The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson 9781350051218, 9781350051249, 9781350051232

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THE THEATRE AND FILMS OF CONOR MCPHERSON

Eamonn Jordan is Associate Professor in Drama Studies at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Ireland. His published works include The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (1997), Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (2010), From Leenane to LA: The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh (2014). He has edited Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (2000), with Lilian Chambers he has co-edited The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A  World of Savage Stories (2006) and The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right beside the Beyond’ (2012). Most recently, he co-edited with Eric Weitz The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre (2018).

Online resources are to accompany this book are available at: https:// bloomsbury.com/the-theatre-and-films-of-conor-mcpherson9781350051218/. Please type the URL into your web browser and follow the instructions to access the Companion Website. If you experience any problems, please contact Bloomsbury at: contact @bloomsbury.com

Also available in the Critical Companions series from Methuen Drama: BRITISH MUSICAL THEATRE SINCE 1950 Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin and Millie Taylor BRITISH THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 1900–1950 Rebecca D’Monté  A CRITICAL COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN STAGE MUSICAL Elizabeth L. Wollman DISABILITY THEATRE AND MODERN DRAMA: RECASTING MODERNISM Kirsty Johnston MODERN ASIAN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 1900–2000 Kevin J. Wetmore, Siyuan Liu and Erin B. Mee THE PLAYS OF SAMUEL BECKETT Katherine Weiss THE THEATRE OF ANTHONY NEILSON Trish Reid THE THEATRE OF EUGENE O’NEILL: AMERICAN MODERNISM ON THE WORLD STAGE Kurt Eisen THE THEATRE OF TOM MURPHY: PLAYWRIGHT ADVENTURER Nicholas Grene THE THEATRE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Brenda Murphy VERSE DRAMA IN ENGLAND, 1900–2015: ART, MODERNITY AND THE NATIONAL STAGE Irene Morra For a full listing, please visit www.bloomsbury.com/series/critical-companions/

THE THEATRE AND FILMS OF CONOR MCPHERSON

CONSPICUOUS COMMUNITIES

Eamonn Jordan Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright ©  Eamonn Jordan and contributors, 2019 Eamonn Jordan and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. viii–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Old Vic’s production of Girl From the North Country. (©  Manuel Harlan) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jordan, Eamonn, 1964- author. Title: The theatre and films of Conor McPherson: conspicuous communities / Eamonn Jordan. Description: London; New York, NY: Methuen Drama, 2019. | Series: Critical companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055825 (print) | LCCN 2018059581 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350051225 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350051232 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350051218 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: McPherson, Conor, 1971–Criticism and interpretaiton. Classification: LCC PR6063.C73 (ebook) | LCC PR6063.C73 Z58 2019 (print) | DDC 822/.914–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055825 ISBN: HB: 978-1-350-05121-8 ePDF: 978-1-350-05123-2 eBook: 978-1-350-05122-5 Series: Critical Companions Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements viii References and Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Career breakthrough and trajectory 1 Working assumptions and methodology 3 Performance making 6 Contextualizations 8 Overview and vectorization 10 1

Monopolies of Self/Terms of Endearment 19 Introduction: Stories and their telling 19 Monologues, performers, audiences 20 Tiger country 25 Rum and Vodka: No man in the mirror 28 The Good Thief: Degrees of depravity 31 This Lime Tree Bower: Three strikes not out 33 Port Authority: Last resort lineage 35 Come on Over: A third narrator? 41 Conclusion 44

2

Criminality and Caper Tragicomedy 47 Introduction: City of capital/capital city 47 I Went Down: On the road to nowhere? 49 Saltwater: Finders keepers 53 The Actors: Infamy and fortune 58 Deserving and undeserving rich/poor 62 Conclusion 64

3

Convergent Realities: Ghosts and the Uncanny Introduction: For the supernaturally inclined St Nicholas: The gift/thief of a story

65 65 69

Contents

Shining City: Hiding in plain sight 73 The Eclipse: Eleanor/Lena 81 Paula: Immaculate deception/fatal distraction 85 Conclusion 90 4

Apocalyptic Dispossessions 91 Introduction: Safe houses and parallel universes 91 The Birds: Unfitting survival 92 The Night Alive: The banks are bust 94 The Veil: Gothic dominoes 101 Girl from the North Country: The great escape 106 Conclusion 115

5

Season’s Greetings 117 Introduction: Christmases past 117 Dublin Carol: Till life do us part 120 The Seafarer: Hook, line and sinker 126 Conclusion 134

6

Conspicuous Communities 137 Introduction: A pastoral sensitivity 137 The Weir: Sleight of register/sleight of consciousness 138 The story realm 141 Relational mismatches 145 Your round 147 Conclusion 153

7

Critical Perspectives 155 Conor McPherson in conversation 155 Conor McPherson’s Haunted Women: The Weir, The Veil and Paula  Lisa Fitzpatrick 164 Narrativity and the narrator figure in Conor McPherson’s Port Authority, The Veil and Girl from the North Country  Maha Alatawi 178 ‘You know?’  Ben Brantley 187

vi

Contents

Conclusion 189 Quantum states 189 Convergences 193 Notes 199 Notes on Contributors 230 Index 231

A Chronology and Further Reading sections are available on the book’s Companion Website: https://bloomsbury.com/the-theatre-and-filmsof-conor-mcpherson-9781350051218/.

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All quotations from the published work of Conor McPherson are reproduced by agreement of Nick Hern Books Limited (http:/www.nickhernbooks. co.uk/). The idea to write this book first sprung to mind in 1998 when I saw Ian Rickson’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. Since then, I have seen some wonderful productions of McPherson’s plays. Seeing and talking about productions with fellow spectators, reading critical analysis about McPherson’s work, some of which I can recall and some of which I no longer have the power to recollect, writing about the work and teaching McPherson’s work to various cohorts of students, guarantee that this is a book that has been shaped and evolved thanks to the inputs and the perspectives of so many. Thanks to the undergraduate students in the School of English, Drama and Film who took my module on McPherson’s work for the first time in 2017, and they have challenged me to make better sense of the work. Further, I have published some previous essays on McPherson going back to 2004, and some of those arguments find their way into this publication. I thank the editors and reviewers of various books and journals. I will mention each publication as appropriate in the book. Most of that writing has evolved into something I hope that is more deliberate, extensive and connected. I thank Methuen Drama’s Publisher Mark Dudgeon for his kind support and astute guidance and series editors, Patrick Lonergan and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. for their invaluable inputs from proposal stage through draft manuscript to publication. Lara Bateman and, before her, Susan Furber, provided constant and timely editorial assistance on this project, for which I am most grateful. Thanks to my many colleagues in the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, but especially those directly associated with Drama Studies over the last decade, Catherine Casey, Fiona Charleton, Finola Cronin, Rachel Fehily, Anne Fogarty, Paul Halferty, Shonagh Hill, Miriam Haughton, Mary Howard, Declan Hughes, Kellie Hughes, Marie  Kelly,

Acknowledgements

Kasia Lech, Cathy Leeney, Mary Kelly-Borgatta, Frank McGuinness, Clara Mallon, Cormac O’Brien, Emilie Pine, Andrea Scott, Carmen Szabo, Rayla Tadjimatova, Ashley Taggart, Kevin Wallace and Marilena Zaroulia. Thanks to the many undergraduate, MA Students, particularly the various PhD students that I have worked with and learnt from hugely over the past few years: Maha Alatawi, Susanne Colleary, Annetta Kavanagh, Michael Maguire, Audrey McNamara, Anne O’Reilly (Kelly), Iris Park, Salomé  Paul, Rachel Price-Cooper, Noelia Ruiz and Eva Urban. There are many mentors, collaborators and colleagues in the field of Irish theatre scholarship that have been important to me, but I only want to signal a few, Lilian Chambers (my co-editor on a previous collection of essays on McPherson), Enrica Cerquoni, Dan Farrelly, Mariá  Kurdi, Christopher Murray, Paul Murphy, Redmond O’Hanlon, Melissa Sihra, Ian Walsh, Clare Wallace and Eric Weitz. A special thanks to Anthony Roche who prompted me towards the completion of this project and to pitch the idea to Bloomsbury. I am very grateful to Maha Alatawi, Ben Brantley and Lisa Fitzpatrick for contributing their incisive essays to this book. Thank you to Rhona Trench for writing an endorsement. Over the years, I have worked with a huge number of colleagues on books I have edited and co-edited, and I am grateful to them for their insights, enthusiasms and expertise in the area of Irish theatre. In many instances there are so many ideas and arguments that did not find expression in this book. A special thanks to Conor McPherson for doing the interview and for writing the works and directing many of the premieres of his plays that have given me real pleasure in experiencing, in writing about and in challenging me to make some better sense of what it is to be human. I have had the privilege for a few years to co-teach with Conor a graduate playwriting module at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin. Thanks to the numerous theatre and performance makers who have performed in Conor’s work, and who have given many audiences memorable experiences. Thanks to Barry Houlihan, in the Special Collections of the Hardiman Library, NUI, Galway, Ireland, where the Abbey and Gate Archives are held, to Mairead Delaney, the Abbey Theatre’s archivist and Jennie Borzykh, Archive Assistant at the National Theatre, London, for providing me with access to see recordings of The Seafarer and The Veil. And thanks to Sarah Gunn, Treasure Entertainment for supplying me with a DVD copy of Saltwater. Thanks to Ciara Byrne for reading my manuscript and offering invaluable responses. ix

Acknowledgements

Research leave in 2014 gave me the time to first start working consistently on this project. Thanks to the College of Arts and Humanities University College Dublin for Grant support which has helped with the finalizing of the manuscript. Thanks, as always, to Marian, Roisin and Ian, for their backing, support, for just being there.

x

REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS

All quotations from the plays are taken from Plays: One, Two, Three and Four. Rum and Vodka

Rum

The Good Thief

Thief

This Lime Tree Bower

Bower

St Nicholas

Nicholas

The Weir

Weir

I Went Down

Down

Dublin Carol

Carol

Saltwater

Saltwater

Come on Over

Come

Port Authority

Port

The Actors

Actors

Shining City

Shining

The Seafarer

Seafarer

The Birds

Birds

The Eclipse

Eclipse

The Veil

Veil

The Night Alive

Alive

Paula

Paula

Girl from the North Country

Girl

xii

INTRODUCTION

Career breakthrough and trajectory In the very early 1990s, Conor McPherson started writing and directing plays for University College Dublin’s Drama Society (Dramsoc).1 The year 1992 saw the first semi-professional production of his work in Dublin by the Fly by Night Theatre Company. By 1996, London’s Bush Theatre was restaging a 1995 Dublin production of This Lime Tree Bower. This production at the Shepherd’s Bush venue proved to be a crucial tipping point in McPherson’s career trajectory.2 In February 1997, St Nicholas became McPherson’s first work to premiere in London, opening to critical and box-office acclaim at the Bush, thanks in part to McPherson being fortunate enough to cast the highly regarded and talented Brian Cox as the play’s narrator/theatre critic. The spectacular success of The Weir at the Royal Court in July 1997 brought McPherson to the attention of the global theatre community. Ian Rickson’s production of Weir was staged initially in a forty-seat venue at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs that was temporarily located at the Ambassadors Theatre, while the Royal Court’s Sloane Square premises underwent renovation.3 Weir is regarded by many as one of the most significant plays of the twentieth century. McPherson was only twenty-five when he wrote it. Numerous successes followed with plays like Dublin Carol (1999), Port Authority (2001), Shining City (2004), The Seafarer (2006), The Birds (2009) – a loose adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novella of the same title, The Night Alive (2013), and most recently, Girl from the North Country (2017), a play with music by Bob Dylan.4 Although McPherson was born, reared and remains resident in Ireland, unusually for an Irish writer, the majority of McPherson’s works have been premiered at some of London’s most prestigious venues: the Bush, Royal Court, National Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, the Young Vic (a co-production with Belfast’s Lyric Theatre) and Old Vic.5 Dublin’s Gate Theatre, when under Michael Colgan’s artistic directorship, has also played a pivotal role in McPherson’s career, hosting the Royal Court’s touring productions of Weir and Shining, mounting their own production of Carol not long after its Royal Court opening, staging

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

a revival of Weir directed by Garry Hynes in 2008, and commissioning new work like Port, Come on Over (2001) and Birds. The much-lauded Steppenwolf Theatre Company has mounted productions of four different McPherson plays in Chicago.6 Apart from Ian Rickson taking directorial responsibility for Weir and Carol, rather unusually, McPherson has directed the first production of every other new work,7 declining to follow the advice given to most playwrights to avoid directing the premiers of one’s of own works. It is probably fair to say that very few, if any, of McPherson’s peers have had such extensive backing from such a range of highly regarded theatre companies and hosting venues across the time-frame of his career. Staging productions of new work by very reputable writers even in the most established and wellfunded venues invariably proves to be a very risky business, particularly in the highly competitive London theatre scene, where there are so many options from which the paying public can choose. There is little tolerance for anything less than the highest production standards; consistently accomplished and engaging new work that may be a little overwritten or have some rudimentary flaws is simply not going to draw enough people into the theatres. Also unusual is not only McPherson’s hit rate with untested writing, but also the fact that his work transfers with such frequency from a London to a New York venue, sometimes with many of the same cast members.8 Strikingly, time lags between the original production and transfers is regularly very brief.9 For example, Alive opened at the Donmar Warehouse in June 2013, before transferring to the Atlantic Theatre in New York in December 2013. Other productions of Alive quickly followed, including Henry Wishcamper’s production in Chicago at Steppenwolf ’s Theatre in September 2014, another at the Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles, directed by Randall Arney in February 2015, and in October 2015, McPherson directed another production of this play, which was co-produced by the Dublin Theatre Festival and Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, with a completely new cast.10 Most plays hardly ever get produced, and the few that do, hardly see the light of day again; fewer again receive the range of subsequent productions opportunities that McPherson’s writing achieves. The same year as the premiering of Nicholas and Weir, saw the release of McPherson’s screenplay for the multiple-award-winning film, I Went Down, a work commissioned by director Paddy Breathnach and producer Robert Walpole. McPherson’s work in film as writer/director has been ongoing with Saltwater (2000 [a version of Bower]), The Actors (2003) and The  Eclipse 2

Introduction

(2009), which was co-written with Billy Roche and was very loosely based on Roche’s short story ‘Table Manners’ from Tales from Rainwater Pond (2006). In 2017, BBC Northern Ireland broadcasted the three-part drama, Paula, with Alex Holmes directing a superb cast, including Denise Gough in the lead role. Like many other contemporary writers, McPherson is just as comfortable as a film and television-maker as he is a performance-maker. And like many of his playwriting peers, McPherson is as much influenced by film, screenwriters and film directors as he is by his theatrical predecessors, traditions, practices and genres. As I write, he is involved in the adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl (2001), to be directed by Kenneth Branagh for Walt Disney Motion Pictures films, with a late 2019 release date.11

Working assumptions and methodology Part of my task with this book is to identify the many dramaturgical and screenwriting tropes in each work. Why and how McPherson manages to embrace, enhance and subvert more conventional genres will be central to my analysis. It is especially interesting to consider how a commercially astute writer such as McPherson finds audiences across the globe for plays that are on the surface conventional, but as these works play out, they become far more subtle, complex and allusive. Just because work is popular and commercial it does not mean that it is dramaturgically or ideologically middle-ground, the equivalent to easy listening. I deal with the plays as texts, but also as documents/records that trigger, inspire, shape or result in a performance. I believe there is a substantial place for both text- and performance-based scholarship. I oppose the dismissal of or disdain for textual analysis, particularly because most texts have merit, standing and status. If someone is a skilled reader of texts and has little access either to a live performance or a production archive of quality, then the text does offer something of true substance with which to engage. Published texts and productions of these scripts are not one and the same thing. Each production faces a multitude of decisions and challenges, some macro and some micro, some to do with a building, budget, director, design team and cast, and each performance, while rehearsed to be consistent in terms of its overall mise-en-scène, still varies each night across a production run, bringing a type of instability that may unnerve, if one wants to ground arguments in the realm of certainty. In many respects, a single experience of 3

