problem. Would’ve watched me kill myself if that was what

I wanted” (ibid). On the day John left, he was drunk when he came to get Mary from school, he “must’ve been drinking for days” (49). He took her to the pub, even though she was only seven, and he got a drink while, unable to think of anything else to do , she sat on the floor with her schoolbooks until he fell on her in a bar-fight. A Guard took Mary home (49). John says:

I know. Terrible things happen. You have a temper and you’re not talking to someone. And you calm down and try to keep your heart, fucking, somehow open. But you go and hit the fucking bottle. And you make everything fucking worse. […] But I can hardly remember anything. I was in a very bad state. I don’t want to make any excuses, but Jesus Christ! I was in hell. I was in agony. And nobody knew. And I didn’t know what to do about it. You don’t know. I am sorry. I am sorry. I’m sorry about the whole stinking business. I think about it now and I want to puke. I wish I’d never been born. It’s all been awful. (49-50)

John understands that drinking ruined his life. He sees how his behavior caused his family pain.

John tells his daughter that things just continued to get worse while he lived with Carol. He went on bender after bender, sometimes in

102 Carol’s dead husband’s clothes, because his own were covered with vomit

(51). John’s life eventually spiraled into a pool of “boredom. Loneliness.

A feeling of basically being out of step with everybody else. Fear. Anxiety.

And, of course, a disposition to generally liking the whole fucking thing of drinking until you pass out” (58-59).

As Mary leaves, John reluctantly agrees to visit Helen in the hospital. Mary asks John a simple favor: “don’t drink anymore before you see her. Be sober, alright?” (61). She repeats this request three times and John agrees. She says that she will be back at five o’clock that evening to pick him up and leaves his office. John is left with a choice.

“Bollocksed”

As Part 3 of the play begins John has made his choice; he has not kept his promise to Mary. The stage directions say it is four o’clock that afternoon and that John “sleeps in a drunken stupor” with three quarters of his bottle of whiskey gone (67). Mark, who has returned for his paycheck, wakes him. John explains that he did not go to the bank, as he had planned, that he has had a “horrible” day, and that he has

“had a good bit to drink” (68-69). John realizes that Mark has also “had a few” and that he is not “very full of Christmas cheer;” he offers Mark a drink (69), and has one himself (70).

103 John learns that Mark has tried, unsuccessfully, to break up with his girlfriend and ended up in the pub across the street (72-73). John explains that he understands the intricacies of a difficult relationship and tells Mark about Carol. Mark learns that John and Carol met in a pub when John was “still married” and “going into a nose-dive on the booze” (76). John says “she hooked me because she could see that I was very taken with getting bollocksed and she’d buy me drinks” (ibid).

When Carol took John home for some whiskey and more, John was

“more into the drink than the sex,” while Carol was in it for the companionship (76-77). John says:

I thought of it like God had sent me like a drink-angel. Like I believed in God and he’s sent this to take care of me. And that she was like all confused because she didn’t know why God had sent her. (77)

John took all of her money to go get drunk, and he would get drunk to try to feel better about taking her money.

Mark helps John take down the Christmas decorations and John describes, in painfully brutal detail, “that special alcoholic’s hangover”

(82). This hangover comes “after a couple of days on the serious piss.”

What happens is, day one, for whatever reason you’ve started early and basically polluted yourself. It’s a form of poisoning. And so, on day two, you are in the absolute horrors. I don’t mean what most people feel like after their Christmas party, sick tummy and a headache. This is a raging dose of the screaming paranoid shits. You’re shit scared. Just to walk down the street you think you’re going to be beaten up. And there’s a sickening disgust with yourself to boot, and there’s only one thing you can do to stop it. (83)

104 “More drink,” Mark says. And he is absolutely correct. John’s description then tracks the alcoholic through the second and then a third day of hard drinking, passing out, being sick, and starting all over again. John may be a drunk Irishman but his story refuses any romantic reading of the stereotype.

Bad Habits

It is no surprise that Conor McPherson wrote this scathing indictment about alcohol nor that he is able to relate the horrors of that lifestyle with such realism. Alcohol has played prominently in most of

McPherson’s plays,10 including This Lime Tree Bower and The Weir. What is remarkable, however, since Dublin Carol so brutally depicts the consequences of alcoholism is that when it was written, McPherson was an alcoholic. In an interview with Maddy Costa, McPherson discussed his own alcoholism, which he thinks began in 1997:

I was tasting independence and freedom, but I was irresponsible, and probably the wrong person to have it. I became dependent on drinking: you think it makes you feel better, but all you're ever doing is keeping withdrawal at bay. (Qtd. in Costa Par. 13)

In an interview with Chicago Tribune theatre critic Chris Jones,

McPherson explains further:

I developed bad habits. Alcohol relieved my feelings of gloominess. I got to the point where I was using alcohol to

10 Although the degree of prominence varies from a central issue in Rum and Vodka, to nearly non-existent in Come on Over.

105 stop feeling worse. I felt very insecure. I was one of those guys who stumbled around in the dark for a long time. (Qtd. in Jones Par. 20)

McPherson, like so many of his characters, like John in Dublin Carol, was a drinker; he drank to escape, he drank to feel better.

But McPherson’s drinking days have come to an end. As Maddy

Costa explains:

Whisky didn't keep him from writing Dublin Carol and Port Authority; it just soused the hours when he wasn't writing. And he might have carried on, until one February night in 2001 - the night Port Authority opened in the West End - he collapsed and was rushed to hospital. His pancreas had ruptured and he was unable to return home for more than two months. "My body gave way," he says simply, "and that was it." He's been sober ever since. (Par.15)

The distance from the drink has given McPherson the chance to look back on his alcoholism and the use of alcohol in Ireland. He says

“drinking is everywhere, it's like nothing happens without it. Courtships, weddings, funerals, going to the theatre, everything: it's always alcohol, alcohol, alcohol” (qtd. in Costa par. 14). Continuing on this theme,

McPherson notes “Ireland has always had this strong culture of alcohol.

I've always been aware of the hunger of Irish men to get into a bar and lose themselves in pub culture. They transcend into a kind of traumalike state. It's very seductive” (qtd. in Jones par. 23). Colin Murphy nicely sums up McPherson’s relationship with alcohol:

Drink is a recurring motif in McPherson's plays; that's perhaps not surprising given the fact that he was an early alcoholic and by the time he turned 38 was 10 years off the bottle. McPherson, though, proves to be not just a brilliant chronicler of Irish drinking culture, but a fervent critic of it.

106 He cites the footage of Brian Cowen in Offaly, following his elevation to Taoiseach,11 "standing on the back of a truck with a pint in his hand" as symptomatic of our attitude to drink. "It's crazy when that is tolerated." Is that not simply Irish, I venture. "If that's Irish, then we've got to change what Ireland is, what Irish means. Our society is alcoholic. Of course, people don't want to hear that because no alcoholic wants to hear it. And I didn't want to hear it when I was drinking. It's addiction, it's sick and it's in our culture. There's a psychological problem there. In Ireland, the person standing at the bar drinking a Ballygowan is an alcoholic." McPherson's plays have always been deeply moral, an inclination that goes right back to a masters in philosophy at UCD. (Par. 13)

As discussed next in Part 3, McPherson’s thinking about alcohol use in

Ireland is borne out by the statistics.

11 The prime minister of the Republic of Ireland.

107 Part 3: Drowning the Tiger

The issue of alcohol was certainly in the cultural consciousness when Barry and McPherson were writing their plays. In April of 2000, the laws governing the hours of operation of pubs in Ireland changed. The

London Times’ Mark Hodson explains:

Ireland's drinking laws are to be relaxed with the abolition of "holy hour", when pubs are forced to shut on Sunday afternoons. The distinction between summer and winter licensing hours - last orders is half an hour earlier during the winter - will be scrapped, and nightclubs will be able to seek extensions until 2.30am. The new hours, which should come into effect by the summer, will mean landlords can serve until 12.30am on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, followed by a half-hour drinking-up time. During the rest of the week, bars will shut at 11.30pm. The most controversial measure is the abolition of "holy hour", which is not an hour at all, but two, from 2-4pm. (Par.1)

These changes made getting a drink easier and allowed for more drinks to be consumed. Also in 2000 RTE, Ireland’s national television broadcaster, presented a well received prime time episode devoted to the subject of alcohol abuse in Ireland (“Abuse of Alcohol”). The Irish were thinking about their use of alcohol in relation to the rest of Europe and the conclusions were startling.

The website for Alcohol Action Ireland says “Ireland continues to rank among the highest consumers of alcohol in the 26 countries in the enlarged EU. We drink about 20 per cent more than the average

European” (“How Much Do We Drink”). The website also says “alcohol consumption in Ireland increased by 46 per cent between 1987 (9.8 litres

[per person, per year) and 2001 (14.3 litres) when our

108 consumption reached a record high. Consumption has been falling from this peak in 2001, to 12.4 litres in 2008” (ibid).

In 1999, the Centre for Health Promotion Studies at the National

University of Ireland, Galway, published its first National Health and

Lifestyle Survey (or SLAN) which, as John Sheehan explains, “evaluated drinking habits of those aged eighteen and over” (230).

One of the findings showed that the younger age groups drank less frequently then the older age groups but were more likely to engage in high risk drinking such as binge drinking and drinking to intoxication. (Ibid)

In the same year, The Health Behaviour in School Aged Children (HBSC) survey:

indicated that over 50 per cent of Ireland's children begin experimenting with alcohol before the age of twelve. One third of the fifteen to sixteen age group reported binge drinking three or more times in the previous month and one quarter reported having been drunk three or more times in the past month. Females engaged in high risk drinking per session more commonly than males in the eighteen to twenty four year old age group. 60 per cent of females admitted to binge drinking compared to 50 per cent of males. (Sheehan 230)

Clearly this revelation was very concerning, and the disturbing statistics simply continued to emerge.

Sheehan’s article, entitled "Alcohol and Society A Medical

Perspective,” exposes a number of the ramifications of this degree of alcohol consumption in Ireland.

From a medical perspective, we are already paying a huge cost because of alcohol related harm. It is estimated that the total economic cost of alcohol to our society annually is 2.2 billion euro. […] In a study conducted in the Mater

109 Misericordiae Hospital, Dublin, it was found that 13% of people attending the Emergency Department were intoxicated. 13% equates with 7150 attenders annually. (230)

Another 2002 study by the hospital revealed that “30 per cent of males admitted to hospital and 9 per cent of females admitted to hospital met diagnostic criteria for either alcohol dependency or alcohol abuse” (231).

Sheehan provides an overview of the potential medical dangers of alcohol, all of which were widespread throughout Ireland during the

Celtic Tiger.

As well as significant liver disease, alcohol can cause damage to the brain, nervous system, stomach, gullet, pancreas, heart and reproductive organs. In particular, alcohol can cause a foetal alcohol syndrome with varying levels of damage to the unborn child. Alcohol increases the risk of various cancers, including breast cancer as well as liver cancer. Over the last decade the increase in alcohol consumption has been reflected in increases in cancers relating to alcohol. (231)

This last, of course, is what Barry was reflecting in Our Lady of Sligo, and it seems no coincidence that cancer, though not alcohol-related, also plays a significant part in Dublin Carol.

It is only recently that the sheer impact of Ireland’s alcohol consumption during the Celtic Tiger has been revealed. In a 2011 article for Irishhealth.com, Niall Hunter wrote: “Death rates from alcoholic liver disease (ALD) in Ireland have seen a massive increase during the Celtic

Tiger years, according to a new study” (par. 1). Hunter explains that the mortality rate from ALD increased 188 per cent between 1995 and 2009

(par. 2), while the number of documented cases of ALD increased 201 per

110 cent in the same time frame (par. 8). Dr. Aiden McCormick, chairman of the Irish Society of Gastroenterology, who performed the study, noted:

The death levels among the younger age group are fairly low, but have dramatically increased. We can also expect that mortality rates will increase in the older age groups as the cohort who were drinking heavily when younger get older. (Qtd. in Hunter Par. 7)

This increase in ALD, McCormick said, can be directly tied to the

“changing patterns of drinking” during the Celtic Tiger.

Beyond the health and financial impact, Sheehan discusses a number of other ways that drink culture was impacting Ireland during the Celtic Tiger. He reports that, “between 1996 and 2001, the number of prosecutions for public order offences increased by 161 per cent. 80 per cent of these offences related to drunkenness” (231). Also, Sheehan says, “alcohol may also lead to relationship/marital breakdown, unplanned pregnancies, domestic violence, absenteeism and a host of other social problems” (231).

Under the Affluence

There are, perhaps, a number of reasons for the increase in alcohol consumption in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger. The most obvious cause, and the one most frequently cited in the press and in studies such as that of Sheehan, is affluence. People drank more during the Tiger because they could afford more drink.

111 In a 2012 article in The Irish Times John Waters wrote “during the

Tiger years, the better-off accounted for much of the increased spending on alcohol” (“The Real Reason” par. 6). Additionally, Waters points out,

“the less well-off tended to spend more, in relative terms, of their incomes on alcohol” (ibid). The bottom line is clear—both the rich and poor drank, and drank to excess.