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

a performance is limited in that there is only so much that one can absorb, consider and focus on during any one moment, not to mention to recall after the event. Another production of the same play with a different cast, in a slightly different time period or staged in a dissimilar cultural/political context should add layers of difference, complication and insinuation in terms of what its mise-en-scène proposes. Individually and collectively spectators experience a production differently. Whatever details are included in a textual or performance analysis, these are only a small fraction of the overall experience of a text or performance made up of multi-factorial forces, energies and impressions. Without necessarily theorizing on the complex relationship between text and performance in any serious fashion, it is worth reflecting on W. B. Worthen’s response to his own question, ‘What are dramatic performances performances of ?’12 That is to say that ‘the text is absorbed into the multifarious verbal and non-verbal discourses of theatrical production, transformed into an entirely incommensurable thing, an event’.13 So in that process of absorption and incommensurable transformation, Worthen wonders, ‘How can dramatic performance be conceived not as the performance of the text but as an act of iteration, an utterance, a surrogate standing in that positions, uses, signifies the text within the citational practices of performance?’14 That said, while productions of any single dramatic text vary considerably, there are certain genre signals, dramaturgical fundamentals, sequences, and continuities that cannot be circumvented, and in that way, acts of critical engagement cannot be entirely served by the notion of ‘surrogation’. Additionally, in terms of critical responses, there is a parallel question that extends from Worthen’s contention: What is a textual and performance analysis an ‘analysis of ’? That challenge is summed up in many ways by Bruce McConachie’s reflections on ‘cognitive multitasking’.15 Accordingly, my textual and performance analysis are a form of critical unmasking, recognizing that an act of criticism is not simply an unbiased objective response, but is overlain with many diverse inputs, competencies, expectations and blind spots. Criticism is an act of embodied engagement, investment of presence, shaped endlessly by attitudes, values, prejudice, ideological dispositions, likely provisional in its viewpoints and sentiments. An act of critical engagement balances between embracing and resisting, and between being susceptible and suspicious about how a work can be seductive. Sometimes a reaction may be inclined towards cynicism, but, if so, the response might be sharper and incisive, but generosity, as a 4

Introduction

prerequisite of criticism, might well be dispelled. I would not go so far as to suggest that criticism is some ‘incommensurable’ act of transformation, as Worthen sees the relationship between text and performance. Good criticism is almost always an act of self-confrontation, of allowing the conscious and unconscious mind, experience, memory and knowledge to interface creatively in the intensity of what is felt and thought during the performance experience. I use the published plays often as a form of evidence confirmation and use details of productions and reviews to re-affirm or counter my own viewpoint. Although I have seen almost all these plays live in performance, there are three that I have not, and neither do I have archival access to these plays, namely Rum, Nicholas and Thief. Additionally, recent archival access to recordings of some of the works I had previously seen has supplemented my critical analysis. A play like Birds proves more complicated to unpack critically in terms of the interface between performance and text: I saw the play’s premiere at the Gate Theatre, I had read the script used for this production, but McPherson rewrote the play for its American premiere at the Guthrie Theatre, which I did not attend. The current published text is based on this American production, and it is materially different to the one used for the Gate Theatre. It is worth re-iterating the point that plays like Weir find themselves staged in social, political, cultural and performance contexts radically different to the ones first staged or that I have seen. My critical observations are supported by scholarly reflections, and, within limits, I signal rival readings and alternative perspectives to the ones I favour. (The essays included towards the end of this book offer perspectives that sometimes chime but also challenge my own position and argument.) When a point needs to be bolstered by theoretical considerations, by reflections on genre or broader socio-political circumstances, my intention is to use such work in ways that are accurate, summative and not obscure. There are things I could have theorized on more, but I chose not to in order to be more reader-friendly. Sometimes I allow ideas and concepts to stand alone, as I do not want to burden every idea or to supplement every thought with additional supporting or qualifying remarks. Where obvious, the reader is encouraged to make such connections her or himself. Indeed, the reader will foster links that I have forgotten to reinforce, ignored, not considered pertinent or missed entirely. I have decided to cluster the analysis of plays and films nonchronologically across six chapters, and to be as comprehensive as possible about each work; but some work will invariably get more focus than others. 5

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

I decided against covering his theatre and screen adaptations or his work for stage and film where McPherson is not the writer or co-writer.16 There is a need to acknowledge that the chapter divisions are helpful but false in some respects. Regardless, to benefit the reader, I try to keep discussions about individual works to one chapter, but at times that is not possible. A play like Nicholas, rather than appearing in the monologue chapter, appears in the supernatural cluster where it functions better. Previous discussions about the monologue format remain pertinent to it, even though it is isolated from such analysis.

Performance making McPherson has been unusually forthright in critical writings, newspaper feature pieces, comments made for documentaries, program notes, Forewords and Afterwords to his published plays and screenplays, and in the numerous interviews that he gives to journalists, researchers and scholars. Such public pronouncements offer valuable insights into his overall views on the processes of writing, theatre making and performance reception. What is notable across McPherson’s career in theatre is his inclination to work with many of the lighting, sound and stage design professionals and certain actors again and again. Ian Rickson directed the premieres of Weir, Carol and, nineteen years later, Nest; various stage, sound and lighting designers including Paul Arditti, Neil Austin, Simon Baker, Consolata Boyle, Paule Constable, Ian Dickinson, Eileen Diss, Mick Hughes and, most of all, Rae Smith, who designed most of the plays after The Weir, including the most recent, Girl.17 Actors Brian Cox, Ron Cook, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Ciará n Hinds, Kevin Hely, Denise Gough, Bronagh Gallagher, Garrett Keogh (an uncle), Laurence Kinlan, Peter McDonald, Michael McElhatton, Jim Norton, Valerie Spelman, Emily Taaffe, Stanley Townsend and Don Wycherley are some examples of performers who McPherson has cast on more than one occasion. McPherson talks about acting in terms of ‘non-acting’. He uses words like ‘real’ and ‘believable’ to describe what he is after, but not necessarily ‘realistic’, in the sense of emotional truths crucial to a Stanislavskian approach to performance. As a director, what he looks for in an actor are sharp instincts, an ability to be creative, to think on one’s feet and a determination to contribute to the overall sensibility of the piece. 6

Introduction

McPherson’s general admiration for the craft of actors is further evident in his comments about the critical and creative investments performers make during the rehearsal process, when he is still learning about his own writing, and he admires the commitment of actors to the precarity of the live event itself. Yet, McPherson is not afraid to poke some fun at the vanity of the profession, evident in Actors where Tony O’Malley maintains the belief that he is young and capable enough to play the lead in a vowels-only Hamlet. In an interview with Noelia Ruiz, McPherson comments: Acting is a mystery in the sense that somebody says something and you believe it, and the next person says it and instinctively as a human being who knows what’s real and what’s not real, you just don’t buy it. …  The really good actors have a direct route from their brain to their mouth and to their appearance, straight into a kind of truthfulness. And when they speak it is utterly convincing.18 In terms of working across platforms McPherson cleverly differentiates between film and theatre, observing: The camera shows you exactly what is going on. A film does the dreaming for you. That suits me from time to time, but the magic of a play is that you actively are dreaming. At every point you are being reminded of its artificiality, that these people are pretending, but what’s so interesting is there’s almost an ancient telepathy between the audience. It’s like a church service, where the story unfolds before us. It’s dark, you have to strain to suspend disbelief, but the effort you make pulls you into a deeper trance.19 Crucial here is, of course, the notion of the ‘suspension of disbelief ’, ideas of trance and telepathy, the focus and energy demanded, and the potential chiming and connection in terms of rhythm or frequency between audiences and stage.20 In most of McPherson’s comments on audiences, he sees spectators as co-creators of work; plays are for the spectators’ pleasure, to give excitement and entertainment value, and less about reinforcing ideological viewpoints.21 Indeed, he notes that what is on stage is seldom something that is unknown or entirely new to a spectator, thereby affording audiences ownership of the works. The spectator needs to be open enough to allow a work to engage with their individual unconscious; one has to buy into 7

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

the experience or not, but it is unlikely that one can be tricked or slowly seduced into that perspective of openness if one is reluctant. As spectators, the only things we can measure or evaluate are similarities with and differences against ourselves and what we think we know of others. Our consciousness is thus at the centre of the process of engaging with a piece of theatre: we resist, suspend, surrender, give over and embrace the live event.22 In the Foreword to Plays: Three, McPherson notes that the best plays come in a flash. An image, a feeling, and that’s it. You know these ideas because they are undeniably ones that won’t let go.  …  Many playwrights I’ve talked with agree that the best moments are often those tentative notes when the ghosts first present themselves in your mind. They are so insubstantial, yet bear their complete mysterious history within.23 How mystery meets ghosts and interfaces will be part of my argument, but not for a moment, can you dismiss the philosophical inclination and political sensibility of McPherson’s writing.24

Contextualizations Most writing for theatre emerges from particular contexts and conditions; a writer relies on his or her experiences, observations, engagements, curiosities, self-interrogations, biases, confusion, ideological values, imagination and research. Most of McPherson’s plays and films have Irish locations and are dominated by characters that are perceived as being Irish. The city of Dublin is central to many of the plays and films, but the issues, circumstances and opportunities dramatized are consistent with the experiences of many who live in urban centres elsewhere. When McPherson’s plays are produced and performed internationally, they are invariably signalled as the work of an Irish writer. However, during the early part of his career, McPherson was inclined to resist his categorization as an Irish writer, not wanting to be defined by conceptions and preconceptions of what an ‘Irish’ writer might be expected or regarded to be, preferring to be seen as a cosmopolitan one.25 Arguably, this refusal to be pigeon-holed as an Irish writer is somewhat of a defensive one, but it is an important intervention as he endeavoured to situate his work. 8

Introduction

Later in his career, McPherson takes a different perspective on this matter of identity alignment, seeing his work as being fundamentally influenced and determined by the location, traditions, sensibilities, values and history of the country in which he was born, reared and lives.26 For McPherson, Ireland has been shaped by its location on the periphery of Europe, by its history of colonization by Britain and by its unique blending of pagan and Christian practices. Ireland’s historical isolation and remoteness preserved modes of thinking, believing and doing that were not fully governed by the dominant principles that circulated Europe from the Middle Ages onward. Additionally, McPherson often broadly distinguishes between Irish and British writers, noting: I think that English drama is horizontal, in that it’s a person on the flat of the earth, looking around that plane, asking: how do I deal with other people on that plane, and how do we organise ourselves to deal with each other? And I think Irish drama is vertical, in that it’s a person standing on the earth. But the concern is all going way up into the sky, and way down into the earth. There’s very little concern, usually, with the organisation of people on the same plane. The difference is the axis. And that’s the reason, I think, for the soulfulness that comes into Irish drama, and the connectedness to the dead, and to God.27 An earlier attempt to distinguish along similar lines led to the following thoughts: Irish plays tend to explore the inner workings of the human being, how it feels to be alive and the difficulty we have communicating our feelings. British plays veer more towards journalism: Look at the state of the NHS/British socialism/what Thatcher did/drugs among our youth/ Aids/power struggles in the home/the police/my flat/London, etc.28 Journalist and critic, Fintan O’Toole, took to task a younger generation of Irish playwrights in both print and in a television documentary for not writing the ‘state of the nation’ type plays that an older generation of writers had, namely Brian Friel, Tom Kilroy and Tom Murphy.29 McPherson’s comments in the Foreword to Plays: Three, without responding or naming O’Toole directly, is to suggest that if one were to look closely at his own writing and that of his peers, the work is more determined by the time in which it was written than someone like O’Toole is willing to concede. In this 9

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

Foreword, McPherson has particular things to say about the relevance and importance of the monologue format to the Celtic Tiger era of economic growth (1993–2008). He uses the analogy of looking at the rings of a tree to determine the climate or history of the period in which it grew. Social change, employment conditions, home ownership, social mobility, gender disparities, class advantages and disadvantages, heightened isolation, anxiety and alienation feature strongly in these works.30 McPherson seems ever keen to lay down certain markers of differentiation, without denoting ‘Irishness’ simply as ‘Other’, but is also inclined to explore and stress universal commonalities.31 McPherson’s works tend to transcend national boundaries and identitarian politics; my perspective on McPherson’s work is about situating the work within the networks of the larger world, dominated by an ideology loosely defined as neo-liberalism.

Overview and vectorization Chapter 1 of this work monitors McPherson’s early professional career successes with the monologue form. Indeed, Rum (1992), Bower (1995), Nicholas (1997) and Port (2001) are exceptional achievements by anybody’s standards, early career or otherwise. Most critics agree that dominant ideologies partially govern through stories that inhibit, discipline, regulate and indoctrinate, rationalizing on behalf of those it rewards and justifying the discriminations against those it marginalizes. Fact and fiction, truth and deception, exaggeration and selectivity, and delusion and fantasy can all be part of any network of intertwining narratives. Alternatively, individuals are the bearers of ideology in other ways, regurgitating dispositional-inciting stories (misfortune, bad luck, exceptionalism), and positing fragments of knowledge, commons sense, sentiments and values often unconsciously, and I tease this impulse out more fully in the chapter in relation to the monologues. Many of the narrators are not necessarily likeable, but neither do they disgust nor repel the spectator. Does the spectator analyse these stories for believability, subtexts, hidden meanings or for indications of psychological strain and self-deception? Are the notions of credibility and truth that are generally associated with the testimony of witnesses before the courts of law applicable in theatre? The discernment of narrators is rudimentary, speculative, intuitive and inadequate, and it does chime with limited human understanding of the mechanisms and systems of our bodies, minds and societies. 10

Introduction

McPherson’s monologues are not the internalization of narrative, but its externalization, its theatricalization, through embodiment. The presence of a performer before an audience ensures that the actor potentially provides his/her own critical or interpretative lens, complicating the processes of reception. Instincts towards self-preservation are offset by an imperious self-destructiveness, and this is an attribute shared by many of the narrators. I will consider the gendered arguments about McPherson’s monologues and how they foreground masculinity, but that does not necessarily imply a disavowal of femininity. With the exceptions of the critic in Nicholas, the academic in Bower, and the priest in Come, these are male characters who are seldom privileged. Less than satisfactory critical consideration has been given to intra- and inter-class dynamics in these monologues. As Michael Pierse notes, a class-informed analysis is ‘an indispensable tool in attempting to delineate the exploitative social relations and polarised cultural positions which characterise, spatially and socially, the contours of modern Irish society’.32 In the inter- and intra-class interactions in McPherson’s work there is both the demonstrations and performances of class and an exposure of class-related polarization, rivalries, antagonisms and biases that structure and licence socio-economic and cultural inequalities. If the monologues guide the spectator/reader around the city of Dublin, its streets, pubs and performance venues, the films set in the capital do something similar. Again, wealth, money and underprivilege are the major drivers of these films, especially evident in the actions of criminal overlords and their henchmen in McPherson’s screenplay for Down. In Saltwater the armed robbery of Simple Simon McCurdie’s betting office serves as Frank’s response to the fact that McCurdie keeps his widowed father, George, in a pitiful state of indebtedness. Frank’s criminal action complicates the idea of the heroic underdog striking back against an oppressor. However, what is of real significance in the films is how criminality is not simply the direct opposite of, but is often the complement to, legitimate capital practices. A money fixation is also seen in Actors where two actors desperate to counter their impoverishment create a cunning plan to steal from a criminal figure, Barreller, who turns out to be the least likely underworld overlord imaginable. The Dublin of McPherson’s films is not too gruesome, and is framed in such a way as to accommodate distinctive and disruptive tragicomic impulses. Indeed, each of the first two chapters, explores the significance and implications of the neo-liberal turn. Manfred B. Steger, and Ravi K. Roy 11

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

state that neo-liberalism manifests as ‘an ideology; a mode of governance; a policy package’.33 Expressed differently, David Harvey explains: Neo-liberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.34 Ultimately, neo-liberalism is an ideology that proposes that ‘the state is to refrain from “interfering” with the economic activities of self-interested citizens and instead use its power to guarantee open economic exchange’.35 Philosopher, Michael Sandel expresses it as follows: ‘One of the most striking tendencies of our time is the expansion of markets and marketoriented reasoning into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms.’36 In a more recent publication, Sandel confronts the limits of the marketplace and the aspects of life that people are innately disinclined to monetize.37 Sandel notes that ‘not only has the gap between rich and poor widened, the commodification of everything has sharpened the sting of inequality by making money matter more’.38 The first two chapters illustrate how McPherson’s work revisit ‘non-market norms’ and the ‘commodification of everything’, and finds ways of countering market infiltration with alternatives, without the work being simplistically hostile to contemporary capital, which most critics of neo-liberalism seem to be. McPherson’s writings variously include unexplained occurrences, mysterious phenomenon and the return of the dead under various guises. Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin discuss the significance of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny, its connection with the repressed and the unresolved, and how particular cultural moments can be associated with the concept of the ‘spectral turn’.39 Chapter 3 then focuses on McPherson’s genre-framing adjustments, transitions and shifts in register, and sleights of consciousness that result in a rupturing of the conventionally real via the supernatural.40 The supernatural variously shades most of McPherson’s works, by an obsession with a funerary culture, by encounters with vampires, by hauntings by ghosts of dead partners, and by the grief and terrors associated with the loss of children. Nicholas’s washed-up theatre critic ends up luring blood victims to the home of vampires. Weir is noted for its various fairy and ghost stories, and while Carol has no ghosts per se, it is haunted by the 12

Introduction

spirit of failed Christmases past. Shining is dominated by John’s need to deal with seeing the ghost of his dead wife, Mari, with whom he was estranged prior to her dying mysteriously in a car crash. A devil figure, Mr Lockhart, appears on Christmas Eve to claim the soul of Sharky in Seafarer. Numerous characters in Eclipse experience different types of hauntings; Michael sees the ghost of his father-in-law, Malachy, who has not yet died, and Lena, who after seeing the ghost of a young girl, turns to theoretical physics by way of finding an explanation. Many of the characters in Veil are obsessed with sé ances and ghosts, and the ghost of a young child fleetingly appears in the performance. In Paula, James sees the bloodied ghost of his young sister, Mary, and Paula sees the ghost of Philip, a sometime lover, after his murder. Nick Laine is not the only one who hears the ghost of his dead sister in Girl. Ghosts are gendered female and male, but are predominantly those of girls rather than boys. For Geraldine Cousin lost, missing or endangered children ‘are marketers of both our private pain and a profound uneasiness about our communal future’.41 Cousin adds that the ‘preoccupation with this sense of precariousness’ and the ‘disturbing unreliability of the present tense’, seems currently to haunt our imaginations in various forms, and has both contemporary and historic resonances.42 For McPherson, fairies are ‘the rationalization of very deep folkloric, ancient respect for the mystery of nature and the universe and everything we cannot know’.43 In an interview with Damon Smith, McPherson notes: My granddad used to tell me stories about faeries and things like that, like, out in the countryside, and it all would have been real to a generation before him. So yeah, I was fascinated by those whenever I heard them. And Ireland being a very Catholic country as well, it has a superstitious culture. Supernatural reality seems to permeate everyone’s life. When I was a kid I was always interested in ghosts, zombies, vampires. You name it, I was into it.44 McPherson opens matters further up in an interview with B. Alan Orange: Like most of us, I find that life is a supernatural experience. We live in a mysterious environment that we don’t understand. We are told that the universe is infinite. Time is relative. If you speed up, time slows down. Those things are bewildering. We don’t understand this environment that we live in. We don’t know anything about it, really. We live in a giant mystery. When I am working on stories, its 13

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attractive to me to pit my characters against the unknown. That’s a large experience of life. We should be aware of that.45 So, it is not so much that the supernatural experience is necessarily a consciousness of elsewhere, but something internal, immediate and unknown. Just as significant is the connection that McPherson makes between mystery and the theatre itself. Reflecting on the sé ance scene in Veil, McPherson notes ‘It is the ritual of theatre, where you commune with the beyond, which I think is what theatre can lead to. Theatre is a kind of sé ance.’46 How fears may debilitate in real life but can excite and reward in theatre is a paradox that McPherson’s performance dramaturgy exploits, none more so than the appearance of Mari’s ghost towards the end of Shining. The focus in Chapter 4 on home-places, eviction, homelessness and the uncanny brings together the material and the supernatural. During Ireland’s economic boom many people wanted to own their own homes. House prices exploded, credit was cheap, financial regulation was poor, and the lure of investment in property gave rise to notions that it was easy to get rich quickly, without risk and without too much endeavour. Property speculation seemed to offer some sort of alchemy. A major recession struck in 2008, national debt became almost unmanageable, property prices plummeted, huge increases in the numbers unemployed, and much more were the outcomes. So, it is little wonder that the recession-related plays are directly connected to houses and living quarters, belonging, sanctuary, dispossession and eviction. McPherson’s Birds offers an apocalyptic situation when communications networks are down, transport and food supply systems collapse, and a swarm of marauding birds attack people who get trapped outside in the open. The play is dominated by the anxieties and the terrors associated with being under siege – waiting and wondering when it might be the opportune moment to move on and take shelter elsewhere, and, most fundamentally, the lengths one might go to determine one’s own survival. The play is not based in contemporary Ireland, but has a New England, United States, location, and it is set in the near future. The species-astray trope is long part of science fiction and the horror genres that McPherson so enjoys. In Alive, in Celtic Tiger Dublin, Tommy invests in a live gig-rigging business that fails to pass health and safety standards. His get-richquick scheme serves as a comment on naï ve ambition and implicates the 14

Introduction

inadequate lending strategies of many Irish banks during a time of peak economic growth. Although Tommy is almost broke, he is still not on the social margins in the way that Aimee and Doc are; she the assault victim of her pimp-boyfriend, and he is effectively homeless and living with a mental disability. The play’s ending marks a distortion of time, space and causality, shattering the notion of economics as being the singularly governing frame. In relation to the specifics of Alive’s recessionary context, international audiences do not necessarily need to know or want to know much about it. However, spectators across the world instinctively understand rags-toriches dreams and fantastical schemes to make money, they know how easily environmental and financial disasters can befall any community, they grasp the precariousness of success and failure, and fundamentally intuit what is likely to happen in situations when people feel perilous or when it appears as if there is little else to lose. Although McPherson’s gothic historical play, Veil, is set in 1822 in Mount Prospect, near Jamestown, Co. Leitrim, Ireland, where the Protestant Ascendancy family, the Lambrokes, live, the play resonances with the contemporary recessionary period are obvious. Tenants cannot pay rents, landlords cannot maintain estates and staff go unpaid and are let go. McPherson also addresses the nature of economic cycles more generally, in terms of the repetitious relationships between capital investment, financial risk, wealth and land accumulation, and more importantly, the fallout from speculative investment practices and financial mismanagement. Again the play is guided by a supernatural perspective. Girl is a play with the music and songs of Bob Dylan and is set in the Great Depression era of the 1930s in Duluth, Minnesota, in the United States, and it also exposes a world where indebtedness, poverty, eviction and homelessness are rife. Again, the signalling of another dimension to the economic realities that the characters face suggests different things about time, space and the eternal. In the four plays in this chapter, communal supports are frail, the safety net provided by family supports is dwindling, the expectations of normative social transactions no longer pertain, and in many instances, legal constraints or moral anxieties about taboo violations no longer seem to apply. Recessions are global, current, historic and inevitable in the future. Chapter 5 looks at the significance of Christmas festivities in the work. In many cultures, the Christmas season, despite rampant commercialization, is predominantly associated with the Christian religion, the marking of salvation through the birth of Jesus Christ. Coming in late December, this 15

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period is also linked to the pagan winter solstice and to cycles of rebirth and renewal. And for many, even those with secular-only affiliations, festive gatherings, parties, gifting and the season’s revelries, celebrations, licences and excesses, carry with them something that links back to a collective desire or instinct to mark seasonal transitions and to take solace from the regularity of the seasonal cycle. It is probably fair to say that no other contemporary Irish writer has been so obsessed with, fearful of, trapped by, and even dependent on, the idea or concept of Christmas in its anticipation, occurrence and passing as McPherson. Nicholas takes its name from the patron saint both of Christmas and seafarers. Alive, is in McPherson’s own words, a nativity play of sorts. Paula is set before and close to the Christmas period. Girl not only is set during the Thanksgiving celebrations of late November, just prior to Christmas, but has Doctor Walker dying on Christmas Eve, and features a pregnancy that carries specific religious overtones of a virgin birth, a belief central to Christianity.47 Seafarer and Carol are set on Christmas Eve. One aspect of McPherson’s Christmas trope is a confirmation of a dominant, funerary disposition that Carol exemplifies, which is tentatively undermined by the play’s final moments; the ‘against all odds’ triumph by the Harkin household over Mr Lockhart in Seafarer is similarly disposed to undercut that funerary consciousness and replace it with something celebratory and joyous.48 The plays share a consciousness which is keen to mark moments of transition, and a movement towards light and away from darkness, not by way of linearity per se, but more by way of circularity, seasonality and continuity. Even from the early part of his career, one of McPherson’s many strengths as a writer is to create characters that are inconsistent in behaviour and viewpoint. In Weir, a huge range of emotions are churned over, illustrating that what often makes humankind vulnerable, fearful and frail is similar to what gives joy, warmth, pleasure and rewards. There is a quest to address what gives purpose and value to life in this play. Apart from the wonderful opportunities for storytelling, and apart from the ways that the play reinforces a sense of community and belonging, what is especially interesting is how Weir situates modes of relating that serve as a direct challenge to the dominant neo-liberal, market-orientated model. That approach is the focus of Chapter 6. Weir’s opening moment has Jack going behind the bar to serve himself a drink, and he then opens the till and pays for his drink, in the absence of the proprietor, Brendan. First, this scene establishes the trusting, communal 16

Introduction

nature of the pub environment. Secondly, the sequence runs counter to what one could or would do in almost all situations when one is a business customer. What is more, based on the evidence of the evening’s drinking, Brendan’s bar seems to be run on a not-for-profit basis, given the amount of free drinks he hands out. In his generosity and lack of concern for the cash takings, there is a challenge to the commercial spirit of neo-liberalism, well beyond saying that he is a poor business person or irresponsible proprietor. Based on Richard Shweder and Jonathan Haidt’s writings, Alan Fiske devised a taxonomy of relationality, which Steven Pinker then went on to amend slightly. Pinker identifies these four modes as ‘Authority Ranking’, ‘Rational/Legal’, ‘Equality Matching’ (also called tit-for-tat reciprocation) and ‘Communal Sharing’. Instead of Brendan’s pub being simply governed by a ‘Rational/Legal’ model of the marketplace, here modes of transacting are of a different order.49 The round of storytelling that dominates the evening signals the rewards from transacting on the basis of ‘Equality Matching’ and ‘Communal Sharing’. Yes, there is some competitiveness, but characters support more than oppose each other, running counter to a neo-liberalist ideology that centralizes competitiveness, encourages greater degrees of individualization and prioritizes personal over collective gain. Weir substantiates win/win communal reward structures, rather than the win/lose of the marketplace. In addition, it is the frequency and the manner by which norms of relating are repeatedly breached or violated that frequently links the works themselves. In Alive, Tommy financially exploits Doc by paying him abysmally, yet Tommy also gives him sanctuary when nobody else does. Equally, Tommy rescues Aimee from her pimp/boyfriend, but Tommy ends up paying Aimee for sexual services while in some form of a relationship with her. In Girl, Nick endeavours to expel all of his guests, and marry off his daughter, Marianne, against her will, to an elderly man for money. Girl illustrates McPherson’s ability to find moments when characters, who are so much in need and have so much to lose, interact with others who have initially so little to give and who remain unaware of the bigger reality. Across almost all the plays it is not just that there are different ways of relating proposed, it is the application and overlaying of more than one mode simultaneously to a particular situation which reveals heightened degrees of complexity, through the taboo breaches of social norms and relational mis-matchings. If the early chapters in this book demonstrate a more consistent awareness of the materiality of living, the writings considered in the later 17

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chapters seem to suggest that the work evolves through sleights of consciousness into mysterious realms of elsewhere. But really it is a false division, which supports the organization of the works, whereas, as I will argue, it is the continuities rather than discontinuities between the material and the mysterious that better serve the discussion. Also, there is a sense that McPherson’s body of work is not simply consecutively written plays, rather it is as if they shadow, ghost or hover over and co-exist alongside each other. For instance, my analysis will signal the recurrence of characters with similar names across the plays; there are many Johns, Nicks and even more Marys and variations thereof. Character interconnections and interdependencies are sometimes framed by the darker innerworlds and underworlds, which can be spiritual, metaphysical, social and economic, or more accurately some complex melding of all four.

18

C Chapter 1 MONOPOLIES OF SELF/TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

Introduction: Stories and their telling Philosopher Richard Kearney suggests that ‘telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human.’1 Kearney adds that it is the art of storytelling that ‘gives us a shareable world’.2 He then goes on to propose From the word go, stories were invented to fill the gaping hole within us, to assuage our fear and dread, to try to give answers to the great unanswerable questions of existence: Who are we? Where do we come from? Are we animal, human or divine? Strangers, gods or monsters?3 He continues, ‘The great tales and legends gave not only relief from everyday darkness but also pleasure and enchantment.’4 Such is the importance of stories. Humankind is hot-wired to gather and order the materials it receives from the senses – taste, touch, sight, sound, smell – and to mesh this information with feelings, instincts, intuitions, thoughts, insights and prior incidents in order to structure and recall experiences with a degree of proficiency. The imperative to give narrative form to most experiences is both a gift and a hindrance, in that story-making is an act of recognition, comprehension and distillation, and is reliant on linguistic structures and words, the meanings of which are notoriously imprecise and unstable. Narrative formation is a way of remembering, configuring, shaping and templating experiences, coordinating, linking and consolidating events, and it allows us to make sense of novel or threatening scenarios, while mapping future possibilities. Narratives give coherence to our perceived realities

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

and serve as a means by which consciousness is granted a stability, despite heightened or rudimentary awareness of contradictory or rival modes of consciousness. Through narratives, our experiences, wisdoms, imaginings, expectations, illusions, licences and taboos are accounted for, explained, concretized, exchanged, dutifully forgotten, mythologized, revised and, perhaps, relentlessly re-imagined. Most likely one will tell of oneself differently to a stranger one meets on a train, a person on a first date, in response to questions during a job interview or during conversations with a therapist, friend/confidant or longterm partner. The various public and online versions of oneself are notable forms of ‘self ’ narration. Individuals can either stick to their own story of themselves or revise that story. The idea that if one changes one’s story one can alter who one is, serves as a profound challenge and opportunity. Just as all personal stories have a conscious and unconscious, all groups, cultures and societies do likewise. Indeed, it is difficult to unravel the influence of the cultural and the political on the personal. History, myth, religion and ideology are beneficiaries and exploiters of this instinct to narrate and to transact by way of narration. Public narratives are shaped to communal values, inspire, signal freedom and possibility, and can configure change and encourage ambition. Narratives can also be relayed to limit, repress, manipulate, trick and ensure acquiescence to tradition, authority and order. By indoctrinating through stories, whether these are political histories, religious parables, fairy tales, folk fables, slogans or motivating narratives that transmit the values, dispositions and manipulations of dominant ideologies, to a significant extent, stories determine social being. Such stories do not simply go unchallenged, but, invariably, are hard to resist. Dominant ideological dispositions are countered by various forces, even as they renew themselves and accommodate alternative discourses, plus discord. Monologues are a good way of looking at the interface between private and collective narratives, between enabling and disabling narratives, and between extensive and somewhat limited levels of cognition.

Monologues, performers, audiences Monologues are a specific type of story, resulting in an encounter between a narrator and the spectator in a shared space, governed by conventions of performance. The tone and trajectory of monologues vary from comedic 20

Monopolies of Self/Terms of Endearment

to tragic, from ones that signal despair, futility and self-destruction, to ones that signpost recovery, resilience and redemption. (I am not thinking about testimonial or verbatim theatre, rather single, double or triple person sequential or intercut narratives.) With small casts and often minimal technical and scenographic demands, monologues can be an inexpensive way of creating performances; work with low overheads can be toured more easily to multiple venues.5 Yet, if there is a perception that small-cast monologues are less likely to lose money, as there are so few contributors that need to be paid, McPherson’s Afterword to Plays: One points out that while his early career shows were generally well reviewed, they were often loss making for those involved.6 Monologues are inclined to be constructed with a beginning, middle and end, and they tend to be driven by a perception of causality, rather than being reliant on a sensibility that is fractured, random, illogical or incoherent. Monologues regularly try to deal with fear, dread, loss, failure, confusion and desire, and attempt to make sense of connections their narrators have with others. Monologues often show a determination to put some shape on overwhelming, chaotic and absurd experiences. Many critics have considered the dramaturgical and performance limits and possibilities of the monologue form, and some have done so while reflecting on McPherson’s writings. The arguments are various, and I do not have the space to deal extensively with the wide range of critical perspectives on the monologue, but I do want to offer a broad sweep of the opinions that commentators express. For some critics, monologues are inherently undramatic; for others, monologues are the writing impulses of angst-ridden younger people and a practice that they will outgrow; for others again, because of the unwillingness of a writer to create situations of disputes and incompatibilities between opposing characters, this form of writing is deemed to lack the basic conflict/adversarial dialectic that has been an essential component of traditional dramaturgical practices. Another viewpoint proposes that monologues are merely narrated short stories, and, accordingly, should remain on the page, and, if not, given the emphasis on language and voice, be better suited to the medium of radio.7 Consequently, the prerequisites for a scenographic stage environment and the presence of an actor before a live audience are deemed surplus to requirements by this argument. From a different perspective, the monologue form is deemed to be passive and self-indulgent, overly confessional or decidedly and futilely therapeutic 21