Sheehan explains that, though other factors, such as “lessening parental controls, changing lifestyles and increased consumerism” during the Celtic Tiger played a part, “increased affluence with increased disposable income clearly contributes to funding the drinking habits of young people” (230). The thriving economy in Ireland during the Celtic

Tiger allowed for more money to be spent on alcohol, and that money translated into health and social problems.

Cultural Consciousness

All of the statistics, as alarming as they are, are not the only reason that the stereotype of the drunk Irishman was being reflected and complicated on the Celtic Tiger stage. As Sheehan explains, “alcohol related harm in our society” was a frequent topic in the media (232).

Irish policy-makers also made the topic a frequent talking point.

Sheehan says:

The Minster for Health and Children established a Task Force and an interim report was published in May 2002. The Minister for Justice has recently outlined plans to address alcohol related harm in society. […] The President, Mrs.

112 Mary McAleese, at a speech in Virginia, USA in May 2003, highlighted the abuse of alcohol and drugs in Ireland. She said that we, as a society, need to reimagine an Ireland intolerant of 'stupid behaviour,’ which it has benignly overlooked for too long. In a similar vein, the Economist magazine in May 2003 published an article entitled,' Ireland and Alcohol: Slainte'. The report focused on alcohol misuse and our tolerant attitude towards it. The article implied that foreign industrialists would think twice about investing in Ireland because of the "booze culture" pervading society. (231)

Clearly, alcoholism and drink culture were in the cultural consciousness in Ireland. While statistics show that awareness of the dangers of alcoholism in Ireland did not cause substantial change in the attitudes towards drink, the narrative about drink culture in Ireland was very much destabilized during the Celtic Tiger. Exposition of the medical facts, coupled with changes in the laws governing the operations of pubs, as well as what John Waters characterizes as “successful efforts to educate the public about the dangers of drink-driving” (“The Real

Reason” par. 5), shaped the patterns of drinking in Ireland.

What Barry and McPherson are reflecting in their plays is this changing narrative. Neither of these plays embrace the stereotype of the

Irish drunk, the sometimes happy and frequently violent inebriate for whom a hangover is the biggest risk. Through the broken bodies and shattered families of Mai and John, Barry and McPherson present the devastating consequences that stem from excessive drinking and from alcoholism.

113

Chapter 4 The Old Hag, The Irish Mammy, and the Poor Old Woman.

Historically and folklorically Irish women have been seen as prophetic seers, as healers, as witches, as meddling outsiders, and as personifications of Ireland. This chapter focuses on the diverse representations of aging women on stage, demonstrating and discussing how each of these folkloric conceptions of women plays out during the

Celtic Tiger. Part 1 looks at negative representations of women—that is, women presented at “hags,” and “witches,” especially how these play out in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998). In Part 2, examines the ways in which the stereotypical representation of the Irish Mammy were complicated during the Celtic Tiger through a close look at Elaine

Murphy’s Little Gem (2010). Part 3 searches for the traditional nationalist representation of women—the Shan Van Vocht.1

1 Sean Bhean Bhocht in the original Irish.

114 Part 1: The “Vicious Auld Witch” and the Anti-mother Hag

This section explores negative representations of aging women on stage during the Celtic Tiger period. In particular, it will focus on old women presented as “witches” and “hags.” The section begins with an exploration of antecedent traditions of witches and hags in Irish folklore and in Irish theatrical history, and continues with an examination of these character types in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats. It ends with a discussion of the cultural contexts and connotations of hag/witch characters during the Celtic Tiger, explaining possible readings for these character types in a time of cultural change.

One of the most archetypical representations of aged women in

Ireland is the “hag.” In his book The Lore of Ireland: An Encyclopedia of

Myth, Legend, and Romance (2006), Dáithí Ó hÓgáin writes that hags are

“supernatural beings in the form of old women, who are described as inhabiting lonely parts of the Irish landscape” (283). Ó hÓgáin calls the hag “an old native symbol” that functions in part as “protectress of the landscape” (ibid). The Irish word for “hag” is “cailleach” derived from the word caille meaning “veil” (ibid). Ó hÓgáin says that “the great age of particular hags was often the subject of comment, as they were believed to have lived through many generations” (ibid). It is worth noting that the word “cailleach” can also be defined in modern Irish simply as “old woman” (Ó Dónaill 172).

115 The role that a hag plays in a folktale or a supernatural legend is changeable depending on the needs of the narrative; she can be either a malevolent or a benevolent force. In some tales, for example, the hag is viewed as a prophetic figure, aware of and able to interpret the weather to foretell agricultural trends (Ó hÓgáin 283). In other tales, however, the hag is set as “a definitely hostile being” (ibid). Ó hÓgáin describes several oral narratives in which the hag sets impossible challenges upon the heroes (ibid).

In his Handbook of Irish Folklore, Seán Ó Súilleabháin explains how a “collector of Irish oral tradition” (xi) may go about classifying and identifying certain types of tales, or the characters within them. In his section on hags (447), Ó Súilleabháin encourages folklorists to ask:

Are there any local traditions about women who were regarded as being very old and wise and possessed of supernatural powers? By what names were they called (hags, cailleacha)? […] Were they looked upon as human or supernatural beings? (For further points of enquiry see previous section dealing with witches). Were these hags supposed to live to a great age? Had they unusually keen sight? Great wisdom?

It is on Ó Súilleabháin’s guidelines and on Ó hÓgáin’s descriptions that this reading of the hag in Celtic Tiger era drama is based, and on this authority that this study conflates the hag with the “witch” figure.

Following Ó Súilleabháin and Ó hÓgáin, I classify as hags negative representations of women; women who possess (or are suspected of, or accused of, possessing) supernatural powers including witchcraft,

116 divination, or Ó Súilleabháin’s “keen sight”; and those whose place in the community at large is highly suspect.

The standing of the hag/witch within her community is central to the discussion at hand and the common characteristic that links the different types of hag/witch characters described in this chapter. In many cases, as Ó hÓgáin suggests, the hag is seen as a valuable part of the community, a beloved and reverently feared protectress. By other members of the community, particularly the Roman Catholic clergy and others who benefit from a monopoly on the sacred, or from a patriarchal power structure, the hag/witch is a source of great fear.

The supernatural hag/witch has been seen and talked about on stage throughout Irish theatre history. A few examples include Synge’s

Playboy of the Western World (1907), Yeats' At the Hawk’s Well (1916),

Lady Gregory’s The Golden Apple (1916), and Yeats' The Only Jealousy of

Emer (1922). As a character type, she reaches her Celtic Tiger highpoint in Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats (1998).

The Anti-Mother

Another conception of the hag that bears particular weight during the Celtic Tiger period, and was the most frequently seen negative representation of women during the period, is the hag/witch as anti- mother. While the classification of this character type does not appear in

117 Ó Súilleabháin or Ó hÓgáin, there is much evidence for its existence in

Irish folklore.

The reading of the hag as the anti-mother begins with the bean- ghlùin, a version of the cailleach that is associated specifically with midwifery. While the midwife and rural healer certainly also hold positive associations, the relationship between traditional midwives and accusations of witchcraft is well established throughout Europe, particularly in Catholic Europe. In his 2009 book On Monsters, Stephen

T. Asma explains that midwives were so highly suspect that Heinrich

Institoris, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum—the leading tract in the hunting of witches—spoke openly against them. Asma quotes Institoris as saying:

No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives. When they don’t kill the children, they take the babies out of the room, as though they are going to do something out of doors, lift them up in the air, and offer them to evil spirits. (112)

This fear, as misplaced as it may sound, filtered to Ireland. Gearóid Ó

Crualaoich, in his 2003 book The Book of the Cailleach explains the nature of the Catholic clergy’s attitudes towards midwives:

Many accounts exist of the tension between wise/healing women and Christian clergymen who regarded the activities of the former as constituting a threat both to their own moral authority and to the spiritual wellbeing of their flocks. In some cases the clergy are reported as regarding the wise healers as witches of the Christian-demonic variety, in league with the powers of Satan. In other cases, their perception of the wise healer is said to be that such women are somewhat deranged, prone to pagan superstition and disruptive of good social order and clerical authority. In

118 almost all cases, wise healers constitute an antagonist for the priest and this antagonism is portrayed as being expressed routinely in sermon and denouncement from the altar. The non-clerical view portrayed of the wise healer is that of a woman who offers valuable services to individuals afflicted by life crisis or misfortune. In this ‘lay’ perception, the wise healer is morally neutral, or perhaps we might say, theologically neutral. (179)

Even though the popular perception of the midwife was ambivalent, the link between her and the witch was firmly established. When necessary, the witch/midwife link could be easily invoked from the pulpit to discredit, or cause the lay public to fear, powerful or threatening women.

It seems that in Irish folklore it is Institoris’ argument of midwife

(and thus witch) as child-killer that has lingered and caught hold, and it is precisely here that the resonance of the hag/witch is found during the

Celtic Tiger. Anne O’Connor writes:

In exploring the image of the evil woman in Irish folklore the figure of the child murderer is especially significant. Child murderess traditions […] are concerned with the supernatural manifestations of the souls of children who have died without baptism (whether aborted or miscarried foeti, stillborn infants or those who have prematurely died of natural causes immediately after birth, or murdered children). […] In Ireland these traditions are distinctly religious in character, reflecting complex moral and theological themes. The main function of the Irish child murderess and dead child revenant legends seems to be to stress the absolute necessity for salvation of sacramental baptism and also of repentance. Stories collected in Ireland, associated with the figure of the woman as midwife and as child murderess may be said to constitute an Irish child- murderess revenant legend type. (283).

O’Connor later explains that “The figure of the witch-midwife, so prevalent in European witchcraft traditions, is not emphasized in Irish

119 traditions, although the figure of child murderess, herself a diabolical character, emerges very clearly as the personification of evil in the Irish child murderess legends” (284). So how can we characterize the child- murderess, if not as witch/midwife?

The distinction O’Connor seems to be making hinges on the lack of overt supernatural powers on the part of the women in the tales. The act of murder itself is not necessarily achieved by magical means, and the

Devil only gets involved as a punishment for the soul of the woman (as opposed to an agent in the woman’s actions).2 Rather than being witches in any traditional sense, these women are bean-ghlùin—midwives—and therefore cailleach. Since they are represented in a negative light, as child-murderers must be, they are hags.

While child-murdering hags can certainly be said to be anti- mother, an actual act of murder may not be required to garner the distinction. If, as mentioned above, midwives could be considered witches on account of antagonism to Catholic teaching, then it stands to reason that any woman who found herself foul of the Church was potentially suspect. In an article on infertility in Ireland, Jill Allison explains that, upon the authority of Catholic teaching, for centuries

“childlessness was something that went against the social grain, leaving people open to a kind of speculative criticism”(4). This sort of criticism

2 O’Connor provides several examples of these stories from around Ireland.

120 could, and certainly did, lead to women being labeled hags. Allison explains that this type of thinking was born in:

An era when sex, birth, motherhood and family were tied closely to social and moral ideals consolidated in a relationship between the Catholic Church and the Irish state. In this era procreation was the basis of the nuclear family based on marriage which, in turn, came to represent social stability and political identity in Ireland. (4)

Being childless whether voluntary or not was against the social norm, and therefore suspect. It is common, both in Irish folklore and in Irish drama, for a childless woman to be dubbed a hag,3 likewise women who have children but do not act in a predictable maternal manner.

Beginning in 1994 with Marina Carr’s The Mai, representations of women as the anti-mother hag became commonplace on the Celtic Tiger

Irish stage. In this play, our hag is Grandma Froachlan, a centenarian woman of illegitimate birth whose cruelty to her daughters causes one of them to label her “a vicious auld witch” (31). The plot of the play parallels a story told near the end of the first act—a story that centers on witches.

MILLIE: Owl Lake4 comes from the Irish loch cailleach oíche, Lake of the Night Hag, or Pool of the Dark Witch. The legend goes that Coillte, daughter of the mountain god, Bloom, fell in love with Bláth, lord of all the flowers. So away she bounded like a young deer, across her father’s mountain, down through Croc’s Valley of Stone, over the dark witch’s boglands till she came to Bláth’s domain. There he lay, under an oak tree, playing his pipes, a crown of forget-me- nots in his ebony hair. And so they lived freely through the

3 The Widow Quin and the Widow Casey in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World are prime examples of this.

4 Where the play is set.

121 spring and summer, sleeping on beds of leaves and grass, drinking soups of nettle and rosehip, dressing in acorn and poppy. One evening approaching autumn, Bláth told Coillte that soon he must go live with the dark witch of the bog, that he would return in the spring, and the next morning he was gone. Coillte followed him and found him ensconsed in the dark witch’s lair. He would not speak to her, look at her, touch her, and heartbroken Coillte lay down outside the dark witch’s lair and cried a lake of tears that stretched for miles around. One night, seizing a long awaited opportunity, the dark witch pushed Coillte into her lake of tears. When spring came round again Bláth was released from the dark witch’s spell and he went in search of Coillte, only to be told that she had dissolved in a lake of tears. (33-34)

Here witches and hags are one and hags are, as Margaret Llewellyn-

Jones describes them in her book Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural

Identity (2002), “destructive and grotesque” (74).

In 1996, Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane presented another anti-mother hag, in the form of the (not incidentally named) Mag. Mag delights in tormenting her adult daughter, Maureen.

Mag demands that Maureen make her Complan,5 and then spits it out when it is not to her liking, which is nearly every time Maureen makes it.

Mag teases Maureen about her previous nervous breakdown. Mag interferes with Maureen’s love life, burning a letter of proposal from

Maureen’s beau. Though accusations abound about what a “good daughter” would do for her mother, there is no attempt on the part of

Mag to act motherly.

5 A powdered drink mix

122 In addition to Mag and Grandma Froachlan, Margaret Llewellyn-

Jones also finds remnants of the hag in Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996), and in Marie Jones’ Women on the Verge of HRT6 (1996). Anti-mother hags can be found in McDonagh’s Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), and A

Skull in Connemara (1997). By far the most comprehensive portrait of the anti-mother hag, though, is found in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats.

By The Bog of Cats

In her By the Bog of Cats,7 Marina Carr presents women who fit each of the versions of hag that I have discussed—the supernatural hag/witch, and the anti-mother hag. Perhaps the most apparent of these is the Catwoman—a supernatural hag/witch.

The script describes the Catwoman as:

A woman in her late fifties, stained a streaky brown from the bog, a coat of cat fur that reaches to the ground, studded with cat’s eyes and cat paws. She is blind and carries a stick. (356)

The Catwoman is blind but she knows “everythin; that happens on this bog. I’m the Keeper of the Bog of Cats in case ya forgotten? I own this bog” (365). She possesses, then, the “unusually keen sight” that Seán Ó

Súilleabháin suggests is common amongst witches and hags.

6 Hormone Replacement Therapy

7 See Appendix for synopsis

123 Hester accuses her of stealing her garden chair, a crime that the

Catwoman pleads guilty to, although the Catwoman promises to return it. This simple act of theft echoes the defining characteristics of witches in Henry Glassie’s Passing the Time in Ballymenone. Glassie says that witches “remain in history to embody the opposite of human good,” and that “the good person gives” but “the witch steals” (547).

As the scene progresses, we come to understand that the

Catwoman’s “keen sight” comes in the form of “visions and dreams”

(357), and also from the ability to commune with animals, such as the great black swan Black Wing, whose corpse Hester is dragging, and whose death the Catwoman foresaw (ibid). Later we learn that the

Catwoman can talk to ghosts, that they seek her out, in fact (372). We also learn that the Catwoman was a midwife; she tells Hester, “I knew your mother, I helped bring ya into the world” (ibid). In one fell swoop, the Catwoman places herself in opposition to the Catholic mainstream, at least as conceived by Heinrich Institoris.

The Catwoman has no misconceptions about the source of her prophetic powers. She tells Hester “you are my match in witchery, same as your mother was” (357). The Catwoman describes her power as “the gift of seein’ things as they are, not as they should be, but exactly as they are” (358). But contrary to Institoris’ thinking, the Catwoman says that her powers came from God—not from Satan (357).

124 Regardless of the origin of the Catwoman’s gift, she has been ostracized by her community at large. While Hester is her friend, with the ironic exception of the priest Father Willow, others seem to barely tolerate her, or to fear the consequences of excluding her from social events. Xavier Cassidy, for example, reminds Mrs. Kilbride that it is “bad luck not to invite the Catwoman” to his daughter’s wedding (376). It was an expression of disgust by Mrs. Kilbride at the Catwoman’s presence that predicated this reminder, and Mrs. Kilbride’s opinion of the

Catwoman that seems the most indicative of that of the community.

When challenged by Monica on her assertion that the Catwoman’s presence would ruin the wedding, Mrs. Kilbride insists that the

Catwoman does not have “as much right to walk God’s earth” as she does:

No, she hasn’t! Not till she washes herself. The turf-smoke stink of her. Look at her moochin’ up to Father Willow and her never inside the door of the church and me at seven Mass every mornin’ watchin’ that auld fool dribblin’ into the chalice. And would he call to see me? Never. Spends all his time with the Catwoman in her dirty little hovel. I’d write to the Archbishop if I thought he was capable of anythin’. (376)

While this quote is far more revealing of the cruel hypocrisy of of Mrs.

Kilbride, it demonstrates the marginality of the Catwoman in the community. Although the Catwoman and Father Willow are friends (and possibly more, which Carr leaves open for interpretation), she does not live up to the measure of Catholicism that Mrs. Kilbride sees in herself.

125 The Catwoman is by nearly every measure an archetypical hag/witch. Where Carr has complicated this retelling of the folk type is in making her not at all evil. Although her powers are not widely accepted in her community, she is clearly not guided by malevolence or malice. She has supernatural powers, she does magical things, but there is no indication that the Catwoman is in the play to, in Glassie’s words, “embody the opposite of human good” (547), and with good reason. That role, in Carr’s play, is already filled by another hag—Mrs.

Kilbride.

In By the Bog of Cats, a play with the self-confessed witches

Catwoman and Hester, the first mention of the word “witch” is directed at

Mrs. Kilbride. On her first entrance, Mrs Kilbride greets her seven year- old granddaughter Josie—the illegitimate daughter of her son Carthage and the play’s protagonist Hester—as follows:

MRS KILBRIDE: Well, good mornin’, ya little wagon8 of a girl child. JOSIE: Mornin’ yourself, y’auld wagon of a Granny witch. (356)

Mrs. Kilbride, interestingly enough, does not argue with this designation, but does take exception to Josie using the term Granny, reminding her that she prefers “Grandmother” (ibid). Kilbride then insults Josie’s mother, telling the girl that she had seen Hester “wooshin’ by on her broom half an hour back” (ibid). While this exchange is primarily

8 “wagon” is a slang term signifying a contrary or cantankerous woman.

126 lighthearted slagging, and reciprocal slagging at that, the first impression of Mrs. Kilbride given to the audience is very clear. She is a hag, and her ridicule of Hester foreshadows a reading of her as an anti-mother.

As the play progresses, she gets worse. In her next scene, Mrs.

Kilbride and Josie are playing cards. Kilbride wins five games in a row while gloating about her victories over the girl—telling the seven year-old that she loses because she is “thick.”9 When Josie protests, insisting that she always beats her mother when they play, Kilbride replies:

That’s only because your Mam is thicker than you. Thick and stubborn and dangerous, wrong-headed and backwards to top it all. Are you goin’ to start cryin’ now, ya little pussy babby, don’t you dare cry, ya need to toughen up, child, what age are ya now? Seven auld years. When I was seven I was cookin’ dinners for a houseful of men, I was thinnin’ turnips twelve hour a day, I was birthin’ calves, sowin’ corn, stookin’ hay, ladin’ a bull be his nose, and you can’t even win a game of Snap. Sit up straight or ya’ll grow up a hunchback. Would ya like that, would ya, to grow up a hunchback? Ya’d be like an auld camel and everyone’d say, as ya loped by, there goes Josie Kilbride the hunchback, would ya like that, would ya? Answer me. (360)

The attacks and cruelty continue. Josie is chastised for being a poor loser when she accuses Kilbride of cheating at cards. Kilbride says, “I never cheat. Never. D’ya hear me, do ya? Look me in the eye when I’m talkin’ to ya, ya little bastard” (ibid).

When Josie declines another game, she is a “little coward” who

“can’t even spell you own name” (ibid). When Josie proves her

9 Slang for stupid.

127 grandmother wrong by correctly spelling Josie Kilbride (the name Mrs.

Kilbride called her by only moments earlier), Kilbride strikes again:

Ya got some of it right. Ya got the ‘Josie’ part right, but ya got the ‘Kilbride’ part wrong, because you’re not a Kilbride. You’re a Swane. Can ya spell Swane? Of course ya can’t. You’re Hester Swane’s little bastard. You’re not a Kilbride and never will be. (361)

It seems that poor Josie cannot do anything right, and she is not

Kilbride’s only target. Josie’s father, Carthage, is “an eejit,”10 and Josie’s mother is a “Jezebel witch” who wastes her money on “whiskey and cigars” (361). Kilbride, on the other hand, as she rejoices in boasting, is much more frugal, saving “three thousand pound,” of which she intends to leave Josie none, because Hester “would get hould of it” (ibid).

When Carthage arrives he steps in in Josie’s defense, yelling at his mother to “ lave the poor child alone” and to “pick on somewan” (362) her own size. As Klbride storms off, she reminds Carthage that he can’t “do away” with her, and that she “won’t be goin’ away, ever” (ibid). Later in the play at Carthage’s wedding to Caroline Cassidy, we learn the terrifying truth of this statement.

At the wedding, as the stage directions note, Mrs. Kilbride enters

“in what looks extremely like a wedding dress, white, a white hat, with a bit of a veil trailing off it, white shoes, tights, bag, etc” (374). As the scene progresses she continues an attempted upstaging of Caroline, and the usurpation of the attention at her son’s wedding. She poses for a

10 Idiot.

128 picture with Carthage “like a bride and groom” (ibid), she shows off her clothes to every guest, boasting about the cost (374-5), she explodes at the presence of the Catwoman. We learn that Mrs. Kilbride, and not as she insisted Hester, has stolen money that Josie was given for her First

Communion (375).

Kilbride ridicules Josie for coming to the wedding—her father’s wedding—in her communion dress. Finally Carthage has had enough.

He says “it’s you that’s the holy show in that stupid dress” (377). Mrs.

Kilbride responds, “How was I supposed to know the bride’d be wearin’ white as well” (ibid). But, of course, she did know and planned her own wardrobe accordingly. For Mrs. Kilbride, this day is not about her son, and it is not about his bride.

The bride’s father, Xavier, stands to deliver a toast—as is traditional—only to be interrupted by Mrs. Kilbride. Her toast is entirely inappropriate, talking about times in which Carthage had shared her bed following her husband’s death, about craft projects that demonstrate his

Catholicism, and about making certain that his mother was always happy even at his own expense (378). But it is at the end of her interminable toast that the most disturbing revelation about Mrs.

Kilbride’s usurpation is revealed:

I only want to say that Caroline is very welcome into the Kilbride household. And that if Carthage will be as good a son to Caroline as he’s been a husband to me, than she’ll have no complaints. (378)

129 With a simple Freudian slip, perhaps, or a function of drink—Mrs.

Kilbride explains herself fully. She is the anti-mother.

Mrs. Kilbride is a cruel woman who mistreats and steals from her granddaughter. She is a brutal xenophobe, expressing at every turn her disgust for “Tinkers”—an ethnic identity shared by Hester and, by extension, Josie and the Catwoman. She is a self-righteous woman, much more interested in performing devout Catholicism (and reminding everyone around her of her performance) for social status than in displaying any semblance of true “Christian” values. She is not anyone’s ideal version of a mother, insulting and berating her son, or proclaiming his virtues, when it suits her.

The representation of Mrs. Kilbride as the anti-mother hag is striking in a play wherein a mother brutally kills her daughter. But, because of the breadth of evil behavior that Carr provides Mrs. Kilbride, it is clear that she, and not Hester, in By the Bog of Cats, is the representative of the “opposite of human good.”

Cultural Context

There are many possible explanations for why hag/witch characters, particularly of the anti-mother variety, were commonplace in

Irish drama during the Celtic Tiger. Margaret Llewellyn-Jones offers an excellent feminist reading of the hag as the grotesque inversion of the stereotypical matriarch who is often seen, along with the Madonna and

130 Magdalen figures, in Irish drama (75). This hag character, Llewellyn-

Jones argues, is connected to death and functions as a mythic figure of

“mourning and warning” in relation to female desire (both erotic and social) (74-83). While Llewellyn-Jones is certainly correct in her analysis, she does not quite explain the repeated stage appearance of the old anti- mother hag as the representative of evil. This notion, however, has a deep cultural resonance in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

There were many changes in social, political, and religious life in

Ireland during the Celtic Tiger, many of which had a deep impact on the lives of women. Of particular interest here is a drastic shift in public policy concerning abortion and contraception and the concomitant socio- religious debate and tension that grew from it.

Jill Allison explains that, prior to 1992:

Procreation was the basis of the nuclear family based on marriage which, in turn, came to represent social stability and political identity in Ireland. This relationship depended in part, on the discursive construction of the use of contraception or abortion as not only sinful but distinctly un-Irish. Catholic social teaching and Church values were woven into the political fabric of the nation as part of the Constitution forming the basis for prohibition on contraception, divorce and abortion and enshrining legal rights for the family as an institution. (4-5)

But in 1992, the centrality of Catholic values in Ireland would be shaken by two historic and monumental events. The first of these was the passage of the “Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Act” fully

131 legalizing contraception11 to anyone over the age of 17. The second cataclysmic event of that year was the decision by the Irish Supreme

Court that a 14-year old rape victim should be allowed to legally travel to

England and obtain an abortion. This case, famously called the “X

Case,” found in part that abortion is constitutionally legal in Ireland if the life of the mother is in danger (“Attorney General v. X”).