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

in orientation. Indeed, Brian Singleton proposes that the monologue format reveals ‘an anxiety about theatre as a medium for communication’.8 Others have discussed monologues in terms of their reinforcement of gender hierarchies and of heteronormative practices: effectively, how maleorientated monologues re-affirm patriarchal order. Lisa Fitzpatrick, informed by the work of feminist critic Jill Dolan, argues ideological representation most commonly … denies subjectivity to female characters and positions the male characters at the centre of the action as protagonists and antagonists, with the female characters in a range of supporting roles and, often, functioning as objects of transaction between the men.9 Fitzpatrick continues: in this monologue form, ‘the women are further marginalized by the presence of the single, male body on the stage; their erasure seems complete’.10 At another level of critique, monologues are harangued on the basis of their reach and scale. Clare Wallace situates monologues within a postmodern frame, as determined by key figures like Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Crucial to postmodernity is the suggestion that the grand narratives that provide access to overarching meaning or eternal truths no longer have credence or give coherence to value-structures. Accordingly, Wallace argues that McPherson’s monologues effectively illustrate a ‘penchant for the small-scale story’, and that such narratives ‘are tales which lay claim to no monumental significance, mythic references or universal applicability’.11 Such micro-narratives, as Wallace identifies them, lack resonance and wider application. Arguing in a slightly different fashion Wallace notes: ‘Their evasion is served as entertainment, ethical dilemmas are side-lined, and the audience is left with amusement and equivocation.’12 In a somewhat similar vein to Wallace’s first argument, Nicholas Grene contrasts two generations of Irish writers, a pre-1990s and a post-1990s one; he argues that in the work of the former group the ‘stories told … betoken the layered nature of Irish culture as palimpsest of past and present, with the mythic buried within it’, whereas the contemporary use of narrative, by the likes of McPherson, delivers ‘truths of ordinary experience, spoken without any amplifying echo-chamber of myth or archetype’.13 Points about scale and the possible absence of an ‘amplifying echo-chamber of myth or archetype’ raise important issues. Grene sees contemporary writers as intentionally closing off the types of resonators evident in pre-1990 writing: 22

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‘What we are given are stories in shallow space: deeper structures, echoes and resonances are deliberately denied.’14 McPherson himself turns out to be one of the best defenders/proponents of the monologue. For McPherson, monologues are not simply short stories, but narratives delivered by an actor, in a theatre space, often with minimal but sometimes specific scenographic and lighting design requirements. While the inclination might be for the performer to embellish and theatricalize, from McPherson’s point of view, this would be a mistake. The actor is there to facilitate the story, to engage the spectator through his/ her presence, but he proposes that exuberance should be reined in. For McPherson, monologues are less about heightened embodiment or the theatricalizing of a story, and far more about letting the story do the work. If the actor is relatively still on stage, it does not mean that their bodies are consequently repressed. Instead, the body becomes differently expressive, with vocal delivery, pitch, tone, gesture and facial expression becoming more significant to the embodiment. More importantly, the delivery of the actor can never be neutral; she/he effectively comments on the drama’s action as they process, present and interpret the work. Distance is found in the fact that the performer is not necessarily a character in the conventional sense of the word, rather the actor is more of a narrator or intermediary – a mediator between story and spectator. It is McPherson’s intention that performers are not simply delivering interior monologues, or that what is narrated is simply a stream of consciousness, rather, he suggests, that the performer acknowledges the presence of an audience, and engages the spectator, sometimes with questions, and sometimes by means which breach theatrical expectation. If more than one actor is narrating, the performers often remain alert to the presence of each other, even if they do not necessarily interact. In Bower,15 each actor remains on stage throughout, and the stage direction proposes that they ‘are certainly aware of each other’.16 Additionally, when Ray and Frank momentarily address each other in Bower, another type of awareness is signalled: Frank (to Ray)  I never heard that. Ray  I’ve been saving it. (118) In Nicholas, the narrator directly interrogates the generic assumptions that spectators may have about vampires, and, as the play concludes, he also poses philosophical questions to his audience about love and intimacy. 23

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Given how distracted people can be in their daily lives, keeping focus on an actor and their narrative can be a challenge for the spectator. Also, in terms of attention, one may well be taking in what is being communicated at face value, but one is also probably doing what one does when anybody tells a story or their version of some incident or encounter, one tests the account for plausibility, consistency and accuracy, and listens out for anomalies and contradictions. Across the full range of verbal cues, we focus on the pace, hesitations, what is fluffed, hurried or glided over, what might be going unsaid or on what might not be expressed with the necessary conviction. Body language is similarly interrogated and interpreted for gestural anomalies and leakages. Yet, theatre is not a court of law. A monologue needs to be fundamentally plausible or credible in the sense that it is consistent in terms of the genre in which it is working, and unyielding in terms of whatever theatrical worlds that are demarcated or summoned into being, but also marked by the limitations and flamboyance of the teller. For something to be believable does not imply that something is necessarily or altogether true. While a narrator can offer a highly subjective, even contentious perspective on events, usually the narrator cannot pull the rug out from beneath an audience by being knowingly manipulative. Neither can a narrator be an unreliable witness. For the spectator, there is little reward in being duped, having our perceptions destabilized and our empathy undermined, as this would be in bad taste; trust matters. If a narrator is arrogant, or persists in exuding a very high status, it is often more difficult for audiences to engage, if not empathize (not that empathy is a necessity), with such figures. All-knowing narrators are fundamentally off-putting in my experience of monologues; monologues seem to be better served when a narrator’s status is low, more particularly when his or her self-awareness is limited and restricted. That way, narrators can push the limits as to what a spectator can conscionably endure or bear witness. That does not mean that deviance or difference are not tolerated. Bizarrely, a spectator may have a degree of compassion for a narrator under certain dramatic circumstances that one might not have under reallife conditions. All of this means that the spectator may not be quite so repulsed or revolted by what a narrator admits to thinking, desiring, seeing and doing. The spectator serves as confessor, juror, prosecutor and voyeur. As each spectator, interprets and responds to a monologue, his or her own unconscious is also effectively engaged and even projected back on to the performer. The interfaces between the narrative, actor, space and spectator 24

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ensure a form of spectatorship that can be profound, and anything but passive. As there are so many monologues to get through in this chapter, discussions on specific performances will be limited, unlike later chapters.

Tiger country Of the monologues McPherson wrote from 1990 to 2001, none could be categorized as simply apprentice activities, rather, these plays are very accomplished pieces of writing, displaying considerable variation and intellectual maturity. Sometimes it is a single character narrative, as in 1992’s Rum, 1994’s Thief and 1997’s Nicholas. Sometimes it is characters taking numerous turns to speak, with each promoting contending perspectives on a set of circumstances as in Come (2001), and sometimes characters offer distinctive slants on particular incidents, while also progressing the action as in 1995’s Bower. Port (2001) is in many respects the most complex of the monologues; three performers tell stories that seem distinct, but as the play progresses the narratives perhaps prove to be tentatively connected. Although McPherson did not self-consciously set out to write monologues that spoke directly to Ireland’s Celtic Tiger period, a time period in which the country altered very quickly, these plays are precisely marked by fastchanging socio-political, cultural and economic circumstances that are discernible as a local context, but also as a reality mimicking more broadly, global forces. McPherson notes: So there I was the other night, watching this TV programme about how Irish playwrights apparently failed to write about all this stuff, but over the next few days I began to wonder if the programme was actually missing the point of what art does and how time reveals it. I had a look back over the successful plays from the time and speculated if (like looking at the rings in a fallen tree) it’s possible to argue that our theatre history contains the unmistakable mark of its climate at this time.17 He continues: It was as though the crazy explosion of money and stress was happening too close to us, too fast for us, making it impossible for the mood of the nation to be objectively dramatized in a traditional 25

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sense. It could only be expressed in the most subjective way possible because when everything you know is changing, the subjective experience is the only experience.18 As such, the monologue, on the one hand, takes one directly inwards, and, on the other hand, is marked by the environment from which it sprung. This is a view on McPherson’s work that has become altogether clearer in hindsight. One does not need to be familiar with the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger years to grasp the significance and nuance of McPherson’s work as it is more how the narrators account for their transactions in their environments rather their actions being singularly determined by broader socio/political and ideological pressures. That said, it is important to identify the sweeping changes and new conditions that many Irish citizens, and those who arrived from across the globe, experienced during this period of economic growth and enhanced prosperity. The high levels of unemployment that blighted the Republic of Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s made way for close to full employment; centuries-old patterns of emigration and population decline were stalled, the influence of the Catholic Church waned as the society became more liberal in orientation, and attitudes to success became more positive rather than begrudging, as people became better educated, better rewarded in work and more comfortable in their own skins. Of course, a dividend from Northern Ireland came by way of cessations of violence and a Peace Process, European Union membership and financial aid from Structural Funds, access to a common market and later a single currency also helped. There was substantial inward foreign direct investment by global multinationals, with increased high-skilled employment opportunities across the computing, communications, pharmaceutical, technology and engineering industries, as well as in the services sectors. A young population, improved third-level provision, strong inward migration and a wider global economic upturn were other contributory factors. All of this meant that Ireland’s open economy was even more globalized. While all boats did not rise, many boats did. Some people were the first generation of their families to achieve a third-level education and to own their own homes. However, many remained uncomfortable with the neo-liberal economic model and a low-tax regime steering that growth. For Harvey, neo-liberalism ensures ‘the financialization of everything. This deepened the hold of finance over all other areas of the economy, as well as over the state apparatus.’19 Accordingly, ‘Commodification 26

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presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide – an ethic – for all human action.’20 While the market did not quite serve as the guiding principles for all human interaction, money became more and more important to that society, evident in an obsession with property ownership and investment portfolios, and heightened levels of conspicuous consumption. When the mantra is ‘We never had it so good’, it is difficult to be a naysayer. Sustained criticism of this new dispensation was invariably destined to be regarded as self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing or as a cheap shot. Consistently disparaging views on wealth are to be seen in most Irish dramas, amounting to an indulgent form of wealth-shaming. It is a writing tradition which supports the notion that money does not matter so much, but that is not always as radical a viewpoint as it might first seem, because it disguises the more complex social significance of money and the esteem, privileges and dividends that accrue to elite/establishment figures. McPherson’s writing is very unusual in that it deliberately foregrounds the relevance of money to the lives of his characters and he fails to compensate the poor with either words or wisdom: one narrator blows his weekly wage over a weekend’s binging (Rum), another turns to armed robbery to avenge the perilous financial situation of his father’s business (Bower), and another earns his keep as a thug extorting money on behalf of a crime lord (Thief). The focus on money in the monologues allows the spectator to infer or recognize issues of privilege, advantage, disadvantage and how these may impact on identity and class differentials. Numerous variables inform class distinctions, namely wealth, income, occupation, educational and professional qualifications, values, accent, physical carriage, where one lives, cultural taste, food values and dress code.21 Other markers include access to health provision, attitudes to risk, life opportunities and life expectancy. Class differentials are not simply reduced to differences between rich and poor, owners and workers, salaried and waged, not even in terms of the three-way distinction between elite, bourgeois and working classes. McPherson does not simply follow the stereotype that those with more privilege exploit their standing or that disadvantaged characters are victims of systemic inequality. McPherson does not fetishize the ordinariness or decency of his working-class characters; they are just as likely to exploit weaknesses of others, have prejudices, take what is not theirs, in the ways that some Left-leaning criticism would prefer not to have exposed, without 27

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having someone other than the character to blame. However, the liberally inflected values of his middle-class characters do not necessarily chime with a tendency to capitalize on and aggressively reinforce their positions of privilege. So as encounters with privilege and lack, these monologues are aware of broader social dynamics.

Rum and Vodka: No man in the mirror Rum only not proved to be McPherson’s first major calling card but is a piece of writing that inspired many of his contemporaries into believing in the viability of the monologue form. The narrator’s self-consciousness exposes the gap that exists between fabrication and fact, between confused awareness and a sluggish upgrading of consciousness, and between wishfully wanting something and the realities of and efforts needed for its realization. The play’s action is not just a memory recalled, but the tense of its narration is the present continuous.22 The narrator is 24, married to Maria and they have two children, Niamh and Carol. Their home in Raheny is mortgaged, and he has a clerical job in the voting registration department of Dublin Corporation. The narrator’s work friends drink heavily and live in Killester surrounded by ‘leftovers and remains of about a thousand takeaways, bottles, cans, socks, the place stinks’.23 Poor impulse control clearly relates to the narrator’s alcohol dependency, but it also correlates to his own sense of inadequacy.24 Equally, there is also embarrassment, shame and a lack of purposefulness in how he perceives of himself to be. Across the monologue, the narrator is variously suspicious, delusional, pessimistic, impatient, fretful, self-indulgent, arrogant and carefree. Persistently, his freeze, fight or flight reflexes are triggered by a variety of circumstances. Early comments that he thinks he ‘hates the human race’, or that the world is scheming up ‘new ways’ to get him ‘to leave the planet’ serve as clear examples of his exaggerating and self-aggrandizing mindset (9). Such lines require degrees of flamboyance, flippancy and irony to be adopted in performance. The narrator goes on a weekend drinking spree, having crossed his superior, Eamon Meaney, and followed that by throwing a computer out of an office window, that lands on his car. (Meaney has his car quickly repaired and computer replaced and has not reported the incident.) When the narrator admits to Maria that he cannot pay for the groceries in their shopping basket, a vicious row ensues. She turns on him, strikes 28

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him with a can of tuna and then thumps him, while he topples over a trolley with somebody else’s child in it. Later, rather than accept that he should not have spent the wages earmarked for the grocery shopping, he surmises that Maria will be fine for money, as she is bound to have put some away. Of far greater concern is the non-consensual sex he has with Maria while she slept: he initially fears that what he has done amounts to rape and is worthy of jail, but that terrifying thought is quickly curbed. The narrator’s pattern is to fall for women who ‘look after’ him (10), so when he meets Myfanwy, the Trinity College-educated Arts graduate, who is now pursuing a business diploma, he wants her to not only ‘look after him’ (28), but also envisages her curing his life – something he says on two occasions (25 and 29). Myfanwy does not take him seriously, but has consensual, if drunken, sex with him, and, for her, it amounts to nothing more than a nonchalant and passing intimacy. The narrator’s deluded fantasy of Myfanwy rescuing him concludes abruptly at a party, when he discovers her having sex with her friend, Rupert. Sociologist, Mike Savage, distinguishes between three different types of capital: economic, social and cultural;25 ‘Social classes arise from the concentration of three distinctive kinds of capital: economic capital (your wealth and income); cultural capital (your tastes, interests and activities), and social capital (your social networks, friendships and associations).’26 The narrator’s attitude towards his office manager displays a certain hostility towards authority figures, but also suggests a degree of class antagonism. And when the narrator discusses queuing to buy a drink in the Olympia Theatre, he notes: ‘The Bar was jammed. People paying in to drink. But they had money to burn. Fat bastards’ (27). The line does signal a heightening of affluence in that society but also his jealousy. Additionally, the narrator’s observations on Myfanwy’s Clontarf home offers further indicators of class differences. He identifies the ‘huge slab of oak’ that is the front door of Myfanwy’s ‘huge house’, he notes the luxurious nature of the furnishings and decor that include ‘two plush green suites’, ‘carpets thick as your finger’, ‘big bed’, garage and piano (31–4, all my italics). Additionally, photos on the walls include those marking weddings and graduations that serve to contrast with his registry office wedding and his lack of a third-level qualification. Her Clontarf home contrasts with the ‘sameness’ of the houses in his private housing estate.27 Additionally, Myfanwy’s home is also ‘othered’ because it is regarded as a ‘dark house’, with a musty smell (31). 29

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She is a student with her own car, whereas he travels by bike. Myfanwy dresses the narrator in expensive clothing she finds in her brother’s house, while he happens to be away ‘in Pakistan writing a history textbook’ (41). Her gesture might be read less in psychosexual terms, but because the borrowed clothing makes the narrator feel ‘classy at the time’ (41), the gesture fundamentally calls attention to what Paul Murphy identifies as the practice and performance of class disparities.28 Although the figures in the play frequent similar pubs and have access to the same performance venues around the city, class differences are implicit and at times contentious. It is the narrator’s inability to relate to the values and attitudes of Myfanwy’s bohemian-leaning peers that is especially striking. Her peers are interested in world politics, in the making and experiencing of cultural output, including theatre and foreign film. The narrator is unable to relate to their cultural landscape, has little access to their social codes, is put out by their attitudes, and is also challenged by them for his racist comments and political incorrectness. Cultural capital is associated with knowledge, awareness and taste. Culture is a way of signalling or performing values with which one wants to be associated and the virtues with which one wants to align oneself. Sometimes this is realistic and aspirational, sometimes fanciful and delusional. Culture is also a tool of inclusion and exclusion. In terms of social capital, the narrator has friends that are drinking buddies, Myfanwy’s friends cluster together in ways that signal a better integration of their cultural and social capital. The classic argument about class disparities contrasts the elite and privileged with the poor and the disenfranchised. Here, the narrator’s false sense of entitlement and his willingness to sponge off Myfanwy, stealing alcohol from her brother’s home and later taking money out of her purse serve as McPherson’s refusal to position him simply as a marginalized victim of privilege. Midway through his lost weekend, this fly-by-night husband sees himself in a mirror in Myfanwy’s house: I saw myself in the mirror. I looked like I was dead. Like I’d been beaten to death. (32) Alcohol has left this narrator depressed, traumatized and neglectful of his duties towards his family. The narrator is intent on disassociating from most aspects of his life, keen to fabricate his own victimhood, but not so 30

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eager to give up on a fatalism. He feels that he is destined/compelled to break Maria’s heart. What is of particular interest is how Rum’s narrator uses language in ways that are provocative and flippant, sometimes both simultaneously; thus embarrassment, inadequacy, self-disdain and selfloathing are companioned by bravado, disrespect, self-determination and petulance. This narrator self-deceives so as to better deceive others.29 His blind spots are so obvious, as the compulsion to self-sabotage and mess things up are constancies in his life. If the spectator is not repulsed by these tactics, and if one does not maintain a position of superiority, one may entertain the idea that the disjunctions, anomalies and contradictions in the narrator’s mindset reveal not only a sense of split or divided subjectivity, or a divided mind, but the clear-cut operation of rival systems of consciousness that neuroscientist, David Eagleman, accounts for in his work. Eagleman views consciousness not from the perspective of a single core but from a ‘team-of-rivals framework’ so that ‘we can often interpret the rivalrous elements in the brain as analogous to engine and brakes: some elements are driving you towards a behaviour, while others are trying to stop you’.30 It is not free will, but that ‘human behaviour largely operates without regard to volition’s invisible hand’.31 Eagleman accepts that while there may be some veto power, a sense of ‘free won’t’ or a chance for consciousness to halt, stall, divert what is being processed in the mechanisms of the brain, in the alien and ‘hidden subroutines’ or ‘conflicting zombie systems’ that remain outside consciousness.32 He concludes that the brain’s operations ‘are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.’33 While Eagleman is talking about the mind, it does have application as to the awareness of those narrators who believe they are in charge of, steering or in possession of their story.34 If there are rival impulses operational, there is also something else: disassociation and disconnection: ‘The whole day felt like something that had happened to someone else’ (18).