The upshot of all of this, coupled with revelations of decades of sex abuse within the Catholic Church, was the growth of incredible cultural tension between the Catholic past and ,the at least on the surface, the more secular present. Laury Oaks explains:

The Catholic Church’s influence over politics has receded since the 1980s and far fewer people are regular Church- goers. In 1981, 86% of Irish Catholics regularly attended Sunday Mass whereas in 1998, the figure stood at 60%; in some urban areas, the proportion was as low as 6%. In the 1990s, urbanization, the public exposure of a series of sex scandals involving Church officials, and the rise in dominance of consumer-driven values contributed to this pattern. (1975)

This tension played itself out in the ongoing debate about abortion, and in the ways that that debate classified motherhood and Irishness itself.

Oaks describes the view presented by anti-abortion activists as one in which “women who do not privilege motherhood as the most important activity in their lives both contribute to and reflect a rapidly decaying culture that is devaluing and making less time for children and family”

11 This act pertained primarily to condoms, which, along with birth control pills had been available first only by prescription (beginning in 1980), and then only in restricted places (beginning in 1985).

132 (1974). Even as the more liberal thinkers in Ireland were celebrating steps towards empowerment in women’s lives, the other side of the debate were encouraging Irish women to “embrace the values associated with a ‘‘traditional’’ Irish, Catholic culture which privileges motherhood and married family life” (Oaks 1974). That is to say, the tension grew between the “new” secular and globalized thinking, and the “old” traditional Irish ways of life.

While none of the plays discussed were written as overt responses to the cultural discourse on abortion, all of them present troubling pictures of women—whether as carnavalesque inversions of traditional

Irish motherhood, as Margaret Llewellyn-Jones argues, or as melodramatic stereotypes, villains to be booed and shouted down. This does not mean to imply that Marina Carr or Martin McDonagh were meaning for their hags to be read as some kind of statement on the abortion debate, but the palpable cultural tension regarding women undoubtedly filtered into their plays.

Heinrich Institoris considered midwives a threat to Catholicism because of their perceived roles in aborting children. He labeled them witches, and called for their destruction upon those grounds. It can be no coincidence that there is an eruption of witches, and of anti-mother hags, on the Irish stage at exactly the moment when the country was in socio-religious turmoil and enmeshed in debate surrounding abortion.

133 Setting hag/witches as the embodiment of evil women, and tying that evil to inversions of culturally held conceptions of motherhood, is only possible if those conceptions of motherhood are so ingrained as to be nearly universal within the culture. Part 2 will discuss the traditional

Irish views on motherhood and Celtic Tiger theatrical responses to them through a look at “the Irish Mammy.”

134 Part 2: Renegotiating the Old Irish (Grand) Mammy

Evil anti-mothers were not the only ways that old women were represented during the Celtic Tiger. There were many more positive aged female characters on the Irish stage. This section will discuss positive representations of women by placing these representations into conversation with traditional stereotypes of Irish mothers and, by extension, grandmothers. This sections begins by breaking down the ways that Irish mothers have been written and culturally understood in the past, and the socio-religious implications of these representations.

Then it explores how these stereotypes were complicated and reimagined during the Celtic Tiger in Elaine Murphy’s play Little Gem (2010).

As noted in Part 1, the mainstay of the anti-abortion debate in

Ireland during the Celtic Tiger was a push to encourage Irish women to

“embrace the values associated with a ‘‘traditional’’ Irish, Catholic culture which privileges motherhood and married family life” (Oaks

1974). But how, specifically, was that view of motherhood characterized, and where did it come from?

In his groundbreaking work on sexuality in Ireland, Tom Inglis explains the “traditional representation of Irish women as essentially humble, pious, self-sacrificing, “natural-born” mothers” (30). Digging a bit deeper, Inglis says:

135 The stereotypical image of a good Irish woman was, as Luke Gibbons has argued, a silent emulation of Mary, the virgin mother. She had the virtues of loyalty and forbearance and “an unlimited capacity to endure suffering.” Irish women were represented as mutually supportive, silent, resigned, and passive, as not participating in the male world, particularly in politics and the struggle for power. (25)

This image, which this study will label “the Irish Mammy”, was instilled,

Inglis argues, in the 19th century, reinforced by British Victorian attitudes towards women, marriage, and the family, and culturally embedded by Catholicism until well into the 20th century (13, 18).

Dympna McLoughlin defines three main characteristics of a respectable Irish woman:

(1) An overwhelming desire to marry and to remain faithful, dependent, and subordinate; (2) an unquestioning readiness to regard the domestic sphere as her natural habitat and to engage in reproduction rather than production; and (3) a willingness to accept that women’s sexuality was confined to marriage. (Qtd. in Inglis 16)

In other words, the traditional role of women in Ireland is confined to the home and hearth, marriage is unequivocally assumed, and self-sacrifice is the norm.

These views on the “proper” roles for women had undeniable consequences in the Irish household. Inglis explains:

The women fortunate enough to marry, even though they often married much later than their European counterparts, continued to have large families. High levels of marital fertility became a dominant feature of Irish demography and lasted up to the end of the twentieth century. This pattern constituted a contrast with the rest of Europe, where levels of marital fertility had begun to decline a hundred years previously. Part of this Irish pattern may have been due to lack of knowledge and information about contraception, not

136 to mention denial of access to it. But evidence from  would indicate that, in comparison to other countries, Irish men and women still saw large families as ideal. (17-18)

As Inglis notes, “this evidence suggests that most married women willingly subscribed to the concept of the ideal mother put forward by the

Catholic Church” (18). The Catholic Church and Catholic mothers played a reciprocal role in promoting this cultural view of women:

Irish women, particularly mothers, were dependent on the church for status and authority; consequently, they may have redoubled the influence of this image among each other. The result of having large families was that Irish mothers had to enforce the same strategies of sexual control on their daughters as had been enforced on them. They inculcated in their daughters the same notions of self-denial and self-sacrifice into which they had been acculturated. (Inglis 18)

So between the teachings of the Church, the well-documented role of

Catholicism in Irish policy, and the part played by Irish women in indoctrinating their daughters, the stereotype of the self-sacrificing Irish

Mammy became a cultural icon.

While there has been significant criticism of this patriarchal and parochial view of women, the Irish Mammy figure remains a common occurrence in performances of Irish culture. The steadfast self- sacrificing Irish mother features in traditional folk songs like Mother

Machree, Mrs. McGrath, and even Danny Boy. She appears in literature, with perhaps the best-known example being the title character in Frank

McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. She can be seen in Irish film, in Irish television shows, and in Irish theatre.

137 On the Irish stage, representations of the Irish Mammy appear frequently. Maurya in Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904), as she laments the death of all of her sons, and of “their father” (to whom she never refers as her husband), is a prime example of this archetype. Other appearances include Juno in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924),

Mother in Tom Murphy’s Famine (1968), Mommo in Tom Murphy’s

Bailegangaire (1985), Kate in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1991), and many others.

Critical Perspectives and Cultural Changes

Culturally embedded or not, the Irish Mammy archetype is not without its critics. Some of the criticism is aimed at the impact on the rights of women that resulted from the very conservative view of the cultural place of women. Tom Inglis notes:

What is remarkable in Ireland is that although women played a crucial role in the struggle for independence, once this was gained, the new Free State began to pass legislation that helped to confine women to the home. […] By 1937, women’s political, economic, and reproductive rights had been so severely curtailed that women were explicitly barred from claiming for themselves a public identity. (21)

Ivana Bacik explains that the Irish Constitution, written in 1937, includes language that specifically limits the role of women to that of subservient home-maker:

Article 41 [of the Constitution] also recognizes and seeks to promote a traditional, stereotypical role for women. Paragraph 2 of the Article provides that “the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a

138 support without which the common good cannot be achieved,” and further notes that the State must “ endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged be economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. (67-68)

The proper and legally defined place for woman was in the home. For better or worse, the Irish Mammy had moved from Victorian era attitude into law.

The Catholic morality that guided the framers of policy into legally limiting the rights of women to the home also successfully limited women’s sexual agency. Inglis says that, until the latter half of the 20th century, Irish “women were seen as the weaker sex and not proactive in seeking sexual pleasure” (25). He explains that this worldview was so dominant that, in Irish literature and drama:

It is difficult to find descriptions of female sexual transgressors in Irish literature prior to 1950. The absence of depictions of sexual transgression reflects the strict moral censorship imposed by church and state until the late 1960s. Even more clearly, it reflects the harsh reality of the incarceration of female sexual transgressors (or those so designated by the authorities) in mental asylums and Magdalene homes for “fallen women,” some of whom, once admitted, remained there for the rest of their lives. (26)

Irish women could not engage in sex for pleasure. If they did, they risked incarceration or enslavement (in Magdalene Laundries, for example).12

12 In 2012, Dublin’s Anu Productions presented a site-specific devised play called Laundry, that took audiences inside one of the old Magdalene Laundries. The production won the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Production.

139 By the 1970’s, however, things were beginning to change. Inglis summarizes:

Feminism grew steadily from the 1970s. The Irish women’s movement campaigned vigorously for a change in the laws banning artificial contraception (a significant start was made in 1979). The ban on married women working in the civil service was lifted in 1974. The number of married women in the labor force increased dramatically from 7.5 per cent in the early 1970s to 41 per cent by 1996. But in terms of a striking departure from Victorian ideals, the largest transformation was in the proportion of births outside marriage, which rose from  per cent in 1980 to as much as 33 per cent in 1999. (28)

As Inglis says, life changed dramatically for Irish women after the 1970s, with the most drastic changes happening during the Celtic Tiger era— from 1990 to 2010.

During and surrounding the Tiger, there were a number of changes in law pertaining to domestic life and particularly gender-related policy.

In 1990, Mary Robinson was elected the first woman President in

Ireland, and in 1997, Mary McAleese became the second. As explained in Part 1, abortion and contraception policy changed drastically. In

1993, homosexuality was decriminalized. In 1995, divorce was legalized, with restrictions, in Ireland (Bacik 21).

The relegation to the home, particularly for married women, was challenged and overcome. In his book After the Ball, Fintan O’Toole writes:

One of the reasons that the Irish as a whole got richer in the 1990s was that, as the decade wore on, there were progressively more people working outside the home

140 supporting fewer dependents. Some of this shift came about for straightforward economic reasons: more people had jobs and fewer were unemployed. But much of it was due to a revolution in family structure influences, to a very significant extent, by the rise of feminism. It worked in two ways. Married women joined the workforce in increasing numbers, or women postponed marriage and stayed at work, adding to the number of wage earners and boosting the availability of labour. (22)

Not only did working mothers become more normal, their place in the professional sector played a large part in the economic success that

Ireland experienced during the Celtic Tiger.

Little Gem

In her author’s note in the script for Little Gem,13 playwright Elaine

Murphy writes:

I work part time in a women’s health organization. Little Gem grew from there, it’s a mishmash of all the women I’ve met over the years: hardworking, not particularly rich or poor, ignored by the Celtic Tiger, and the recession probably won’t make much of a difference to them either, you know, women like us, getting on with it. (par 2)

What is complicated in this statement is that the women that Murphy created in her play, while possibly ignored by the Celtic Tiger, exist theatrically speaking in an Ireland forever changed by that same historico-economic period. An examination of the oldest of Murphy’s three characters, Kay, will demonstrate how she represents a

13 See Appendix A for synopsis.

141 renegotiation of the archetype Irish Mammy—one who reflects the changes in Ireland discussed above.

When we first meet Kay, who is in her “early/mid sixties” (Murphy

2), she introduces herself by telling us about her “itch, down there,” in her genitals. She has tried every cream, every pill, and even tried putting her leg on the widow ledge “to let a bit of air circulate” (9). She visits a doctor—“a nice girl, very young, foreign” who says that the itch may be

“stress related” (ibid). The young doctor refers Kay to a dermatologist, though it may take months to get an appointment, and asks after Kay’s husband—who, we will learn later, has had a stroke. Kay tells the doctor that “he’s on the mend” and that the “consultant thinks with the right attitude he could make a full recovery” (ibid). Then the doctor asks another question—Kay says:

She asks how I’m coping—grand, there’s no use in complaining, nobody will listen to me. She says she’ll listen. Tell her about his appointments, medications, and his physio.14 She stops me. “That is all very good, Mrs. Neville, but you should take some time for yourself, you are not a young woman any more.” The fucking cheek of her. I’ve never felt old until now. She wants to know if I get enough help. Who? How often? Lorraine is a godsend, I couldn’t manage without her, and now and again neighbors drop in and sit with him. “You need more help, Mrs. Neville, you look very, very tired.” Gem doesn’t like having people in his house all the time. (9)

Kay’s response to these questions first identifies Kay as an Irish Mammy.

14 Physiotherapy.

142 Kay is married. Her husband is sick and she is taking care of him.

The house where they live is “Gem’s house.” When asked how she is doing, Kay is “grand”—Kay has suppressed her emotional stress and pain in the interest of caring for her husband’s needs. When pressed to tell the doctor how she is feeling, it is Gem’s medical needs that she discusses and not her own emotions.

A bit later the doctor asks if there is anything else she wants to discuss. Kay tells her about an advertisement on the television with an older couple kissing in a car. She tells the doctor that her daughter

Lorraine identifies Kay and Gem with that romantic couple. She says

“tell this young doctor I’m afraid I’ll never get the man in the car back.

She looks at me confused” (10). Kay goes on to explain that Gem is easily frustrated, and a “cantankerous oul fuck” (ibid). Finally she gets to the point, telling her doctor that what she really misses is having sex with her husband.

I’m dying for me bit. We’ve always been very compatible in that department, which is a miracle in itself, because by the time you get to our age you’d normally be lacing the cocoa with arsenic not Viagra. I know it’s not the done thing talking about your sex life, but Jaysus, I’m the wrong side of sixty not dead. She’s trying not to appear judgmental but I can tell she’s shocked because she’s fiddling with her hi-jab. Take that as my cue to leave. (10)

It is here that the classification of Kay as traditional Irish Mammy breaks down.

Kay is certainly not a strict adherent to conservative Catholic sexual morality. Her days of procreation are behind her, and yet her sex

143 life has continued. She takes pleasure in sex and misses it when it disappears from her life. In fact, as Kay said, it is her Middle Eastern doctor who is conservative enough to be embarrassed by frank sexual talk and not the Irish woman “on the wrong side of sixty.”

Kay’s openness about her sexuality continues as bumps into a friend in the grocery store. She laments the lack of help from her doctor to Marjorie Burke, who suggests that Kay goes to another store for a special purchase.

She says to go into Ann Summers and get myself a Rampant Rabbit. She got one six months ago and wouldn’t be without it. Little does she know she’s just put a stop to all those face-lift rumours; the woman is glowing from good old- fashioned orgasms. (10)

Kay follows Marjorie’s advice, though she finds the Rabbit to be a bit too intimidating. The girl in the shop “hands me this green thing, which she calls ‘the Kermit, a six-incher—no extras’” which Kay buys. With frank talk about sex and orgasms, and with a trip to buy a sex toy, Kay makes it clear that, while she may fit some of the conventions, she is not the archetype Irish Mammy.

Kay’s next monologue opens with her recounting of a visit by her granddaughter, Amber, wherein the young woman reveals that she is pregnant—a revelation that makes Kay want to restart smoking cigarettes (20). After Amber leaves the room to go cuddle up with Gem,

Kay reminisces about the early days of her relationship with her husband:

144 From the first day I saw him I knew. He didn’t, but I did. He was a mechanic in the laneway near the factory where I worked. Every Friday—pay day—we went to Flanagan’s on the corner. He was going with one of the other girls from the job. She was doing a line15 with someone else on the sly, and one Friday she went off to meet your man instead of Gem. Thought, right, if I don’t go over there and talk to him now, I never will. So I did. (21)

She and Gem became fast friends and even though his girlfriend had broken things off with secret boyfriend and tried to pick a fight with Kay,

Gem and Kay stayed together. Kay say that she “ended up leaving the job, but I kept Gem. Knew a good thing when I saw it” (21).

This scene, too, complicates a reading of Kay as Irish Mammy. On the one hand, some of Kay’s behavior clearly fits the type—she leaves her job when she gets married, and there is no indication that she works again in her life. On the other hand, Kay is the one who approaches

Gem when they begin dating (which would have been long before Inglis’ feminist start-date of 1970. Kay’s reaction to her granddaughter’s pregnancy is not to lecture her about morality or right and wrong, it is to embrace her and support her. Ultimately, even Kay’s desire to hide her emotional pain in a cigarette is thwarted, as she realizes that the price of smoking has skyrocketed since she last smoked.

In Kay’s next short scene, Lorraine comes to visit. We learn that

Kay makes Lorraine dinner, on her visits, to keep Lorraine from cleaning her house (28). Lorraine wants her mother to put Gem in a “home for a

15 Dating—not a reference to cocaine.

145 few days” so that Kay can have some personal time. Kay says that

“Lorraine has been at me for ages, saying I need to get a life outside of”

Gem (29). She continues, saying that her desire to take care of Gem, and of Gem’s house, “suited [Lorraine], though, when she went out to work and Mammy was there to mind Amber” (ibid). She finishes by saying that “my husband is sick and he needs me here. And I won’t have anyone let him think he’s a burden” (ibid).

Here, Kay is the Mammy—by her own definition. She keeps the house, she cooks for her adult daughter and she suffers silently with her husband’s illness. Unlike more traditional variations of the Mammy trope, however, Kay does not feel and apparently has never felt any need to impose her own desire for staying at home upon her daughter or her granddaughter. Kay is not interested, at least not in this narrative, in lecturing nor in being judgmental.

When we see Kay again, she tells us that Amber has had her baby and named him James—Gem’s “proper name” (34). Gem is, predictably thrilled. He is less thrilled, Kay tells us, about her having sent a neighbor to check in on him while she was away (35). After starting dinner, and while Gem sleeps in his chair, Kay goes up to her room and remembers Kermit—her toy. She tries to use him, but becomes frustrated and distracted. She says “truth is, I can’t cheat on Gem, even if it is with a six-inch piece of luminous green plastic” (35). As she puts

146 her “alien willy” away, she hears “the faint tinkle of a bell downstairs”

(36), she goes to check and finds:

Gem out of his chair, slumped face down beside the coffee table. Drag all thirteen stone16 of him to sit up. He’s gasping for air and even though his body isn’t moving, his eyes are darting all around the room. “Hold on, love, I’ll ring the ambulance.” I know if I let go of him he’ll fall face first back onto the floor. I’m trying to hold him up, pulling him toward the settee to lean up against it. He’s looking at me, trying to say something. I can’t make it out. Those brown eyes are turning black. (36)

What Gem is trying to say is “I love ye”—a message Kay understands just as he lets go. She says “not yet, I’m not ready yet” (36). She explains that “he never listened to me once in forty-two years of marriage and he sure as hell isn’t going to start now” (ibid). As she sits with his limp body, Kay says “wonder what I’ll do, now that I’m not his wife. It’s all I’ve ever been or wanted to be” (36).

This heart-wrenching scene is the epitome of the complication of

Kay as traditional Irish Mammy. She tries to use “Kermit” but can’t, she makes dinner for her husband, and she holds him while he dies. The juxtaposition of the sex-for-pleasure moment with the very conservative expression that being Gem’s wife has defined her life solidifies Kay as an

Irish Mammy for a changed Ireland.

At Gem’s funeral, Kay tells Amber that her grandfather was always proud of her (40). She remembers her husband fondly, ignores extended family, and suddenly realizes that he is permanently gone. She says, “I

16 182 pounds.

147 don’t want to be without him” (41), and continues, “I’ve been Mrs. James

Neville twice as long as I was ever Kay Kelly” (41). When Kay, Lorraine, and Amber return home, they collapse into Kay’s bed and, for reasons none of them know, the trio burst into giggles (48). When Amber picks up the baby and places him with them on the bed, Lorraine criticizes her, explaining that Amber will “give him bad habits” (ibid). When Lorraine appeals to her Kay to support her assessment, Kay replies with a simple

“let her do it her own way,” even though she “knows that Lorraine is dead right” (48).

In this final moment of the play, Kay completes her break from the stereotype of the Irish Mammy. She is no longer willing to stick to tradition, no longer willing to insist that the time-tested forms and ideas of motherhood are “right” just because they were in the past—or at leant willing to allow Amber to try things on her own. Kay is no longer the wife-mother, she no longer feels bound by Inglis’ “notions of self-denial and self-sacrifice” that her mother may have felt.

Like Elaine Murphy’s Kay, reconfigurations of the traditional Irish

Mammy can be found throughout Celtic Tiger era drama. In nearly all of

Marina Carr’s plays, in the character of Chris in Friel’s Dancing at

Lughnasa, (1991), in the mother character in Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus

(2007), motherhood and grandmotherhood are being reimagined, and the changing culture of Ireland is being reflected.

148 Part 3: The Sean Bhean Bhocht: Mother Ireland in the Tiger’s Den

The Sean Bhean Bhocht (often written as pronounced—Shan Van

Vocht), or “Poor Old Woman” is a traditional personification of Ireland.

In this section, after a brief look at the history of the tradition, and at contemporary criticism of it, the occurrence of the Shan Van Vocht character onstage during the Celtic Tiger is discussed. Most particularly, this section explores her notable absence from Tiger era drama, and the cultural reasons that she may no longer be needed.

Sean Bhean Bhocht is Irish for “poor old woman.” Kathryn Conrad explains the Sean Bhean Bhocht as:

A staple figure of Irish political ballads and satiric poetry from at least 1798 onward, [who] embodies the suffering of the nation: she appears in nationalist literature most often lamenting the loss of her land to the colonial invaders. (39)

The Sean Bhean Bhocht, then, is most often understood as a personification of Ireland—as “Mother Ireland”—a suffering woman in need of help. The character type became a popular rallying cry for the

Irish Nationalist movement of the Irish Literary Renaissance period

(c. 1875-1922). She was characterized in songs, in poetry, in journalism

(for example the journal Shan Van Vocht that was printed between 1896 and 1899), in art work (particularly political cartoons), and, of course, on stage.

By far the most famous appearance of the Sean Bhean Bhocht on the Irish stage is in Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan

149 (1902). In the play (set at the time and place of the 1798 Rebellion), a

“poor old woman” arrives at the home of the Gillane family, on the eve of

Michael’s wedding, and convinces the young man to leave his home to help her defend her “four beautiful green fields” (a traditional depiction of

Irelands four provinces—Leinster, Munster, Connacht, and Ulster) from

“strangers in the house” intent on seizing the land (7). The play was very much a work of Nationalist political theatre, and this version Sean Bhean

Bhocht was designed to help shape public opinion.

Shaw discusses the phenomenon of “the poor old woman” in his play John Bull’s Other Island (1904). Shaw, though is particularly interested in that use of the personification of Ireland as rallying cry.

Irishmen, Shaw says, “can't be intelligently political;” “if you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman” (125). An effective if troubling provocateur of Nationalist sentiment, the Sean Bhean Bhocht did not leave the stage at the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, nor with the birth of the Republic of Ireland in 1949.

In Irish drama, the personification of Ireland-as-old woman can be seen fairly frequently. After Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Shaw, She can be found in the figure of Mrs. Tancred in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock

(1924), of Mother in Tom Murphy’s Famine (1968), of Mommo in

Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985). As Melissa Shira writes, “the mother- figure in Irish theatre has traditionally been viewed as a personification

150 of the nation” (582). Some of these characters are the same type of long- suffering Catholic Irish Mammys discussed in Part 2, but not all of them.

Similarly, not all of the mothers discussed in Part 2 can be cleanly read as “personifications of the nation.” What all of these women have in common is that they have been intentionally and recognizably set as

Mother Ireland.

A Problematic Representation

While it had its Nationalist utility, the representation of women as personification of women is not without problems. Many critics have explored the issue through a feminist frame. Eamonn Jordan, in his book Dissident Dramaturgies (2010) writes:

In the traditional Irish play women were almost always obliged to substantiate patriarchal rule and were associated with home, otherness, and the land. (Within colonialism, woman is regarded as double colonized). (25)

Jordan, and others, find within the personification of woman-as-Ireland a close link to relegation to only the domestic sphere. Additionally, the idea that Ireland is a woman in need of rescue, and that that rescue must come from a male, or from the outside—but never from the agency of the woman herself—is very troubling indeed. Melissa Shira adroitly argues that:

It is important to interrogate the signification of “woman as idealized trope of nation” because the social and cultural position of woman has historically been one of symbolic centrality and subjective disavowal as both colonial ideology

151 and nationalist movements promoted feminized concepts of nation, while subordinating women in everyday life. (Qtd. in Jordan 32)

Shira correctly laments the mythical status of women in an Ireland characterized by a patriarchal marginalization of women.

Another thread of feminist criticism of the Sean Bhean Bhocht on stage is the fact that, apart from Lady Gregory’s work with Yeats on

Cathleen ni Houlihan, the majority of the plays that depict her were written by men. As Anne O’ Reilly points out, “generations of Irish women have lived stories that have been authored by men” (qtd. in

Jordan 194). Eamonn Jordan writes:

Feminist critics have argued that most Irish male playwrights offer their female characters a very limited range of dramaturgical functions within their dramas and that a narrow range of behaviors are a part of audience expectations. (25)

Anna McMullan fleshes out the range that Jordan mentions:

Women have been associated both with the homeland, as Mother Ireland, and with the domestic space, particularly in the kitchen. In the Irish theatrical canon women often figure a lost, damaged or barren home/land/womb. (Qtd in Jordan 25)

But as pointed out in Part 2, things are changing in Ireland. Just as the stereotypical Irish Mammy is being reconfigured, big changes happened to the Sean Bhean Bhocht during the Celtic Tiger.

152 The Celtic Tiger

The single biggest difference in the use of the Sean Bhean Bhocht onstage during the Tiger is, simply, that it is noticeably absent. Apart from revivals of plays from the canon that depicted Ireland-as-poor old woman, no new versions of this particular character premiered during the Tiger. This is not to say that Ireland-as-woman disappeared from the dramaturgical lexicon during the period, Ireland-on-stage simply got younger.

Melissa Shira, for example, argues that the character of Big Josie, in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, can be read as Ireland personified, but explains that this version is “an alternative to the romanticized literary

Mother Ireland” (582). Big Josie may personify Ireland, but there are substantial barriers to reading her as Sean Bhean Bhocht. First, she never actually appears on stage. Big Josie only exists in the stories told of her. Secondly, as a Tinker, a cultural outsider, she would be a problematic representation of Irishness. And most importantly, the Big

Josie discussed in the play disappeared when she was a young woman.