The Good Thief: Degrees of depravity Thief is set in a dark criminal underworld; the monologue’s narrator is a former army second lieutenant and has no criminal record.35 He describes 31

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himself as being a ‘paid thug’, has a particular disdain for people who have skills, and he appears to be a sinister, ruthless figure, with few saving graces.36 The narrator is tasked by Joe Murray to intimidate food-importer and warehouse owner, Patrick Mitchell, someone with criminal and paramilitary links. Mitchell is a target because of his desire to re-negotiate the amount of protection money that he pays to Murray. When the narrator’s routine assignment goes badly wrong, the outcome is three deaths, one of which is initially a non-fatal wounding, but he ends up being executed for fear that he will speak to the police. The violent details are written to be narrated in a low key, bland manner and the unashamed factualness of the gory details discomfits rather than disturbs. Having fled the crime scene with Anna, Mrs Mitchel, and her daughter Niamh (another Niamh), the narrator drives out west to hide out beside the Shannon in a ‘huge’ house, with a ‘huge’ garden, courtesy of his friend, Jeff (72, again my emphasis). The home of Jeff and his wife, Marie, is later destroyed by Murray’s gang: while their fates are not precisely indicated, one supposes that they have been killed. Having survived a bad beating dished out by Murray’s men, the narrator ends up in jail, and is only found guilty of kidnapping, as there is no evidence that links him to the murders of Anna or Niamh; there are no bodies or crime scene. The calculation that crime boss Murray seemingly brings to such situations is unnerving, and the ends to which he will go to disguise his involvement in illegality are as sinister as they are striking. The narrator is obsessed with his former partner, Greta, who is in a relationship with Murray when the narrative starts. The narrator admits to having been violent towards Greta because of her infidelities. Greta is also not faithful to Murray, and fear of consequences does not stop her cheating on this underworld figure. At times of great distress, the narrator is reminded of Greta, sometimes it is about her having sex with someone, and sometimes it is about the narrator getting back with her. While the narrator thinks that ‘Greta didn’t love anybody’ (79), the same can be said of himself. The narrator’s final lines account for him seeing Greta years later, and her getting into a ‘big car’ with a ‘guy almost twice her age’ (83). On this occasion, any impulse to walk up to her and interact has finally waned. Although corruption is rife in Thief, the desire for money is a major motivator: the narrator obviously gets paid by Murray for his henchman duties, Murray extorts money from others, Mitchell conspires with criminal elements and stores stolen goods, Anna is with Mitchell for money, Niamh’s father is not with Anna and their daughter due to a lack of money, and by 32

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the play’s end Greta is with a man twice her age, which one assumes has something to do with money. Jeff, the Boyle-based estate agent, had to face down extortion attempts from a ‘Mercedes-driving’, local councillor, called Burke, who wanted a five-grand ‘administration fee’ to ensure planning permission for the two bungalows that Jeff was building (67). The narrator assaults Burke after local heavies have beaten Jeff in the toilet of a pub when he refused to make a payment to the politician. Criminals, paramilitaries, quasi-legitimate business practices and corrupt political regimes go hand in hand. Political corruption and malign business practices are the aggressive gelling forces that facilitate the circulation of corrupt capital and position certain people to be able to benefit most. If Thief is grounded in a reality of corruption, greed, betrayal and violence, there is also another perspective offered by fantasy, hallucination and the uncanny. The narrator’s fantasies associated with Greta are one thing, but, on more than one occasion, the work reaches away from quotient reality. There is mention of ghosts in relation to the big house out west, and there is also mention of out-of-body experiences. When the narrator is being tortured by Murray’s people, his mind dissociates from what is physically happening to him: he imagines himself in a war zone, being led up some stairs to ‘newly painted flats beside a river’ (79). More than that, he experiences the beating from the perspective of the soul: ‘Maybe that dream I’d had of her when I was getting that kicking was her soul and she met me while things were happening to her body’ (79). Earlier, he had considered the nearby presence of Anna and Niamh in the room in which he slept: ‘I could feel them lying beside me and when I listened to them breathing it felt like my soul was being bleached’ (77). Ghosts, souls, out-of-body experiences will be central to discussions on the supernatural in Chapter 3.

This Lime Tree Bower: Three strikes not out Bower (1995) offers a series of interconnecting monologues delivered by three male narrators, the school goer, Joe (aged 17), his brother, Frank (aged 22), who works in the family chip shop business and Ray, who is in his 30s and teaches philosophy in University College Dublin. Ray is the boyfriend of Carmel, sister to Joe and Frank. As this play’s incidents provide the inspiration and template for Saltwater, I will hold over some of my discussions of this work until I get to the analysis of that film. There is 33

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no spatial specificity marked out by Bower, but it is a world constituted by particular public houses, schools, housing estates and a seafront that in many ways aligns with Skerries, north county Dublin, that later proves to be the setting for Saltwater. This piece is not just delivered as if from the perspective of some sort of continuous present as is with Rum. Joe talks of taking one of Frank’s shirts to wear for his evening out, and he then says that he actually ‘saw it again recently’ (115). This comment complicates the passage of time. Family indebtedness is linked to a loan provided by the local bookmaker and councillor, Simple Simon McCurdie. McCurdie is a sinister figure, manipulating people and taking control of their businesses by providing loans that he knows cannot be repaid. In Reynolds Bar, McCurdie’s local reputation is enhanced by his demeanour during conversations about the split of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) from the officials (the Irish Republican Army [IRA]). McCurdie remains silent or nods ‘wisely’ when the names of high-ranking Republicans are mentioned,37 signalling some form of unsaid affiliation with paramilitary Republicanism. Frank’s response to McCurdie’s attempt to take an investor’s share in the family business is to stage an armed robbery. When the police show up on their doorstep, it is not to pursue Frank for his involvement in deed, but to question Joe about the rape of a young woman, Sarah Comisky. Joe’s friend, Damien, on whom Joe has a crush, has tried to frame him for the sexual attack. Confirmation of Sarah’s rape troubles not only Joe’s perception as to what happened but his own moral sense, after he is titillated and horrified by the experience and uncertain as to what has occurred in terms of consent and violation. For Frank, his father had always behaved ethically and followed the rules, and that dedication to honourable values did not do him any good: ‘But sometimes you have to decide that principles will only fuck you up, because no-one else is ever moral. … But he was right. That was the thing. Well I didn’t want to be right any more. That’s a load of meaningless toss’ (119–20). Frank’s belief that principles merely inhibit desire effectively justifies armed robbery. The philosophical gaps and moral contradictions evident in Ray’s perspectives on principled matters are crucial to this play, given he is the one reflecting, teaching and writing about ethics. Ray ranks Carmel’s intelligence as superior to his own, but still objectifies her by romanticizing Carmel’s noble qualities. Ethical considerations do not stop him persistently lying to and cheating on her. Carmel is successful in her work in the Irish Financial Services Centre and is sitting professional exams, but none of the 34

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male characters are sufficiently interested to know what she is employed to do; there is a sense that they are threatened by her achievements. When Ray attempts to question the theory of language proposed by an elderly visiting philosopher, Wolfgang Konigsberg, he embarrassingly vomits in the public forum of a large lecture theatre. Here suspicions about intellectual capital match those about cultural capital in Rum. Wallace correctly argues that Bower is composed around ‘three distinct modes of perception – naivety, cynicism and pragmatism – plaited together around three associated ethical predicaments – the witnessing of a rape, a robbery and professional misconduct.38 Across the three stories, lies, deception and betrayals of trust are key, and there is a struggle to situate the significance and purpose of dignity, honour and justice. Apart from the constant telling of lies or the hanging on to delusions about people or things, nothing is quite what it seems in Bower. There are often multiple and contradictory narratives about characters, situations and circumstances. One account has it that the person that gives Frank the gun is on the run from the conflict in Northern Ireland, but that he could not be extradited for reasons unknown; another version explains him as simply an ‘armed robber out on parole trying to stay out of trouble’ (94). There is ambiguity surrounding why Damien arrives in Joe’s school mid-term; the 1920 shipwreck in the harbour inspires various accounts of its perishing. Local gossip circulates widely contradictory accounts of the robbery in the days after its occurrence. Frank is neither a Robin Hood-type figure nor an underdog hero striking back against the corruption of malign capital. When Frank, Ray and Joe spend some of the stolen money on a weekend away, there is no remorse about the spending of fraudulently acquired cash on luxuries, rather than giving it to the poor. Yet, if the play suggests that it is difficult to substantiate an ethics around money and wealth, Sarah’s rape ensures that the ethical and legal issues are clear cut. In the absence of consent, such violation brings no ambiguity with it. Additionally, as it is a relatively rich boy who rapes a girl from a poor background, the class dimension to the sexual assault is something worth considering.39

Port Authority: Last resort lineage In Port,40 each of the three characters, Kevin, Dermot and Joe, is given five individual turns to address the audience: Kevin is ‘maybe 20’, Dermot is 35

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mid- to late 30s and Joe is 70.41 Given that the name ‘Joe’ appears in Bower and Port there might be a suggestion of continuity. For McPherson: ‘The play is really three generations of Dublin men talking about how they face up to the responsibility of emotion. … The three men could be related; they could be the same person. I don’t know.’42 Talking to Tim Adams, McPherson suggests: The young person isn’t certain that love can be real; the middle-aged man is only discovering that it is; and the older person seems so sure of it. I was interested in the way that many of us go through the whole of our lives staying with someone just out of complacency, because leaving isn’t easy. … It’s about whether you are prepared to make yourself happy at the cost of someone else’s happiness. And that’s not just a personal or historical or psychological question. It’s also a moral one.43 Port is not a sequential monologue like Bower, rather, it appears as if each narrator’s story is discrete. Kevin has just left home to house-share and go on the dole – there is the regular consumption of alcohol, smoking hash, house parties, following bands and some sex. It is a hedonistic lifestyle of sorts, without too many cares and without much concern for the consequences of actions or for the future. Kevin idolizes Clare, and her regard for him is complex: they spend time together, flirt a little, and in certain ways play at being a couple in that they shop together for party provisions and go for long walks. Kevin inaccurately reads signs of tenderness as proof of some fundamental sexual chemistry between them; but there are different types of intimacies. When Kevin speaks antagonistically of Clare’s other female friends, he sees them as possessing a posh and snobby Dublin South-side sensibility. In addition, Kevin’s perspective on the better-looking Dublin 4 types, to whom Clare is usually attracted, reinforces class rivalries and hostilities: ‘headbangers. Or lads who thought they were, anyway. … She was always with some spiky-haired crusty who you could see was from Dublin 4 or somewhere, putting on a bit of an accent. They were all rich and spoiled and better looking than any of us’ (134). The accusations of falseness and a perception that the offspring of the elite are spoiled and overindulged is consistent with interpersonal jealousy as it is with class polarities. Although Clare does not want a sexual relationship with Kevin, she does not quite want him to be with the student Trish either. Kevin gets 36

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along well with Trish; they have a good sex life and are comfortable with each other and that is evident in his comment: ‘Her hand would slip into mine, absent-mindedly, and automatic, no strings attached, just proper love’ (161). Kevin sees Trish and his friend Davy Rose as being alike: ‘They wanted more than the world had to give them’ (162). In contrast, he sees himself as someone more inclined to go with the flow, not a fighter. Indeed, Kevin’s more expansive perspective on souls is interesting: ‘There isn’t a soul for everyone, maybe lots share a soul, just two – for those who go with the flow, and one for all the people who fight’ (179). Kevin’s narrative ends optimistically with two lovers complimenting each other, rather than being divisive, rivals or deluded fantasists. Dermot’s work history is flaky, having been fired from his last job in Whelans for the sexual harassment of a male colleague, and previous to that, he got sacked from Denis Mahony’s car dealership, as he never sold a car over an eighteen-month period. Out of the blue, a dream job offer comes to Dermot from O’Hagan’s company, money-managers/financial advisors for bands, media people and artists. When there is a party in O’Hagan’s, Dermot fails to bring his wife, Mary, as he is ashamed and embarrassed by her. He is also very much aware that his Penneys’ blazer and Dunnes Stores’ loafers are utterly at odds with the designer clothing worn by the professional elites attending the event. Dermot’s drunkenness at the party is not regarded as a poor judgement call or as a bad start to his new career. The scale and affluence of O’Hagan’s home reminds Dermot of his mother’s naïve and unsuccessful attempts to get him a place in a ‘posh’ private school, run by Jesuits, which was ‘all wooden staircases and arched hallways’ (146). O’Hagan has mistaken Dermot for someone else of the same name, and the appointment is rescinded, while agreeing to recompense Dermot for the inconvenience. O’Hagan threatens Dermot that if he brings a legal case, he will pay a heavy price. Dermot knew deep down that he did not fit in with the rubyschool educated business colleagues of O’Hagan. While Dermot enjoys the trappings of an elite lifestyle, the first-class travel, large hotel suites, casual sex (possibly but not confirmed with a prostitute) and cocaine, it is only a temporary circumstance, a carnivalesque inversion of his social order. Banished from this business world, Dermot finds himself comforted by Mary. Her account of their relationship includes her need to take care of him, and her awareness of his desperation as a young man. Mary can cope with his fears, but also regulates him through his anxieties. Despite his low regard for her, and despite all that has gone on between them, she 37

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still promises to be there for him. As Dermot’s story ends, Mary allegedly consents to his self-submission, as he disassociates from the trauma of the moment, hunched and bowed. His accounts of his encounters with her and what she says, come only from his perspective. Joe is currently resident in assisted-care accommodation. A successful job in Cadburys allowed Joe to be socially mobile, as his family moved from Donnycarney to the more affluent area of Sutton. According to him, Ireland of the 1960s didn’t have ‘a lot of issues that you do now’ (150). If he can grandstand in this way, he also admits that he has ‘no idea’ about himself, even if he champions goodness and decency. His life story proves to be somewhat more difficult to evaluate based on these values. When Liz, Joe’s wife, was getting treatment for an ovarian cyst, he went around to his neighbours, Tommy and Marion Ross. A previous conversation with Marion at a party turned out to be anything but a casual exchange. She got under his skin and Joe began to obsess over her; in Joe’s mind Marion attained ‘mythic proportions’, whereby ‘your sense of what’s right and wrong and what can tip the balance into some kind of unpredictable insanity’ becomes possible (171). The night before he had dreamt: ‘I was down at this river and there was a woman there with jet black hair and the unconditional no-nonsense acceptance I’d felt was like, when I woke up, that I’d lost a part of myself. Not that Marion looked anything like this woman in the dream’ (160). (That fixation on unconditional alignment is of a different order to what a forlorn Carol offers an even more desperate John in Carol.) Joe is caught by Marion attempting to steal a picture of her as a child; he claims that the image is a moment when both innocence and mischief are simultaneous, and this fascinates him. Time seemingly has not dampened Marion’s sensibility, energy or aura. Confusion obliges Joe to consider all outcomes to Liz’s health, to imagine some celestial purpose to his thoughts and current circumstances. His is a mind astray, scanning for causality when there is little or none, looking for signs of definitive patterns in the face of the neutrality and randomness of nature and the universe; he somehow wants to see divine design in his desire to be unfaithful. After Joe turns down Marion’s offer to take the photo, they barely see or speak to each other again, despite being neighbours. However, he frames the outcome of the encounter in the language of marriage vows: ‘For better or for worse. Or both, mmm?’ (174). Joe had fallen in love with someone he did not know, he did not fight for her, and, instead, made a decision to let his life ‘run its course’ (184). Joe realizes that the love he has 38

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for his wife, particularly now in light of her passing, is compartmentalized, and that ‘there was nothing neither wrong nor right about’ them as a couple (150). He suggests regret and worry are futile, wasteful emotions. As he readies himself for sleep, Joe brings a newly acquired picture of Marion to his heart, alongside the rosary beads of his dead wife, Liz. It first appears as if these are three stand-alone narratives, but as the stories progress, tentative and subtle connections start to be possible. Kevin’s friend, Davy Rose, is in a band called the Bangers, who are managed by O’Hagan’s company. Then it is revealed that O’Hagan has been obliged by a stipulation in his mother’s will to send someone a photograph of her as a child, which is likely to be the photo that Joe tried to steal many years previously, and then Joe receives it in the post. Liz’s rosary beads that Joe keeps close to him were from Lourdes, while the beads of Kevin’s grandmother had also been purchased there, and as we realize that Kevin’s grandmother has just died we start to make further tentative connections. The rosary beads may also be simply a coincidence, as there is nothing unique about people possessing rosary beads purchased in Lourdes. The implication perhaps is that Joe is Kevin’s grandad. It might also mean that Marion and Liz died around the same time.44 Only a re-marriage would explain that someone with the surname O’Hagan might be the child of Tommy and Marion Ross. Although each of the characters circulates in the same areas of Dublin’s Northside, such as Raheny, Howth Junction, Bayside, Fairview, Kilbarrack, Baldoyle, Beaumont, Donaghmede, Artane, Donnycarney and Sutton, and while these locations are fixed, there are enough textual clues to suggest that the narrators are not necessarily operating from within the same time-frame, even if they do share the same physical space on stage. When tasked by his mother’s will to send the photo, O’Hagan becomes restless, wondering, ‘the past is over, isn’t it?’ (169). The past is never so easily demarcated from the present in McPherson’s work. Complications of time can also be read into the fact that in Kevin’s story the Bangers are only a start-up band, playing in small venues and at house parties in Dublin, whereas in Dermot’s tale the band is on an international tour, kicking off in Los Angeles before an audience of 80,000. Intentionally, logic and causality are confounded to a considerable degree by the playwright. Particular names link characters not only across this play, but also out to other plays. Dermot’s wife is Mary, Joe’s neighbour is Marion Ross and Joe’s companions in the residential home include Mary Larkin and Jackie Fennell, another Mary and another Jack (Weir). Liz’s 39

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sister is Carmel, the same name as Joe and Frank’s sister in Bower. Also, Kevin’s girlfriend is a Trish and Sister Pat is one of the individuals running Joe’s residential home, both names are abbreviations of the name Patricia. Humans are hot-wired to make connections between facts that may or may not be random, accordingly, McPherson tempts the spectator to connect the stories, even when the links are tentative, even speculative. The clues are there not simply to entice the spectator to substantiate anything definitively, but to alert us to the fact that the need and compulsion to connect is fraught territory. Each of these three narrators is alert to their own strengths, resiliences, passions, incompetencies, imprudences and negligences. Kevin notes of himself, ‘Like I was starving and I’d no idea even if there was any food in the house’ (143). Here, awareness fails to trump helplessness or incite action. Dermot admits: ‘And I feel a row coming on, but I’m on top of it. And I think that I’ll probably just break something later instead’ (148). This comment suggests some connection to and awareness of his own rage, yet the expression and realization of it through a need to break something is infantile. Joe ends up with a philosophical disposition that is based on acceptance, Kevin’s ethos is shaped by distinctions between those who fight and those who drift or go with the flow, and Dermot’s avoidance attitude is summed up in the lines: ‘Don’t ever try to work anything out. Because you don’t know – and you never will. And even if you do, it’ll be too late to do anything about it anyway’ (154). The gaps between awareness and action, between living for the now and the consequences of opportunism are shaped by an awareness of diverse and contradictory states of mind. These are the rival systems of consciousness that pull individuals in different ways, already discussed in terms of Eagleman’s work. In performance, there is an attempt to achieve the interweaving of the stories, an interconnection of characters and a layering of different spaces and time in order to affirm that sense of rival states of consciousness, with the implication that there are no absolutes and no certainties. Eileen Diss’s design for the play’s premier has a large wooden platform or plinth around which the actors move. Diss’s design is suggestive of a space close to the water’s edge, where ferry bells sound. Matt Wolf ’s review notes how the set is a ‘deliberately placeless and abstract set’.45 Wolf adds that Port ‘features no bus terminals onstage [in reference to New York’s Port Authority bus station]: the journeys denoted in the title are clearly spiritual ones. At times, McPherson drops the passing hint that our trio may represent the same self at different stages in one life’.46 Or as McPherson puts it in the Critical 40

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Perspectives section: ‘It could be that they are the same character, simply starting out from different time periods.’ When it is the turn of the performer to do his narrative section, he moves centre stage, and as he concludes a bell rings as if to signal the point of pause. There are three very different narrative styles utilized, Enna MacLiam, as Kevin, paces around the stage when he delivers his narrative and there is a strong sense of the throw-away and also urgency to his narrative style. Stephen Brennan’s performance as Dermot offsets the impatience of MacLiam, his is a bravura, self-indulgent performance mode, and even during the moments of reflection, there is something always ungrounded about the depths of his awareness, gains are overplayed, mistakes are downgraded and inconveniences ignored with composure. Brennan’s comic timing is extraordinary, feigning disbelief and taking particular glee in accounting for his disastrous performance at the party in O’Hagan’s home. Jim Norton’s Joe stands somewhat stooped, wears a cardigan and relies on the assistance of a stick to stand up. There is something mature, thoughtful and equally disregarding, while not flippant, to Norton’s tone. When one performer is narrating, other actors remain visible in the shadows and function almost as silhouettes, as if they are connected, even haunting one another. On another occasion, when MacLiam is narrating, Norton stands with his back to the audience, and Dermot bends forward, elbows on knees, so that his face is not seen, while he is seated on a wooden platform.47 Nicholas De Jongh talks about how Mick Hughes’s lighting captures the passing of time: ‘Time and the day pass from apricot sunlight to pink sunset and starry evening, while the dark night of the soul takes grip.’48 Performance styles are inconsistent with philosophical beliefs and measures of self-esteem. If collectively the performers do not show an awareness of each other in the way that the narrators in Bower do, the overall miseen-scène confirms that their interconnections are a combination of fate, chance, coincidence, contingency and chaos. The ‘unexceptional’ and the mundane become exceptional and uncanny through the interdigitization and layering of the stories.

Come on Over: A third narrator? There is little interaction between the two narrators, Matthew and Margaret, played by Jim Norton and Dearbhla Molloy, in the premier of Come on Over at Dublin’s Gate Theatre.49 Both performers wear hoods ‘that should 41

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look like mass-produced sacking and have neat holes for the eyes and mouth’.50 He is a Jesuit priest staying with a former sweetheart and back in his hometown, Jamestown − the physical location for Veil and the place that inspired Weir. Matthew is investigating the remains of a young girl whose corpse has not decomposed, even after 400 years in the ground.51 Matthew is there to gauge whether the remains can be proclaimed as a miracle, whereas academics from both Trinity College and University College Dublin provide a scientific rationale for the preservation of the remains, namely ‘organic substances buried below the permafrost’ (195). Matthew is disfigured, having lost an eye and half a nose when an eleven-year-old African girl, Patience, assaulted him after he had raped her. Rather than facing responsibility, Matthew tries to apportion blame to an Englishman. Later, Matthew holds firm to the fact that his sexual encounter was not with a child, but with a young woman and that, somehow, he does not deserve punishment for being so tempted. In the theatre an actor’s face is a central communicative tool. By hooding each of the characters, the spectator is denied the chance to see what the physical features of each face might reveal. The hood not only serves as a form of theatrical mask, but can also be associated with shame and penitence. McPherson states that the hoods should conjure ‘images of being hostages, dead, or executed’.52 Late in the play, Margaret takes her hood off, but Matthew urges her to put it back on, in a fashion that confirms the unequal power dynamic that exists between them. When Margaret talks about masturbating him, she thinks about her late husband, where Matthew’s penis has been, and she wonders how many penises her own daughter has felt. There is no consideration of her own desire here and nothing consoling or rewarding about what transacts between them. The moment repeats the pre-vocational, unrewarding intimacy both shared. Clearly, a funerary consciousness is being unravelled here, in terms of the shame and disassociation from sexual pleasure that the sin-orientated and anti-body rhetoric the Catholic Church preaches with its belief that marriage is the only place where sexual actions can be free of sin. It is a religious belief system based on doctrine that does its best to deny, damage, corrupt and pervert intimacy. The unspoken narrative of this work is crucial. Indeed, it could be argued that the spectator is prompted to provide the rival narrative of clerical abuse to what both offer. This story would account for how children were violated in state institutions, in hospitals, in dormitories of schools, in presbyteries, in sporting clubs and elsewhere around the county. In Ireland, it was 42

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predominantly the children of the poor who suffered most in Industrial Schools and at the hands of the clergy or their agents.53 Such abuse was but one of the many consequences of class hierarchies. There also was the realization that such criminal behaviour was reliant on the complicity of governments, civil servants, educators, doctors, social workers and members of the police and judiciary, who were disinclined to intervene, and allowed, in most instances, such violations to go unpunished. Abusers were systematically transferred to other positions of authority, and when such stories were brought into public awareness, there was an inclination to dismiss, deny and downplay the matter.54 Eventually Matthew admits to his violatory actions but does so only in terms of sin. He then switches tack, claiming that his greater sin was ‘to feel abandoned. And not to trust in God’s love’ (204). The broader application of this sleight-of-hand is equivalent to how the church systemically covered up abuse within its own ranks, hiding behind the spurious superiority of canon over civil law. If nothing else, the absolution offered by the sacrament of confession and the penances prescribed fall well short of the notion of retributive justice that would apply in the civil courts.55 Evil acts cannot be so easily absolved and erased. The obfuscations, cover-ups and the extent of the obstructions of justice by the Catholic Church left many believers and non-believers across the world outraged. Still there were also some who remained in denial and certainly did not want such dirty linen to be washed in public. Matthew’s willingness to see the child’s remains as an expression of divine will and miraculous intervention collapses when the corpse begins to decompose. This monologue sets out to break the neat relationship between the sinner and forgiveness, as if evil comes from without rather than within. Norton’s brave portrayal of Matthew’s spurious rationalizations sit uncomfortably alongside the desperate and destructive forms of acceptance that Molloy illustrates so well on behalf of her character. Molloy captures her character’s loneliness and the depths she would go to because of desperation. Critical responses were particularly hostile. Karen Fricker says that Come has ‘far too many of McPherson’s pet themes – unexpressed love, communication problems, steadfast women and weak men – are packed in here, and as director he fails to bring order to the overloaded mess’.56 Charles Spencer suggests: The piece, written in McPherson’s potent monologue form, is piercingly evocative, powerfully exploring the tension between 43

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human and divine love. But McPherson’s own production is ruined by his decision to make both the leading actors … and a chorus of recorder-playing children wear hoods, entirely concealing their faces apart from tiny holes for the eyes and mouth. The device is both baffling and alienating.57 For me, sitting in the theatre experiencing such a performance was a difficult and unnerving experience. I had little of the distance that I usually have in the theatre.

Conclusion Regularly, that which is culturally and ideologically disowned, denied, hidden or repressed can be impressively accommodated in the monologue form. The narrators in Rum, Thief and Port binge drink because they are addicted, but also because it is a way to allay fears and disassociate from thoughts of oblivion, duty, purpose and responsibility. Frailties go in tandem with notions of temporary and provisional performative identities, more generally. If various forms of masculinity predominate,58 then femininity enters the fray not directly as a visible presence but in different, less tangible ways. Sometimes the blatant, inappropriate and stereotypical gender biases of characters signal difference. However, because most of the male characters are so fixated on various female figures that are central to or hover at the edge of their environments, and because most of these woman figures are anything other than conventional, there is an obvious challenge to, and undermining of, any conformist objectivizing or idealizing of them. The monologues are not just about narrators, their personal stories, but also reveal a great deal about privilege, opportunity, greed and generosity and the ideological disposition that substantiates these viewpoints. Various interfaces between cultural, social and material capital establishes class clusters, differences, but also commonalities. McPherson does not simply fetishize the decency of the less affluent and does not merely demonize the wealthy. Corruption is exposed in the interfaces between a small business and a loan shark in Bower, gangsters, paramilitaries, politicians and dodgy businesses in Thief, the media, entertainment industry, politicians and professional establishment classes in Port. Exploitation is rife and is never configured simplistically.

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The performer is both narrator and observer, and that sense of distance is essential to the transaction between actor and audience as it is the most direct route to link in the spectator. Indeed, it is probably true to say that however often uncomfortable and opposed a spectator is to the mindsets and actions of the plays’ narrators, the spectator is afforded a position not so much of complicity, but privilege in relation to the narrator. The spectator perhaps provides the more decisive ethical disposition, rather than the works themselves.

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C Chapter 2 CRIMINALITY AND CAPER TRAGICOMEDY

Introduction: City of capital/capital city Dublin is not an iconic city, per se, as it does not have the landmark buildings of a New York, Paris, Venice or Bangkok. In many Irish films Dublin is defined by its distinctive buses, trains, light rail and trams, its nearby mountains and proximity to the Irish sea, and its small bridges across the river Liffey (like the O’Connell, Ha’penny, Rosie Hackett or Samuel Beckett bridges). Dublin’s limited number of landmark buildings and monuments can be seen in films, including the Christchurch and St Patrick’s cathedrals, the Spire, the Poolbeg chimneys, City Hall, the Four Courts, Irish Financial Services Centre, new Conference Centre and, more recently, its redeveloped sports stadia, the Aviva and Croke Park.1 Since the early 1990s, and with few exceptions, the Dublin captured in films is portrayed as a high-density city with complex social dynamics. Dublin is seldom represented as a city of rejuvenation, professional living and cultural privilege, but more as one burdened by subsistence living, underprivilege and various other forms of socio-economic disadvantage.2 These cinematic worlds are associated predominantly with social immobility, structural inequalities and broader state welfare dependencies. Living conditions comprise large-scale/high-density, usually run-down, social housing, including down-at-heel inner city flat complexes, dilapidated suburban high-rise buildings or run-down low-rise suburban estates on the city’s periphery. Additionally, these worlds tend to be dominated by criminal activities from robberies, prostitution, extortion to drug dealing, human trafficking and the torture and execution of rivals, or anyone who gets in the way of money-making and territorial claims. The almost feudal hierarchies of these criminal underworlds are based on indebtedness, misplaced loyalties and spurious moral codes. Individual or clusters of criminal elites generally

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

accumulate significant wealth. Invariably, the forces of the law are almost ineffectual in the protection of the innocent or in apprehension of those guilty of criminal actions, and there tends to be a fatalism surrounding the discharging of natural or civic justice. Examples of the above can be seen in the following works: John Boorman’s The General (1998), John Crowley’s Intermission (2003), Joel Schumacher’s Veronica Guerin (2003) and Ian Fitzgibbon’s Perrier’s Bounty (2009). Yet the Dublin of these films is not so darkly conceived as the way Belfast invariably is in films set in contemporary Northern Ireland. Using the example of Marc Evans’s Resurrection Man (1997), Martin McLoone argues that the ‘desolation’ stands apart, as ‘these streets are conduits of death – dumping grounds for mutilated corpses and escape routes for the killers’.3 McPherson’s film work is driven less by a realist imperative and more by a strong tragicomic one. (McPherson’s Paula complicates this line of argument.) Just as the monologues speak to the Celtic Tiger’s period of economic prosperity, and just as the monologues signalled the critical importance of money to the dynamics of that and almost all other societies, McPherson’s Dublin films have money as central to their plots. The neo-Marxist Slavoj Žižek identifies ‘subjective violence’ as being the more visible forms of violence ‘performed by a clearly identifiable agent’, which is measured against a norm of non-violence; thus it is seen as a ‘perturbation of the “normal” peaceful state of things’.4 In many instances, violence associated with criminality is seen as a shattering of norms on the one hand, but on the other, that its violence is isolated to certain areas and, in the main, seen as self-contained and not mainstream. Equally, this subjective violence is deemed random and pathological in many instances. It tends to be ruthless psychopathic figures that populate criminal representations of American organized crime as in mafia-type gang films generally. For Žižek, one also needs to take a step backward from such subjective violence and ‘to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance’.5 He sees this ‘objective’ violence as ‘precisely the violence inherent in the “normal” state of things’. Furthermore, Žižek regards objective violence as a systematic and fundamental oppression designed to maintain the mechanisms and inequalities of neoliberal capitalism. For him, objective violence then is ‘often the catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’, thus ‘something like the notorious “dark matter” of physics, the counterpart to the all too visible subjective violence’.6 How the subjective 48

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violence of criminality can give particular visibility to the ‘dark matter’ and the murky arts of neo-liberal capital is the focus of this chapter.