In short, she is not the “poor old woman.”

It is possible to read Ada in Enda Walsh’s The New Electric

Ballroom (2008) as a personification of Ireland. She is a woman whose sense of self and sexuality are shaped entirely by her older, more conservative (though hypocritical) sisters. She works, she would love to break free and take agency in her own life, but the stories and values

153 and traditions of the older generation of women around her have colored her world and created insurmountable fears and doubts. But, though she may be Ireland, or at least Irish women, personified, at only 40, she cannot be the Sean Bhean Bhocht.

The absence of the Sean Bhean Bhocht during the Celtic Tiger is not a coincidence. There are three distinct factors weighing on Irish culture during the Tiger that have rendered her obsolete. The first of these factors centers on the dramatic differences in the lives of women in

Ireland overall. As mentioned in Part 2, women are no longer defined by the traditional and Roman Catholic ideas about the place of women in society. Women are no longer seen to be weak and in need of rescue. A

Celtic Tiger woman, such as A in Terminus or Kay in Little Gem do not need anyone to free their green fields—they can do it themselves.

The next cultural factor is the decline in nationalist sentiment during the Celtic Tiger. The Celtic Tiger is characterized whether positively or negatively by increasing globalization in Ireland. As T. White puts it, “the Irish have culturally escaped from a parochial sense of nationalism and become a proud member of the international community” (qtd. in Coulter and Coleman 119-120). If this was truly the case during the Tiger, and the embracing of their place within the EU seems to imply that it was, then there was no need for the Sean Bhean

Bhocht to rally her troops. While nationalism was still a hot topic (and

154 remains one) in Northern Ireland during the 1990s and 2000s, in the

Republic, the Sean Bhean Bhocht simply had no work to do.

Finally, the “poor old woman’s” fate, as personification of Celtic

Tiger Ireland was sealed by the idea that the country could no longer be defined by those cultural elements that may be considered “old.”

In 1999, Fortune magazine’s Rob Norton painted a picture of the new, changed, Celtic Tiger Dublin:

Dublin this summer was teeming with these young Irish people, as well as with kids from all over Europe--they spilled out of the offices and shops and restaurants and cappuccino bars and pubs. For Dublin has become a trendy destination for eurokids--a hip, cosmopolitan place to hang out and practice your English for a summer or a year, and an easy place for anyone with an EU passport to get a job. And are there ever jobs to be had! Ireland in the 1990s is far and away the most dynamic, successful, fastest-growing nation in Europe. (Par. 2)

Norton later discusses the attitude of the Irish concerning the past and the future. He says that, while it might be tempting to assume that the

Irish cling to the past and fear cultural change:

To Irish thinkers, though, nothing could be further off base. Declan Kiberd, a literary scholar at University College, Dublin, argues that the Irish are one of the most ruthlessly future-oriented of all peoples. He cites their quick abandonment of Gaelic in the mid-19th century as one example, and Ireland's thorough embrace of business as another. "Far from being obsessed with the past," he writes, "what the Irish really worship is their own power over it, including (if need be) their power to liquidate seemingly sacred traditions." Anyone walking around Dublin this summer would have found it hard not to side with Kiberd. The New Ireland will be something very different. (Par. 44-45)

155 Norton’s predictions were correct.

“New Ireland” was indeed very different and as Kiberd implied, in order to properly personify it on stage, a new tradition would be needed.

If “new” Ireland can be personified, it is not by the Sean Bhean Bhocht, it is not by anything so traditional. The cultural tension between “new” and “old” Ireland can be seen (or not seen) in the absence of “old Mother

Ireland” during the Celtic Tiger.

156

Conclusion

In the introduction to his book Dissident Dramaturgies (2010),

Eamonn Jordan takes exception to the assertion by Fintan O’Toole that

Tom Murphy “has been able to dramatize an entire society at a time when the theatre has been forced to retreat into the dramatization of individual lives or the lives of a confined strata of society” (qtd. in Jordan

6). Jordan responds, “no playwright can ‘dramatize an entire society,’ and such burdens should not be on the work or on the making or receiving of theatre” (6). I disagree to some extent with both of these noted scholars.

O’Toole seems to be arguing that “dramatizations of individual lives” are somehow precluded from containing within them deeper pictures of society. As I have attempted to show in this dissertation, however, it is entirely possible to dramatize, for example, the looming death of Mai O’Hara, and to include in that small and private moment the echo of a much larger societal discourse.

Jordan is right, it would be impossible for one playwright to create a single work, or even a corpus, that can encapsulate all of the nuances implicit in an “entire society.” However, a dramatist does not need to try to write sweepingly about an entire society in order to capture, and

157 dramatize, that society’s worldview. There is no need for a piece of theatre to try to speak for an entire society, but there is also no way to prevent a play, regardless of the author’s intent, from reflecting the society in which they write.

Rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke wrote that while a writer is:

perfectly conscious of the act of writing, conscious of selecting a certain kind of imagery to reinforce a certain kind of mood, etc., he cannot possibly be conscious of the interrelationships among all of these equations. (Qtd. in Foss 72)

Sonia Foss explains that some kinds of analysis, such as Burke’s

“cluster analysis” for example, “provide ‘a survey of the hills and valleys’ of the [writer’s] mind, resulting in insights into the meanings of key terms and thus a worldview that may not be known to the [writer]” (72).

In other words, it is possible to find in a writer’s work a broader worldview which the author may be unaware that they are presenting. I do not mean to claim that the playwrights discussed here necessarily intended to reflect the discourses that I have uncovered in their work. I do not know, for example, that Marina Carr meant there to be any association between By the Bog of Cats and the societal discourse on abortion in Ireland but, as noted in Chapter 4, that link can be made.

Conor McPherson has addressed this issue directly. In an article he wrote in 1999 he said “when I write something I never do it because

I'm trying to make some point” (“Old Ireland Bad, New Ireland Good”).

158 He continues:

I once heard an academic remark that the popularity of The Weir was due to its representation of Old Ireland meeting New Ireland. The men who drink in the bar are the remnants of Old Ireland. They are comfortable with superstition. They are secure in their community and each knows his place in the pecking order. Then a woman from Dublin arrives and she is representative of the newer, changing, modern Ireland. Expected to fend for herself as an individual, she feels abandoned and has become dysfunctional. She's lonely and confused. The men in the bar take it upon themselves to console her. They accept her belief that she has had a terrifying supernatural encounter and they don't judge her. And, just as all of us often feel like we'd like to take off somewhere for a while and sort ourselves out, this reading of the play suggests that New Ireland is a cold, alienating place where you are supposed to make decisions in a climate of uncertainty, and Old Ireland was a place where we'd like to go now. Even for a little while. Hear the old stories. Sit by the fire. Share your troubles. I can see why, especially in urban environments like London and New York, people see the play as some kind of consolation. And perhaps more so with expatriates and people of Irish descent. As I say, I don't know if this is why the play has been so popular. It's fairly plausible. (“Old Ireland Bad, New Ireland Good”)

But, he concludes, if this reading of The Weir—which I argue in Chapter

1—is correct, then his “new play, Dublin Carol, won't have as easy a time.” That play is about something different—the shifting narrative on alcohol, as discussed in Chapter 3, or something else, which I will discuss in a moment. McPherson says:

But if we apply the "New Ireland relating to Old Ireland" reading to Dublin Carol, it seems to be saying the opposite to what The Weir is saying. John seems to come from a place where he was constantly told he was fairly worthless as a person. Catholicism as an education stressed his need to be redeemed. Though perhaps he was never quite sure what he was doing wrong. And, while he may have been told that Jesus would forgive anything, it still meant that he had done something which needed to be forgiven. Mark and Mary

159 come from the newer, changing and changed Ireland. They've been exposed to different cultures and are capable of seeing more than perhaps just "both sides" of an argument. They come from an Ireland where when someone tells them they are bad people, they can simply answer "Why?" Again, let me stress that I don't know if this is what Dublin Carol is necessarily "about". But if it's true that people see The Weir as a sort of Old Ireland - good, New Ireland - bad play and that this is why they've liked it, it's going to be interesting to see what the same audience will make of this one. (Ibid)

Other playwrights are more overt about their intentions, such as Elaine

Murphy’s desire to write women she knew into Little Gem, but the upshot is the same—the worldviews and societies that the playwrights function within are undoubtedly reflected in these plays, even though many of them “retreat into the dramatization of individual lives.”

Artifacts

In his lecture-cum-essay “History’s Dark Places,” ethnographic folklorist Henry Glassie explains his vision of history, saying that it “is not the past. History is a story about the past, told in the present, and designed to be useful in constructing the future” (1). He continues

The past is vast, and it is gone. Almost all of it is gone utterly, leaving no trace in the mind or archive. We know the past only through things that chance to exist in the present: old books, broken pots, disturbed memories. (1)

It is this view of history that has guided this work. Like broken pots, I see theatrical texts as “artifacts”—as things that “chance to exist in the present.”

160 Seen through Glassie’s lens, each of the plays analyzed here can be seen as a story about the past, the recent past, at the time of this study, but the past nonetheless. These plays, these stories, each reveal a moment in time, and a moment in space. It is by these plays, and others like it, that Irish history, the history of the Celtic Tiger era, may one day be studied. Certainly this has been true of earlier Irish plays. Through the works of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Synge, much can be learned about the social history of Ireland at the turn of the 20th century. The work of

Friel has been studied in terms of its resonance with “The Troubles” in

Northern Ireland. It is important, then, that we endeavor to understand the story these plays are telling.

This dissertation has examined the work of four playwrights—

Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson, and Elaine Murphy. It has looked specifically at characters, in their plays, who are “old.” The youngest character here, Mai in Barry’s Our Lady of Sligo is only 53—far too young to be considered old—but she continually refers to herself and to her cancer-ridden body as old. Other characters are in their late fifties, sixties, and seventies. It would be tempting to see these characters as representations in some way of the playwrights’ peer groups, making the case that the writers are writing what they know.

This, however, is not the case. The oldest of the playwrights, Sebastian

Barry, was born in 1955, making him only 47 when Hinterland, the newest of his plays discussed here, was written. The others are younger.

161 Marina Carr was born in 1964, Conor McPherson in 1971, and Elaine

Murphy was under 30 when Little Gem debuted. Since all of the playwrights were under 50, the placement on stage of characters of age became a place to look for that story.

Through these “old” characters, Barry, Carr, Murphy, and

McPherson reflected the destabilization of some of the longest-held social narratives in Ireland. McPherson gave us commentary on urban versus rural Ireland, alcohol, and change itself. Barry staged tensions about the government, about the idea of a homogeneous “nationalist” Ireland, and about the stereotype of the Irish drunk. Carr and Murphy imploded traditional representations of women, refracting the changes in the lives of Irish women and in the relationship between the society and the

Catholic Church during the Celtic Tiger. The Tiger having upset so many of the bases on which Irishness has been defined, another master- narrative for Ireland has emerged—and this is firmly reflected in all of these plays, and in much of the critical writing about the Celtic Tiger era.

This new narrative is one of change.

Change

If one were to define Ireland, or Irishness, during the Celtic Tiger era, the most accurate picture of the country would be one riven with change. It can be no coincidence that nearly every book examining the

Celtic Tiger period, regardless of the focus of the book itself, opens with a

162 statement about cultural change in the country. Eamonn Jordan’s

Dissident Dramaturgies, for example, which examines Irish drama between 1980 and 2010, begins:

From the mid to late 1980s until the end of the millennium and after, Irish society altered radically and it did so at a pace previously unknown and unanticipated, even by those who offered the most fanciful imaginings, optimistic reckonings, and projections. This transformation worked its way through almost all echelons, economic, political, social, intellectual, and cultural. (1)

Ivana Bacik’s Kicking and Screaming: Dragging Ireland into the 21st

Century (2004), a critical look at the Irish legal system, begins “Ireland has changed dramatically in recent decades” (9), and continues:

by the 1990s, and into the present decade, we have witnessed the emergence of a much more progressive and diverse society, a symbol of economic success for all small states in Europe. (9)

Her book proceeds to characterize and critically analyze these cultural changes. Even books that are critical of the economics and inequities of the Celtic Tiger boom, such as Fintan O’Toole’s After the Ball (2003), discuss loudly the sweeping cultural changes in Ireland during the period.

In Declan Kiberd’s seminal Inventing Ireland (written in 1995, and dealing not at all with the Celtic Tiger that was only beginning at the time of publication), much is said about the use of literature both dramatic and otherwise in shaping a cultural narrative. Kiberd says, for example, that Yeats and Lady Gregory and others writing at the turn of the twentieth century “would all have understood the force of Walter

163 Benjamin’s observation that ‘every age not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it towards wakefulness’” (4). This thoughtfulness about times to come does two things—one is to acknowledge an awareness of change, and the other is to recognize within this awareness some sort of complicity in providing the context for coming times. In short, Kiberd is arguing that Irishness has always been to some very real degree “invented” in books and on stage. In closing his book, Kiberd says:

The exponents of the Irish Renaissance shaped and reshaped an ancient past, and duly recalled it, giving rise to an unprecedented surge of creativity and self-confidence among the people. The task facing this generation is at once less heroic and more complex: to translate the recent past, the high splendours and subsequent disappointments of that renaissance, into the terms of a new century. (641).

How could Kiberd have begun to foresee the degree to which Irishness would need to be reinvented as that new century came to light?

In the midst of an historical period so defined by change, Sebastian

Barry, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson, and Elaine Murphy, went to work to try to reinvent Ireland. They constructed, in very different ways, a theatre that commented upon the present and reshaped the recent past.

Each of them present material that reflects the changes that they saw around them, and the traditional narratives that ceased to define them.

Into characters of age, the playwrights placed reexaminations of the ideological “hinterlands” that had guided Irish thought for decades—

164 hinterlands that were being systemically unearthed during the Celtic

Tiger era.

Through a reading of the unstable narratives presented in these plays one can reconstruct the culture in Celtic Tiger Ireland and identify the newly emerging cultural narrative—one that is new and unique, in

Ireland, to the Celtic Tiger period—change.

Looking Forward: Beyond the Tiger

Irish theatre today is healthy, relevant, and popular. It is challenging the status quo(s), complicating thinking, pushing the envelope, and expanding the conception of what Ireland is. The major theatre companies—The Druid in Galway, The Abbey and The Gate in

Dublin—are being pushed by each other and by other smaller companies. The Dublin Theatre Festival celebrated its 54th season this year and remains, by all available measures, as viable and important a festival as any on the globe. In Northern Ireland, the Belfast Festival at

Queens has continued to grow in recent years. Irish plays are popular worldwide, and this is being helped through a concerted effort by Culture

Ireland to promote Irish tourism and awareness though arts and culture.

This project called “Imagine Ireland” has provided funding and support for numerous world tours of plays including The Abbey’s production of

Mark O”Rowe’s Terminus, the Druid’s tour of McDonagh’s The Cripple of

Inishmaan, and Pan Pan’s production of The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane.

165 It is clear that Culture Ireland sees Irish theatre as an essential purveyor of Irishness.

While theatre in Ireland, and by Irish playwrights, existed before its founding, it is appropriate to imply that Irish theatre began with the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902. In her Our Irish

Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory explains the very specific mission and ideology of the society:

We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us. (9-10)

While Lady Gregory (and her colleagues Yeats and Synge) understood that this was an ambitious proposal, it prepared the ground for what became The Abbey Theatre, and a tradition of Irish theatre that can still be seen today. This was more than the founding of a organization, it was a call to arms for a theatre that would not only reflect, but create and, in the words of Declan Kiberd, “invent” Irishness.

166 From the beginning Irish theatre was political. The plays of Yeats,

Lady Gregory, and Synge were imbued with a political sensibility that was very apparent. So much so that a lack of Nationalist sentiment in

Synge’s work—especially Playboy of the Western World—led at least in part to the riots that followed the play for a decade. The role of creating

Irishness, showing the Irish what it means to be Irish (as opposed to

British), imbedded in the mission statement of the National Theatre

Society, was undoubtedly a part of the cultural shift towards Irish independence. As Fintan O’Toole explains:

The distinguishing characteristic of the Irish theatre that emerged from the ferment of the late 19thcentury was its close connection to the public world. When WB Yeats asked later in life, “Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” the smart answer was, “No – and, by the way, didn’t Lady Gregory write most of Cathleen Ni Houlihan?” But the question was not ridiculous. Most of those “the English shot” – the leaders of the 1916 Rising – were deeply engaged in theatre, and it helped to shape their imaginations. Patrick Pearse even wrote a play, The Singer, anticipating his own martyr’s death. (“Can Irish Dramatists” Par. 6)

This political significance continued through Irish theatre history.

Fintan O’Toole recently released his own version of a state-of-Irish- theatre treatise. He laments that for him, Irish theatre has ceased to

“ask the big questions,” to challenge society and the status quo. O’ Toole makes it very clear that now, in the midst of a terrible recession following the demise of The Celtic Tiger1 Irish theatre has some very important

1 The very existence of which O’Toole questioned in his 2003 book After The Ball.

167 questions to be asking—but is not. O’Toole says that the current state of theatre in Ireland begs the “question of how come no one managed to write a big public play that really touched the rawest nerves of a society in the throes of collective madness” (par. 9). He suggests:

Part of the answer lies in another question: who were the playwrights supposed to be against? The previous century in Ireland was a target-rich environment. The enemies were both large and static: the British Empire; the new Free State; the Catholic Church; the Irish version of the American dream. There were big narratives to draw on or to subvert: Irish freedom, emigration, the struggle between tradition and modernity, the sexual revolution, the Northern conflict. In the course of the 1990s all of these narratives seemed to have reached their conclusion. The “national struggle” was ended by the peace process. The war between tradition and modernity ended in apparently total victory for the modernisers. Putting sex on stage no longer shocked anyone. Emigration seemed to be gone for good, replaced by the more difficult story of immigration. The church was doing such a good job of self-destruction that it seemed a little cruel to kick it. There was a big theme – money – but it was too fast- moving and ambivalent to be easily dramatised. And playwrights weren’t outsiders any more. The previous generation of dramatists had little choice but to be at an angle to power. The Establishment had no great desire to assimilate them. By the 1990s, however, art and literature had become a central aspect of official identity. The stimulus of rejection was lacking. Mainstream theatre drifted away from two simple notions: the idea of saying something and the commitment to playing out conflict. (Par. 9-10)

O’Toole has a point. Irish theatre is not overtly talking about big-picture politics.

O’Toole traces a trajectory from Yeats, Gregory, and Synge through

Sean O’Casey and along to Brendan Behan. The mantle, he says, was picked up by Brien Friel, Tom Murphy, and others. O’Toole is correct.

Each of these playwrights wrote political plays that asked loud and

168 difficult questions. Frank McGuiness should to be in this mix, as well as

Stewart Parker, Gary Mitchell, and Anne Devlin (all from Northern

Ireland). Political themes run through nearly every play by these playwrights.

In response to his article, Sara Keating wrote, “O’Toole’s dismissal of the work of major writers such as Mark O’Rowe, Enda Walsh, and

Michael West, among others, and younger collaborative artists such as

Brokentalkers, Anu, and TheatreClub seems short-sighted” (par.2).

Keating has a good point. She goes on to describe how the work of many of the playwrights O’Toole identifies as currently significant such as

Marina Carr, Sebastian Barry, Conor McPherson, Mark O’Rowe, Martin

McDonagh, and Enda Walsh are very political—just not in the way that their predecessors were.

What O’Toole is missing is that, in addition to the politics in the plays by his preferred playwrights (Friel, Murphy, etcetera), there was intense humanity. The plays are deeply philosophical and densely written. They certainly also carry a political message if one is inclined to look for one. This message can be read as loudly as O’Toole wishes, but there is far more to the plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy than politics. Likewise, there is more to the work of Marina Carr, Conor

McPherson, Sebastian Barry (et al.) than the narrative storytelling that

O’Toole identifies.

169 Marina Carr’s plays are political in many ways. Her play Arial, for example, is about a politician who murders his daughter for political gain. Nor is Carr alone. Keating notes:

The violent suburban wasteland of Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie , the 48-hour brawling binge of Conor McPherson’s Rum and Vodka , the anti-social psychic rupture of adolescence in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs : these plays might not have been political in the way that Brian Friel’s Translations or Tom Murphy’s The Sanctuary Lamp were, but they expressed a fundamental dis-ease with a society where the governing structures of church and State – no matter how dysfunctional – had entirely fallen away. These were plays that embodied the legacy of these failures rather than debated the consequences. (Par. 6)

These playwrights, I believe have all successfully taken up the challenge set down by Lady Gregory and her companions.

The founders of the Irish National Theatre Society would be very pleased by the current state of the Irish theatre. Certainly they could never have conceived of theatre having the type of competition it does, from television, movies, the internet, etcetera. They could also, though, never have conceived of the international success of Irish theatre. It would thrill Yeats to know that productions of Irish plays have been presented throughout Europe, often being translated into the local languages. The idea that Irish plays were being treated with the same reverence on the continent as Ibsen and Chekhov would delight Yeats.

Synge would be particularly pleased with the refusal of simplified notions of Irishness—he would cheer Mark O’Rowe’s work (Terminus, Howie The

Rookie) and Enda Walsh’s (Sucking Dublin and Disco Pigs) among others,

170 for their non-romanticized portrayal of contemporary Ireland. Lady

Gregory would be impressed that Marina Carr is such a success—and with no need to share credit with a male colleague. She would be proud of the Abbey for its resilience and ability to overcome literal and proverbial fires and remain relevant.

It is difficult to predict exactly what is to come for Irish theatre as the political, social, and economic landscape shifts every day. Looking, however, at recent trends, a tendency towards smaller plays and smaller companies will likely continue. While the Abbey, the Gate, and the Druid will continue to flourish, there is increasing attention and governmental support for other theatrical voices. The 2011 edition of the Dublin

Theatre Festival’s most critically successful pieces were by smaller companies. Most of the plays that earned considerable attention during the festival were innovative in form and content. As Ireland continues to emerge from economic recession, these smaller companies such as Pan

Pan and Brokentalkers should continue to thrive.

Another current trend is an introspective consideration of the theatre. Two recent pieces, Pan Pan’s The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane and The Abbey’s production of 16 Possible Glimpses by Marina Carr, are about theatre itself. The former is a deconstruction of casting the role of

Hamlet, and the latter is about the life of Chekhov. Add to this Enda

171 Walsh’s Walworth Farce, which deconstructed the very act of performative storytelling. This movement will likely continue.

We will see increasingly plays that investigate gender issues and a surge in plays about issues of homosexuality. The theatrical movement towards exploration of gender in Ireland has been slow in coming. It began, perhaps, in earnest, with Marina Carr’s Low in the Dark in 1989.

Her play, similar in style and form to the work of Caryl Churchill, is most remarkable—additionally so in that it came a full decade after Churchill’s

Cloud Nine. Building on the work of Carr, playwrights such as Elaine

Murphy, in her Little Gem, have continued to explore this issue theatrically. As noted in Chapter 4, the Celtic Tiger period caused a reconsideration of the traditional narratives of gender roles in Ireland which is likely to continue to be examined on stage.

Recently, there have been several plays highlighting the lives of homosexuals in Ireland. Brokentalkers’ Silver Stars discusses the realities of being a gay man in Ireland. A multi-media presentation of real-life interviews, the play centers on men who had to leave Ireland in order to find acceptance. The play has been an international success.

More recently, as its entry in the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival,

HotForTheatre presented I ♥ Alice ♥ I by Amy Conroy. The play is about a lesbian couple and the journey of their coming out. This movement should continue to gain momentum. Ireland has recently seen an insurgence in gay rights, including a relatively progressive civil

172 partnership law (civil unions became legal in Ireland in 2011).

Additionally, the success of openly gay David Norris in his bid for

Presidency of Ireland2 demonstrates a growing acceptance for the gay community in the country. As a result of this changing narrative, an increasing attention to queer theory is beginning to take shape in

Ireland, with recent scholarship by Fintan Walsh, Eibhear Walshe,

Cormac O’Brien, and Brian Singleton.

Finally, Irish theatre should continue to hold a prominent place on the world stage. New plays, about Ireland, by Irish playwrights, continue to premiere in London—Conor McPherson’s The Veil for example. This year’s “First Irish Theatre Festival” in New York, in its fourth year, was a rousing success. Irish plays continue to be produced regionally and on

Broadway, both in premier and in revival. In 2012, Galway’s Druid

Theatre successfully presented a world tour of DruidMurphy, a celebration of the work of Tom Murphy. The University of Notre Dame hosted a conference on Irish Drama in 2012, and Goldsmiths College of the University of London’s conference on “The Future State of Ireland,” in

November 2012, featured keynote speeches by prominent theatre scholars Roy Foster and Fintan O’Toole.

Irish theatre has long been an integral part of the process of

“inventing” Ireland, and its study important in understanding the Irish.

2 Norris finished in the top half of a seven-person race, overcoming personal scandal to do so.

173 This is evidenced by the fact that several of Ireland’s principal social commentators such as Kiberd, O’Toole, and Foster are also theatre scholars. Many of the central figures in Irish history have written plays, from James Joyce, WB Yeats, and Lady Augusta Gregory to Frank

McCourt and even Pádraig Pearse, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter

Rising. This dissertation has attempted to seize upon the cultural centrality of theatre in Ireland, and to use theatrical text as a means to present a snapshot of Irish culture.

174

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Appendix A: Synopses of Major Plays

Plays listed alphabetically by title:

By the Bog of Cats, Marina Carr (1998): The play centers on the final day of Hester’s life. Hester, a Tinker (an Irish Traveller or Gypsy, very marginalized in Ireland), lives in a caravan with her daughter, Josie—the illegitimate offspring of wealthy Carthage Kilbride. Their caravan is frequently visited by Josie’s paternal grandmother Mrs. Kilbride, who disapproves of Hester, of Hester’s late mother Big Josie, and of anything that does not conform to her pious Catholic worldview. Also present in the play are the Catwoman, a local witch, the blind seer who foretells

Hester’s death; Xavier Cassidy, the father of Carthage’s betrothed, who owns the land on which Hester’s caravan is parked, and who wants

Hester to leave; the ghost of Hester’s late brother, who Hester murdered; an elderly priest, Father Willow; and a kindly neighbor woman, Monica.