I Went Down: On the road to nowhere? McPherson’s screenplay for Paddy Breathnach’s road movie, Down, has Dublin as an unruly city, partially contaminated and determined by criminal activity. Down is marked by indebtedness, punishment beatings, double crossings, kidnappings, disappearances and executions.7 It is far from the ‘dis-organized crime’ that the film’s promotion materials suggest. (The I Went Down: The Shooting Script illustrates that early drafts relied even more on the violently sensational for impact, and it included robberies, kidnappings, vigilantes and acts of terrorism.)8 Breathnach and Rob Walpole, as director and producer respectively, were looking for a style of movie that they felt would have broad appeal.9 This film absorbs the influence of Hollywood’s buddy/road movie generic formulations, and not only re-applies many of them to an Irish context, but also adds something distinctive. Down is very much inspired by comedy capers and road movies such as Martin Brest’s Midnight Run (1988) and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991). In Down, Git (Peter McDonald) and Bunny (Brendan Gleeson) are tasked by Tom French (Tony Doyle) to go to Cork to find Frank Grogan (Peter Caffrey) and pick up some money from him. Grogan was once French’s great friend and companion in crime. Bunny has spent six and a half years in jail for armed robbery and he is being blackmailed by French because of a homosexual encounter he had while in prison. Git is also just out of prison, having served a sentence for a crime his father had committed; the father had attempted to steal a video recorder from a shop after it had been ram-raided by a gang. The opening scene showing Git in prison is not an opportunity to capture the oppression and intimidation that is often shown to exist between prison inmates, rival gangs or between prison guards and those detained. Instead the scene’s focus is on the relationship between Git and his ex-girlfriend Sabrina Bradley (Antoine Byrne) who wants Git’s approval as she is now dating his friend, Anto (David Wilmot). Their exchange takes place in a brightly lit space and it is a civilized and not a hostile or unruly encounter. Git is recruited for the task after he blinds one of French’s lieutenants, Johnner Doyle (Michael McElhatton), during a fight while saving Anto from a punishment beating, a gambling debt not paid. 49

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Down takes Bunny and Git away from Dublin to Gort, Co. Galway, then to Cork, and back up to the capital through the southwest and midlands of Ireland. The main characters travel down back roads as they try to stay away from the main thoroughfares. The rural landscape is a predominantly flat one, in contrast to the use of island and mountain backdrops evident in many Irish films from past decades. There are only a few night scenes, and the darkness evident in internal urban spaces is offset by many of the external scenes that are brightly lit by cinematographer, Cian de Buitléar. As the road-trip progresses, McDonald and Gleeson take a certain glee in the gormlessness and limited, but constructive, inventiveness of their characters to seize the moment. So, when Bunny holds up the petrol station because he is witnessed trying unsuccessfully to open the petrol cap of a stolen car, comedy is to the fore rather than focusing in on the attack on the petrol station’s attendant (Kevin Hely), and whatever trauma ensues during circumstances like this. (Likewise, Grogan’s incessant banter is played to great comic effect by Caffery.) And by way of playing down the violence and negating the fatalism, the spectator frequently witnesses only the aftermaths of vicious exchanges. When Git is beaten up in the pub in Cork, the attack is not seen, only the outcome, a bloodied face and broken nose, which Bunny tries later to re-set in a comic fashion. Likewise, Git’s blinding of Johnner is not shown, but it is a scene that carries the potential for gruesomeness, only the initial stages of the fight are shown, and again its aftermath. The film’s few exchanges of bullets are uneventful, leading to shattered windscreens and a minor car crash. Crucially, there is neither fetishization nor sensationalization of gory violence. It is only late on, when the film’s main characters find themselves in the forest when perspective, disposition and mood temporarily alter. This wooded space becomes the scene of a shoot-out and the location where the bodies of French and Grogan join the previously buried body of Sonny Mulligan (Johnny Murphy). Although Bunny is wounded in the forest, it is an injury with no lasting effects. The disappearance of French is then concealed in hearsay, innuendo and urban legend, just like Mulligan’s previous vanishing. Git and Bunny sell on the counterfeit 20-dollar plates for their own material benefit. The final scene shows them driving away in a car, wearing shades and Hawaiian-style shirts destined for America, a place not known to them by experience, but by media and fictive representations. Greg King reports Breathnach’s comments that ‘the title actually comes from Plato’s Republic, which dealt with an epic journey into a shadowy 50

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world of illusion and danger where there’s no easy way to clearly define good or bad’.10 For King, Breathnach ‘uses the title because of its deliberate ambiguity. The phrase has references to being sent to prison, often for a crime that you didn’t commit, as well as a more lurid sexual connotation’.11 Breathnach’s film uses mediatization, intertextuality and citation to ensure a self-consciousness about genre positioning. Sean Crosson notes: ‘Right from the opening scene of Down, the choice of both music and credits is evocative of Pulp Fiction [1994], while the use of intertitles also invites comparisons.’12 Dervila Layden notes, ‘Genres are always about narrative form and thus by their nature are intertextual as they interact with the evolving generic archetype(s)’.13 Accordingly, it is important to keep in mind Christine Gledhill’s comments that if postmodern practices dissolve the discrete identities of genres, globalization and multinational co-production threaten the existence of the distinctly national. Thus genre theorists confront the apparent breakdown of traditional genre categories as generic features float off into the global stratosphere, ever more promiscuously crossing both generic and national boundaries.14 One relies on the competencies of the audiences to accommodate genre flux, and the utilization of genre-within-genre, art-within-art or mediawithin-media. What the film world in general proves is that genre categories not only are unstable but are there to be broken: they offer promiscuous springboards into alternative forms by way of the spectators’ overall genre comprehension. And without seeing indigenous Irish films such as Down as simply countering and subverting Hollywood norms, the combination of both genre reassurance and experimentation have invoked complicated responses to this film. Barry Monahan signals the ‘generic’ deficiencies of the protagonists: Not only do Bunny and Git become ridiculous in their ineffectiveness at achieving modes of performance that specific generic narrative structures require of them, but comedy is also provided by their reflection and commentary on this. The inability of the small-time gangsters to fill the mainstream roles that both narrative and miseen-scène have drawn for them is paralleled with a breakdown in communication and a failure of linguistic logic.15 51

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I think both main characters fill the ‘mainstream roles’ determined for them, and the malfunctioning of logic is tragicomic in intent rather than an implicit failure. Git and Bunny are, as Monahan concludes, anything but the gangsters of ‘Hollywood’s classical era’, but are, in many respects, kindred spirits of the dislodged tragic clowns found in Sean O’Casey’s or Samuel Beckett’s work. In Debbie Ging’s study on masculinities, she gives a full chapter to marginalized and socially excluded male characters in films of the 1990s and 2000s, in which she argues that the ‘ostensible politics of anti-conformism’ of the new working-class ‘anti-hero’ are ‘not always easy to decode’.16 Ging’s analysis brings together British underclass films as theorized by Claire Monk (2000) and Steve Chibnall (2001) – who proposed the notion of ‘gangster-light’ – alongside Jeffrey Sconce’s term ‘smart film’ (2002), which includes work shaped by irony, fatalism, black humour and relativism, and is also ‘characterized by disaffection, nihilism and anomie’.17 How unlawfulness and rebelliousness are framed is a concern of Ging, who argues that too many films about working-class disenfranchised male characters are based on extreme polarities ‘as lawless and dangerous in the news media, yet reified as popular cultural heroes in advertising and the entertainment media – may have ultimately served the same purpose, namely to stigmatize and essentialize underclass masculinity as social inevitability rather than as a symptom of inequality’.18 According to Ging, global ‘cinematic tropes of male disempowerment and victimhood do not necessarily signal patriarchal defeat; on the contrary they can be read as strategic attempts to reclaim agency and power through the representation of their loss’,19 or even when ‘working class masculinities are excluded from most of the patriarchal dividends, they often benefit in the sense that they are used as exemplars of masculine strength’, and authority.20 Of interest to Ging is the ‘fucked by fate’ attitudes of the smart films’ protagonists and their sense of ‘alienation within contemporary consumer culture’.21 On the evidence of the works she interrogates, Ging is accurate in most instances. However, in Down, working-class males are not contentious, dangerous, intimidating or rebels with causes, merely non-alpha males surviving on a mix of endeavour, guile and gormlessness. They offer no exemplary demonstrations of physical strength and their successes are down to cunning, but more importantly good fortune. In Down humour undermines the fatalism and nihilism, and a genreinspired victory over the odds subverts that ‘fucked by fate’ disposition. 52

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Indeed, their gains breach the strictures of the patriarchal, neo-liberal economy (not hard work but theft), and their losses do not re-inscribe patriarchal agency, rather they are alert to inequality, but are neither stigmatized nor essentialized by unfairness. There is nothing romantically enabling or passively tragic in their status as victims of French. As important, the film’s buddy structure is marked by the usual early tensions between two incompatibles, and then by the emergence of mutual respect and friendship, which is of course a familiar Hollywood trope. However, their relationship is not marked by the usual destructive or defeatist dyads that Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran have identified as prevalent in Irish literature and its funerary dispositions.22 Deleted exchanges between Sabrina and Git steer the work more in the direction of homosocial relationships.23 Additionally, Bunny’s bi-sexuality does not remain on the margins, thereby challenging conventions of heteronormativity and the terms of hegemonic masculinity. Git does not get back with Sabrina, even if the film suggests she knows it might well be the right thing for her; Git is short on initiative.24 French’s wife double-crosses French and Grogan, and, ultimately, she is not someone who is traded or interchanged between these male characters. By double-crossing both, she undermines the traditions of patriarchal exchange.

Saltwater: Finders keepers Saltwater (2000) is McPherson’s first outing as a writer/director of a film.25 The film maintains much of the detail and many of the incidents already included in Bower. In any act of adaptation what is preserved, culled and added are worth dwelling upon, as is how the film genre sets a different series of demands and expectations: particularly in terms of a visual realization that is at odds with the monologue that incites the spectator to imagine a world summoned into being by language. The broad-stroke similarities between each work are obvious enough: the impact of witnessing a rape on Joe [Beneventi] (Laurence Kinlan); the workplace and the not-so-professional aspects of the academic career of Ray (Conor Mullen, reprising his character from the monologue’s premiere), including his philosophical showboating and his cheating on Joe’s sister Carmel (Valerie Spelman) with an undergraduate student, Deborah McCeever (Eva Birthistle); and Frank’s (Peter McDonald) robbery of IR£30,000 from the local turf accountant cum moneylender, Simple Simon McCurdie (Brendan Gleeson). 53

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The Postproduction Note which concludes the published Saltwater: The Shooting Script provides wonderful insights into the filming challenges of a low budget (IR£2 million) film, explaining the various decisions made about character choices and how scenes that worked so well as stand-alone units were deleted because they got in the way of the overall trajectory of the piece. As the script itself contains all the deleted scenes, McPherson’s commentary makes it easy to follow his line of thought. Film gives McPherson the opportunity to broaden the focus both character-wise and landscape-wise away from the three-narrator monologue. Characters other than the narrators that theatre audiences are invited to imagine in the monologue are now embodied in the film, and additional characters are included so as to concretize aspects of the story. The medium offers greater visual richness, steers perspective and allows the spectator to scrutinize through close-up shots, in ways that theatre cannot. The pace of a monologue can be stifled or burdened by an excess of details, whereas film accommodates visual abundance with ease. Kevin Kerrane suggests that Saltwater is not simply a re-write but a reconceiving of the monologue: McPherson was able to reframe the play visually through panoramic shots, close-ups, and montage – and psychologically through subtle shifts in characterization and tone. He established a more upbeat mood (literally upbeat because of the music he chose to heighten key scenes), smoothed away some of the play’s rough edges, and gave more latitude to its central figures.26 The film also brings greater clarity to many of the class distinctions articulated in the play. Characters that gather in the local pub are very much down at heel, and, thanks to the weather and the roughness of the sea, it is easier to see why the family business is not doing so well during the winter period. Damien’s (David O’Rourke) social background is signalled as anomalous in both the play and the film. First, in the film, when Damien and Joe find themselves outside Damien’s home, a sailing boat, named ‘Overdraft’, is parked in the driveway (36:37). Secondly, on their arrival, Peter (an uncredited actor), who is unknown to Damien, enters the Fitzgibbon home, takes off his clothes and plunges into a muddy pond in the back garden, a moment that suggests eccentricity. The kitchen counter has the remains of numerous bottles of champagne and wine, the former serving as a particular 54

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class marker. Finally, the accent of Damien’s mother, Lisa (Lesley Conroy), socially differentiates her from other cast members. Lisa is dressed in a bohemian fashion. The playscript indicates that during the exchange between mother and son Damien squeezes her backside; the film persists with such a detail. McPherson’s own comments in the Postproduction Note suggests how the gesture is indicative of some ‘weird upbringing’, indeed, he asks if ‘the relationship with his mother is sexual’? (130). According to McPherson, Joe finds himself ‘in an alien environment, uncomprehending what he sees. But he doesn’t leave. It’s one of those moments where you’re not a child but not really a grown-up either.’27 Joe is hyper-alert to difference, is fascinated and threatened by it. The mother calls Damien a ‘dirty knacker’ (38:26). (‘Knacker’ is a word that has, apart from it prejudicial association with members of the Travelling Community, strong associations with social class.) In Bower, Joe regards where Sarah Comisky (rather than Tara) lives negatively: ‘She lived up near the Grange where all the knackers lived’ (117). Later, Frank tells of Joe’s distress, having seen someone from school ‘having it off with a knacker from the Grange’ (128). The film finds more particular semiotic realizations of class through the ways that some of the characters speak, especially the heavy workingclass Dublin accents, shared by many. Caroline O’Boyle’s Tara speaks with a strong working-class Dublin accent, as does the character of Junior (Mark Dunne), who fights with her after she boxes him in the face outside the nightclub. If it is the type of violence often regarded as normative within working-class realities, McPherson does not represent in this way so as to reinforce such class prejudices, rather the characters’ accents are more about signalling rank and differentials. In the film, Kinlan and McDonald’s respective accents are discernible as working-class Dublin ones, but their accents are not as strong as Tara’s or Junior’s, and contrast strongly with Damien’s and Ray’s middle-class Dublin accent. Scenes shot on campus in University College Dublin, in a large-scale lecture theatre, faculty meeting spaces and staff offices, provide the environments which are even more class-informed and where the trappings of intellectual capital seem anomalous. Accent, language, physical carriage, professional hierarchy and intellectual concerns are clearly class-related, and inflected by eccentricity. Ray’s relationship with Deborah is given far more focus in the film. Ray’s relationship with Carmel is complex in both instances. In both film and play, Frank’s robbery nets him about IR£30,000, and is framed less as a crime and more as an act of justice. Kerrane notes that 55

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Gleeson and McDonald ‘play off against each other with such ease that the robbery is presented as more of a caper than a crime’.28 In the play, Frank gets a real gun from someone, likely to be a Republican paramilitary; in the film, a fake gun is made from metal piping by John Traynor, who is just out on parole and later, conveniently, goes on the miss, giving the police a chief suspect. Traynor is said by Frank to be in Chicago and of course, just like the two characters in Down, getting away to America is also Frank’s objective. McCurdie, as a moneylender, is subtle but ruthless in his domination of the town. George (Brian Cox) has borrowed IR£2,700 and, despite repaying IR£2,050, he still owes IR£1,190 due to the interest accrued. Despite being so beholden, the interest rates applied by McCurdie are not in any way exorbitant in terms of what money lenders are famed for charging. How McCurdie uses indebtedness as a way of leveraging control over people’s businesses is sinister; for example, supposedly establishing himself as a partner for six months so that he can take the debt at source. Given that it has taken over two years to pay down some of the debt, and that close to half is still outstanding, it is unlikely that McCurdie will be out of there after six months.29 McCurdie’s expectation of free food in the café is the unacknowledged part of the deal, and effectively serves as additional costs of the loan. In the film, Tara and Joe have connected at the party and they kiss by the sea-shore; whereas in the monologue, Joe simply accompanies Damien and Sarah on their way home from the nightclub; it is Damien and Sarah who have paired off. In the film, by the time it comes for Joe to take Tara home, she is semi-conscious. Is she simply drunk as the play suggests – the addition of the fight proposes that she may be partially concussed as well? Joe does not know where she lives, Damien seems to know. After he witnesses the sexual incident, Joe cycles away, fretting, upset and confused. He is unsure what has just happened, in that he has neither the language nor understanding. In the sauna of the hotel’s leisure complex, Joe asks Ray questions about sex, desire and consent, speculating ‘If she didn’t know. She wouldn’t want to, would she?’ (80:28). Ray’s response is to highlight issues of respect and of not taking advantage, but power, rank and privilege additionally complicate notions of freedom and consent, something his relationship with Deborah re-affirms. It is an affair that could lead to him losing his job, yet there seems an unwillingness even from the colleagues that despise him to push things in that direction, rather the inclination is to put pressure on Ray to halt to the affair and leave it at that. 56