A retelling of the Medea tale from the Greek canon, the action of the play begins with Hester dragging the corpse of the great swan Black

Wing across the frozen bog. The Catwoman appears and prophesizes

Hester’s death, echoing the words of The Ghost Fancier, a mysterious stranger, who indicates that Hester will die before the day is out. Next we

183 visit the caravan itself, where Josie and Mrs. Kilbride play cards, and where Mrs. Kilbride treats the seven-year-old girl very cruelly. We learn of the past relationship between Hester and Carthage, of Carthage’s impending wedding to Caroline Cassidy, and of Xavier Cassidy’s plan to evict Hester and Josie. We learn also of the disappearance of Big Josie,

Hester’s mother. Then we visit Carthage’s wedding where his mother makes a grotesque scene and Hester a tragic one. Hester returns home and is confronted by the ghost of her brother. Josie arrives at home to tell Hester that she is accompanying her father on his honeymoon.

Hester kills the girl, understanding that her place in society will be forever colored by Hester’s past and their shared ethnic identity. Finally,

Hester kills herself.

Dublin Carol, Conor McPherson (2000): This play is split into three parts, each part an individual scene. The play takes place in the

Northside Dublin office of an undertaker on Christmas Eve (December

24). In Part 1, John (the protagonist of the play) has just returned from a funeral with Mark, a new employee. Mark is the nephew of Noel, the mortician who owns the business. In this scene the two men discuss their lives—Mark has a girlfriend, John is a drinker. We learn that John had been a heavy alcoholic, and that it was Noel’s intervention that pulled him out of a downward spiral. John tells Mark that he has done well in that day’s work, and that he could have a future in the

184 undertaking trade. Mark says that he may go to college instead. When the scene ends, John tells Mark to return later that day to collect his pay.

In Part 2, John meets with his estranged adult daughter, Mary.

Mary has come to tell John that his wife, Helen, is dying of cancer, and to ask that John come to visit her. John and Helen have not seen each other in many years, since John left the family to live with a woman named Carol who helped feed his alcoholism. John and Mary share painful memories about the past, about John’s drinking, and about the impact of his disease on the family. John reluctantly agrees to visit

Helen in the hospital, and as Mary leaves, she asks that John not drink again before the visit later that evening.

Part 3 features a very drunk John, who is awakened by Mark only an hour before Mary is to return and collect him. Mark tells John that he has tried to break up with his girlfriend but failed when the girl reacted poorly to the news. John asks that Mark help take down the

Christmas decorations in the office, because a decorated space after

Christmas is over makes John sad—he says that he feels the same way most days about getting dressed. John shares a memory of the terrible hangovers and lifestyle caused by prolonged binge drinking. As the play ends John replaces the Christmas decorations that Mark had helped him to take down.

185 Hinterland, Sebastian Barry (2002): The play follows Johnny Silvester through a weekend of his life. Johnny is a disgraced former politician who is facing an inquest on multiple charges of corruption. As the play opens Johnny is visited by Cornelius, the ghost of a former colleague.

The two discuss their political lives. Next, Johnny is confronted by his wife Daisy, who is (understandably) angry about Johnny’s 27-year-long affair with Connie, who visits him at the end of the play. We also learn that Johnny’s health is failing, and that he has been visited by a doctor.

Next Johnny talks with his son Jack who is suicidal and feels that his father has always been absent in his life. Johnny is then interviewed by

Aisling—a young student who confronts him about his political corruption. Finally, Johnny’s long-time mistress visits and is discovered in his office by Daisy, ruining any hope of reconciliation between the couple.

Little Gem, Elaine Murphy (2010): The play presents three women, all related to one another, each telling about a year in their lives from their own perspective. These stories are told in an interlocking style, in a rotating pattern. Amber, the youngest character—(“eighteen/nineteen”) begins the play telling about the night of her debutante ball and the subsequent night of drinking (and a little cocaine) that ensues. As her tale unfolds, we learn that Amber is pregnant and that her child’s father,

Paul, is leaving for Australia. Ultimately, she has her son (who she

186 names James, after her grandfather who goes by Gem), and continues to live with her mother Lorraine.

Lorraine (“late thirties/ early forties”) takes up the narrative next.

Her story involves a minor breakdown in the retail shop where she works and a subsequent trip to the doctor. The doctor tells Lorraine that she must “do one nice thing” for herself every week. This “nice thing” becomes a reluctant trip, with friends, to a salsa dancing class, where

Lorraine meets Niall. Although Niall is very hairy and a bit sweaty,

Lorraine goes home with him and has a failed sexual encounter. When they meet up later, they begin a relationship that is by all measures successful and healthy—Niall helps Lorraine through Amber’s pregnancy, her encounter with her deadbeat estranged husband, and the death of her father.

The final character we meet is Lorraine’s mother (and Amber’s grandmother) Kay. Kay, (“early/mid sixties”), introduces herself by telling us about her “itch, down there.” We learn that though she sees a dermatologist about that itch, the real cause may be the decline in Kay’s sex life following her husband’s stroke. For a possible solution to her problem, Kay visits a boutique shop and buys herself a sex toy. We learn that Kay is the first person Amber tells about her pregnancy—a fact that causes Lorraine some emotional distress—and we follow Kay through the sudden death of her husband, James—or Gem—and its aftermath.

187 Our Lady of Sligo, Sebastian Barry (1998): Set in Jervis Street

Hospital in Dublin in 1953, the play centers on Mai O’Hara. Mai, 53, is dying of liver cancer brought on by decades of alcoholism. In the play,

Mai is in and out of lucidity, in a haze brought on largely by the morphine she is given to dull the pain of the cancer. As the play begins

Mai talks to the ghost of her father and, upon waking fully, to the young nun who is her nurse. She is visited by her husband Jack and daughter

Joanie and, in a series of flashbacks, the violent and brutal history of their lives is revealed. Jack and Mai are both heavy drinkers and they fought incessantly.

We learn of Mai’s personal history and of Jack’s military service.

Mai and Jack learn to negotiate a “free” Ireland, following the war for

Independence and the Irish Civil War. Jack’s drinking and gambling caused Mai to have to sell her father’s house, and Mai herself turned to drink. The couple had a son, Colin, after Mai began drinking heavily, and the boy died due to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Jack blames Mai explicitly for Colin’s death, and the resultant guilt and grief drives her further to the bottle. Mai has an affair with the local doctor, and flees to her cousin Maria’s home—but the guilt she feels about Joanie having seen the tryst sends her back home and away from the solace of Maria’s house.

In the present time, Jack and Joanie visit the hospital, where Mai and Jack share memories and, since neither is drunk, get along. Joanie

188 explains that she has been terrified of her mother for quite some time.

As the play ends, Mai’s father returns with the ghost of her sister, Cissie, who had died when they were both young. The spirits beckon Mai into death as Jack says that he hopes that some lesson might be learned from their sad lives.

Port Authority, Conor McPherson (2001): Port Authority features three men telling stories. The monologues are interwoven with each other, the stories are unrelated, except for a few details that cross over from one story to another. Joe is described in the script as “seventy-odd,” Kevin is said to be “maybe twenty,” and Dermot is in his “late thirties? Mid-

Thirties.” The play is “set in the theatre.”

Kevin, the youngest character, is the first to speak. He explains that he has just moved out of his parents’ house for the first time. He will be moving into a house with three friends—the frequently drunk

Davy, who is known throughout Dublin as “Mad Davy Rose;” a friend of

Davy’s called Speedy, whom Kevin dislikes; and Clare, with whom

“everybody in Dublin was in love.” The rest of his narrative follows about one month of his life. He tells of going to a pub to hear Davy’s band The

Bangers. At the concert he meets Trish, whom he dates. He talks about a house party that his roommates throw that gets somewhat out of hand, and results in his moving back home with his parents. Mostly Kevin’s

189 story centers around his affection for Clare, and their relationship with each other.

Dermot speaks next and tells about his experiences with a new job.

He explains that he is embarrassed about his wife who is overweight, and does not fit in with the image he is trying to create. Then Dermot tells several stories about his new job. The first story centers around a dinner party during which he gets very drunk and gets caught staring at his new boss’s wife’s breasts. Dermot says he is unexplainably forgiven for this transgression, and invited to travel with the company to America to see a band called The Bangers. While in America, Dermot finally learns that his suspicions that he got a job he did not deserve are correct. His boss, O’Hagan, explains that he was hired instead of someone with the same name who had come highly recommended. Dermot flies home to his wife, dejected, and is given some comfort. Mary, Dermot’s wife, cradles his head in her lap and explains that she chose to love him because he needed someone to look after him.

Joe is the last to begin. From his first narrative we learn that he lives in a rest home with twenty other people. He says that Sister Pat, his friend, has brought him a present that arrived in the mail at his son’s house, and that his son’s wife had dropped it off on her way to work.

This confounds both Joe and Sister Pat because it is not his birthday.

Joe tells Sister Pat that he will open his gift after breakfast, irritating the nun who is quite curious about the package and its contents. Joe goes

190 to the dining room, greets some of the other residents, eats, and finally opens his gift. Inside the box are a picture and a note. He understands that a friend has died.

Joe had been married to Liz, and had two children. Joe discusses some of the differences between Ireland in the 1960s and Ireland today, concluding that things are neither better nor worse than they were then, only different. Joe tells of his encounter with Marion Ross, his new neighbor. Marion and her husband invited Joe and Mary over to their home for a birthday party, and Joe and Marion found themselves in the kitchen together, talking. While the conversation was entirely innocent,

Joe had had a dream the previous night about a woman that loved him unconditionally, and while Marion looked nothing like this dream woman, Joe became convinced that it must have been her. When he went home that evening, he says he felt terrible guilt about the whole thing, even though nothing happened. After that, Joe did not see or speak much to Marion until Liz had to go into the hospital to have an ovarian cyst removed. While Liz was gone, the Ross couple invited Joe over for a drink, and while there, Joe had admired a small picture of

Marion as a child. Joe wanted the picture, but did not take it when offered. It was this picture that arrived at the beginning of the play;

Marion had died. At the end of the play, Joe lies down on his bed with the picture in one hand and rosary beads that Liz had bought in Lourdes

191 in the other. Joe never got over the guilt of his uneventful encounter with Marion, nor did he love his wife any less because of it.

The Steward of Christendom, Sebastian Barry (1995): This play is set in 1932, and centers on Thomas Dunne, a retired policeman, who is in a nursing home in Baltinglass, County Wicklow. Thomas is mad and fades in and out of lucidity. The action of the play follows Thomas through his interactions with the staff of his facility, Smith and Mrs. O’Dea, and with his daughter Annie. The bulk of the play, however, consists of Thomas’ visions of his past. Thomas recounts his years of service as a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, including the turnover of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins in 1922. Loyalist Thomas explains his thoughts and confusions about the wars that led to and followed Irish independence.

The play also features Thomas’ memories of his family, particularly his daughters Annie, Maud, and Dolly. Thomas is also visited by the ghost of his son Willie, who was killed in WWI.

The Weir, Conor McPherson (1997): The action of the play centers on a single night in which a new resident has moved to the area, and is being shown around by local businessman Finbar. The arrival of this new resident has caught the attention of the locals, Jack, Jim, and the owner of the pub, Brendan, for one reason—she is a woman. Finbar

192 brings Valerie to the pub to meet the locals, and they engage in a nice evening of “craic,” Irish for lively conversation and community.

Throughout the evening, the inhabitants of Brendan’s pub take turns telling ghost stories. Jack, the oldest of the characters, goes first telling a story about a fairy road that travels straight through the house that Valerie has just moved into.

The next story is told by Finbar—widely considered a blow-hard by his friends in the pub. Finbar relates his personal experience in which a young neighbor girl allegedly summoned a demon with an Ouija Board.

Jim is next (44-48). His story is based on a personal experience in which he saw a ghost with his own eyes. While helping a priest from a neighboring town dig a grave, the ghost of the man he was helping bury walked over and asked to be buried in another grave. The other grave belonged to a young girl who had recently died. Later, Jim found out that the man had a reputation for being a child molester. Dramatically, this story also serves to set up a row between Finbar and Jack, over the nature of their interest in Valerie.

Valerie’s story happens next in the play. In it, she relates the events of the death of her young daughter, and tells of a phone call in which she believes she heard her daughter’s voice. We learn why Valerie has left Dublin, we learn of her broken marriage, we learn of her heartbreaking loss.

193 Finally, Jack tells a very personal tale about the loss of the love of his life through his bad decisions. The meaning found here seems to be a lesson for Valerie to not throw her life away and for Brendan, the young pub owner, to keep looking for love, however painful.

The final moments in the play show Brendan tidying up and preparing to take Valerie and Jack home. As the three decompress from their emotional evening, talk turns to the German tourists that are going to start arriving in the area in the next few weeks. These tourists, who will frequent Brendan’s small pub, are seen as an intrusion by Jack and

Jim.

194