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If the male-orientated nature of the monologue incites criticisms based on near gender exclusivity, the film gives life to Tara, Carmel and Sergeant Duggan (Gina Moxley), and captures their significance, but again not in the ways that centralizes them to the satisfaction of some critics. Critic, David Stratton, observes that the ‘female characters are consistently underdeveloped in this male-oriented pic. Little information is provided about Carmel, and short shrift is given to the characters of the female cop [Duggan] attracted to Frank, and to Deborah, the student with whom Ray is involved.’30 That sense of underdevelopment is not entirely or necessarily an overwhelming weakness. It is not the case that female characters ground male ones nor is it that women complement male characters. Even though there is less direct focus on the female characters, often they are far more complex than their male counterparts. Deborah is assertive and not a victim, Duggan is astute, clever, playfully suggestive and generous, Carmel has more than the measure of most of the male characters. Maria’s (Deidre O’Kane) absence through death is a burden shared by the Beneventi family; the story about finding a baby tooth in her ear after she died that explained her partial deafness confirms but also serves partially as a counterweight to the accusation of underdevelopment. In the play, Joe’s imaginings blend various sexual fantasies with vague memories of his mother, whereas in the film dream/memory sequences centralize his mother, Maria, to his consciousness of growing up. It is Joe’s memories (recorded on 8 mm video footage) of Maria, wearing a red dress that is replayed on several occasions during the film, just when Joe is about to awaken.31 The pattern of male grief being played out against female loss is something Lisa Fitzpatrick identifies in her essay towards the end of the book. Only work like Veil, and Paula counter that inclination. For McPherson, the film is ‘all played out against an environment we can’t live in, which is the sea. So it’s also about reaching a limit. There is nowhere else to go; he has to come back and live or die. It’s about tears and taking responsibility.’32 Film critic and scholar, Harvey O’Brien’s review is especially critical: The thematic/metaphoric connections between stories are too contrived. It seems intended to be a kind of Irish Short Cuts, but McPherson is not Robert Altman or Raymond Carver (but you knew that already, right?). The script is filled with clichéd situations and long stretches of highly theatrical dialogue intermingled with moments of action and comedy. There is neither intellect nor subtlety 57

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to any of it, and McPherson’s direction is bland in the extreme, falling somewhere between theatre and television, but never rising to actual cinema.33 There is something not entirely cinematic about the work, McPherson being a novice film-maker and working with a low budget do contribute to some weaknesses, but I think there is a far more intellectual subtlety in Saltwater than O’Brien acknowledges, nowhere more so than in the ending. In the monologue, Sarah is someone at a distance and not given a voice, whereas the final scene in the film between Joe and Tara complicates notions of the male gaze. Rather than focusing in on Joe’s perception of her trauma and victimization and the impact these have on him, the encounter between Tara and Joe asserts her resoluteness, and signals an optimism in spite of what he has merely witnessed and what she has experienced, her ordeal is by far the more fundamental affliction.

The Actors: Infamy and fortune Loosely based on an initial story outline provided by Neil Jordan, The Actors (2003), a film in five acts, is probably McPherson’s most comedic piece to date.34 After the success of Down, offers came from Hollywood. Initially, Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks had given McPherson a contract to work on Jordan’s idea.35 In an interview with Tim Adams, McPherson outlines the short and hectic trips to LA, but in the end ‘the project collapsed because of disagreements over casting’.36 Tony O’Malley (Michael Caine) lives in a run-down, almost derelict building, and the terraced home of his sidekick Tom Quirk (Dylan Moran) is anything but salubrious. Tony faces eviction as he can’t pay his rent, and Tom’s home catches fire after he leaves on a frying pan with sausages on the cooker. Both actors are in a production of Richard III that plays at the Olympia Theatre; Shakespeare’s play is re-conceptualized, with the Nazi Nuremburg Germany serving as the backdrop – Tony has the lead role, and Tom a small part.37 Snippets from this production illustrate the incompetence of the stage craft and the under-rehearsed work of an uncommitted ensemble. The production plays to small houses; curtain calls are clearly not moments for the spectators to offer their appreciation. Instead spectators fail to applaud generously and leave their seats even before the actors have vacated the stage, in defiance of convention. 58

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Tony holds the conviction that he could still play Hamlet, and not only that, he would like a vowels-only production, a vocal conceit that would express the constraints of Shakespeare’s character (7:20). Caine captures these deliberations of his character with brilliance; naiveté, self-belief and self-delusion interdigitate. Tony details how he prepares for his current role, slowly disappearing while the character forms, as he breathes life into whatever emerges from within. It would be wrong to conclude that McPherson is entirely unsympathetic as to what Tony has to say about preparing for a role, or that McPherson has little respect for the insights of actors and their craft. McPherson’s respect for actors is consistent across all of his public comments, but it is a praise balanced by the observations on the DVD extras that lots of actors have ‘big personalities and that really lends itself to comedy’: he notes: ‘Their vanity and self-absorption are intrinsically funny.’38 (The vanity of the writer is clearly illustrated in Nicholas Holden’s behaviour in Eclipse.) Comments here also chime with McPherson’s belief that an actor’s objective is to strip back the layers of pretence and affectivity to a point where there is less and less self-consciousness and contrivance. A sense of non-acting is proposed as much for performers narrating monologues as it is for those acting in film. Preparation for his role as Shakespeare’s Richard takes Tony into the Docklands and to The Baltic Pub and Club. For Tony, the pub is populated by villains, lowlifes and godforsaken men. The Crombie-coated, toupee and runner-wearing gangster, Barreller (Michael Gambon), is only too happy to supply him with stories that ‘would make your skin crawl’ (31:43). (Telling untruths in pubs is a common practice, and, as you will see later, it informs a particular reading of Weir.) Barreller’s inclination to exaggerate the darkness of this criminal underworld is utterly lost on Tony, who is all too willing to suspend his disbelief. If Tony turns to this world for inspiration for a role, this world also provides him with the stimulus to do something else: commit a robbery. Indeed, the world of this film is one where almost everyone is consistently in performance mode, and yet very few of the characters can see or confront such contrivances. Gullibility and vanity run hand in hand with a trust in an ability to deceive others. It is not an expansion of his criminal empire that motivates Barreller, rather it is a move towards legitimacy that preoccupies him. Barreller does not see either of his two sons, Lesley (Alvaro Luccheri) and Ronnie (Simon Delaney) as his natural heir; neither is ambitious enough to take over control 59

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of the business by subterfuge and/or violence. The general incompetence of Barreller’s sons/foot-soldiers goes against the grain of films set in criminal underworlds more generally. The most astute and quick-witted family member is Dolores (Lena Headey), whose ambition to pursue an acting career later comes to fruition with a flirtatious role in an advertisement for McCullagh’s sausages, a role that Tom had previously auditioned for and was not offered. Barreller’s indebtedness to an English criminal gang, headed, rather unusually by a woman, Mrs Magnani (Miranda Richardson), allows Tony an opportunity to scam some money. Because Barreller and Magnani have never met, all someone (Tom) has do is to pretend to be one of Magnani’s crew to get their hands on the £50,000. When Tom as ‘Clive’ meets Barreller and his family in the Shelbourne Hotel to exchange the money, Barreller advises Clive about the need to go elsewhere to ‘meet some real Dubs not this bollix’ (23:37). Indeed, Barreller is the sort of criminal who is kind enough to offer Tom a lift to the airport. Tom’s general lack of confidence in himself as an actor/improviser changes over time, and some rehearsal with his niece, Mary (Abigail Iversen), helps matters. Tom bases ‘Clive’ on his sister’s English boyfriend. Moran’s Tom becomes more and more assured across his various roles in the scam, first as Clive, then impersonating Jock, one of Magnani’s henchmen, and later pretending to be Barreller. Humorously, Moran’s Tom endeavours to find within himself his own inner Barreller, tapping into aspects of himself that help make the pretence more credible. Caine gets to roleplay across gender, performing as Mrs Magnani, and then as Barreller’s assistant, Mrs O’Growney. Tom agrees to participate in the scam, in part, to improve his acting. All this pretence not only puts pressure on their acting capabilities but also complicates performances of gender and power. Accordingly, the film raises issues about authorship, believability, imagination, appearance, mask, authenticity and the evolving of identity through pretence and performance. Additionally, the film itself opens with Tom’s nine-year-old niece, Mary, sitting at her school desk, writing a story and she becomes the film’s narrator.39 Mary (another Mary) prompts solutions to dilemmas and scenarios that neither Tom nor Tony can solve. With Mary tasked with the narration, McPherson is inverting the pattern of patriarchally filtered narration common to Irish writing practices. After Magnani and her crew watch a performance of Richard III, Tom’s shambolic incompetency on stage leaves Magnani unwilling to believe that such an inept performer could be the scam’s architect. Tom scans for 60

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and then acknowledges Mary and Dolores in the stalls, forgets his line and has to be prompted by Mary from her seat. His Nazi standard falls into the stalls, and he positions himself outside the stage curtain as it closes. In contrast, it is Tony’s impressive performance which confirms Magnani’s belief that he is the mastermind. Tony probably loses much of the viewer’s sympathy because he blames Tom for everything. Arriving at the theatre awards in a wheelchair, Tony maintains a reckless illusion about his life, his attractiveness, and remains willing to tell anyone who will listen about his Hamlet concept-production. The merit implicit in Tony’s win in the Best Actor Category is not shared by the paying punters. If Mary counters the usual gender inscription afforded to the role of narration, Dolores’s performativity fails to follow with the hesitancy in much Irish writing to give women access to a range of performative possibilities and the menacing and subversive potential of metatheatricality. Pretending to be Magnani, Dolores pours petrol over Tom to extract the truth. Playful, quasi-sado-masochistic intimidation is followed by seduction and she is clearly the dominant one. More importantly, Dolores is the one who sees through the inept performances of Tom, particularly the attempt to stage Clive’s death in Tubbetstown Castle. Dolores and Mary are the most astute and self-aware characters in the film, who manipulate and steer various plots lines, while the male characters foolishly believe themselves to be in control. Also, having a woman as the head of a criminal gang is seditious in a different type of way. Many of the critical responses to Actors were underwhelming, if not very negative. Jason Caro concludes that ‘although Moran’s character transformations are pulled off with reasonable credibility (aided by great make-up), writer/director Conor McPherson undermines these deceptions with inane plotting and one-dimensional characters. Caine, in particular, is never as animated nor amusing as he should be – even in drag.’40 Peter Bradshaw concurs: ‘Not even a game performance from Michael Caine can save this shamingly bad comedy. … The lazy kids’-TV plotting and the absence of comic sense from anyone – including a hatful of star names who may wish to have the film airbrushed from the record – are dispiriting.’41 Nev Pierce sees it slightly differently: ‘But it’s Caine’s picture. Whether relishing the chance to slaughter Shakespeare on stage, or proving a cowardly letch off it, he displays delightful self-deprecation and comic timing.’42 Despite Caine’s performance, the piece is funny but not memorable, ‘You’ll still be hard pressed to remember The Actors five minutes after the credits roll, but it has no pretensions to be art – simply a good laugh’, Pierce concludes.43 61

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This overall playfulness with genre-expectations, gender stereotypes and the self-conscious theatricality of the piece are lightly worn and never heavy-handed. When Tony books the €10,000 a night Tubbetstown Castle because it ‘felt right’, a sentiment that sometimes dominates rehearsal room approaches to character. Indeed, despite the great moments of farce and black humour, some of the lines are too cleverly self-aware for the caper-comedy genre in which the film situates itself. Indeed, some character exchanges are especially insightful, offering reflections on the art of acting, the issue of illusion, the real, artifice and contrivance. In a way, the gentle humour about how the actors ham things up is overly burdened by self-aware lines.44 The following examples illustrate the point: Mary: ‘If you don’t believe in yourself you can never convince anybody that you are not you’ (15:33), or when Tom, pretending to be Jock, justifies his scoffing of popcorn on the basis that it helps him to think he is in the cinema so that he will not have to dwell on the brutality that is his every day (20:45). Mary’s final line in the film: ‘The bad actor always gets the attention, and they never notice the good ones, the good ones disappear’ (84:35). The superficial does not make the plotting inane. The paradox of acting is that performance is heightened, artificial and artifice, but somehow real, that from pretence, truths can appear, and from the actor disappearing to allow a character to emerge, the vitality of the energy summoned can trigger curiosity and enthusiasm in an audience.

Deserving and undeserving rich/poor Each of these three films demonstrates how those in positions of authority wield power and how they can leverage others in ways that are exploitative. Poverty obliges one to think only of the immediate, the here and now, about quick fix solutions. French, McCurdie and Magnani are variously corrupt, elite and controlling figures of capital: French with his pub and McCurdie with his bookmaking have legitimate facing businesses, as does Murray in Thief. Further, as Lance Pettitt notes of Veronica Guerin: The level of consumption and pleasure in clothes, motorbikes, inflicting sadistic violence, sex and gambling is an index of the gangster’s contempt for the ‘workday’ capitalism under which the rest of society obediently works, but its excess merely embodies 62

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in extremis the underlying principles of consumerism and ‘cut throat’ competition that drives the wider economy.45 Diane Negra cites Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet and Peter Stanfield’s comments that ‘gangster films are not simply narratives for telling the stories of ahistorical, unidimensional criminal figures or gangs but sites of instability of wider cultural resonance’.46 Criminality allows greater visibility and transparency to the circulation of money. In McPherson’s criminal underworlds, threats of violence are omnipresent, yet McCurdie’s subtly sinister presence is counterpointed by the presence of his sidekick, gormless nephew, Charlie (Alan King), who brings a comic spin to the everyday. Also, the criminal underworlds are less extreme, and are less likely to signal a contempt for the gains of ‘everyday capital’. Moreover, while ‘cut throat’ worlds, these are invariably destabilized, by either a fighting back by the likes of Frank, or in the case of Barreller, who is grotesquely benign, rather than sinister and malign. The criminal cultures in each of these three films potentially remind the spectator as to how they contrast with the many Hollywood films where social hardships in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are deemed as a fundamental consequence of a ruthless, exploitative and proximate gangland culture, but seldom as a condition of broader socially ranked, inequitable relationships. In the films that McPherson has been heavily involved, the visible violence that is nominally the forte of criminal gangs is considered not in isolation, but often in relation to this broader systemic violence that Žižek identifies, as legitimate and illegitimate capital synergize in each of these films. Žižek’s ‘objective violence’ is often made manifest with strong, if unusual, correlations between neo-liberal capital and inequality. This impulse by McPherson is not akin to Žižek’s neo-Marxist analysis, but comes more from the perspective of a social democratic, liberal platform. The sense of entitlement shared by figures like French, McCurdie and Magnani mimics the broader sense of privileges that exists within the elites of first-world societies and cultures; some of whom have ethically earned their economic advantages, some of whom have accumulated vast wealth by more dubious, criminal or less than honourable means. The actors believe that the theft of ill-gotten money is not a crime per se. It is important to recognize that Git’s father possesses a false sense of entitlement when he loots the ram-raided electrical shop. It is in such details where nostalgic or idealistic framing of the working-class graciousness are complicated. Frank’s robbery of the bookmakers does likewise. On the one 63

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hand, Frank’s actions are a type of revenge against elitist corruption that can seem justified, taking back what rightfully belongs to his family, even if his father entered a contractual arrangement freely, but on the other hand, the moral sense of the criminal action is suspect, not least in terms of making Joe complicit and endangering customers. Frank’s actions are not so much a last resort of taking justice into one’s own hands, but the taking of the path of least resistance.

Conclusion In these three films there is a visibility afforded to workday criminality, to coin a term, but also a complex and subversive articulation of the hierarchies of consumerist capital – and for the neo-liberal project that substantiates it. Without de-familiarizing criminality and without starkly displacing the horrors of these realities by making them palatable through comedy, the violence presented in the three films discussed is not grimly authentic or vacantly or self-consciously postmodern, neither is it self-indulgently gratuitous nor simplistically voyeuristic. McPherson’s Dublin is marked not by gangland’s omniscience, but by the ability of the characters to overcome the odds, not necessarily by courage but by happenchance. If the tendency for tragicomedy is to draw the comic longing of loser/heroes towards a sensibility of loss and failure, it is fair to say that these films turn the fiascos and capitulations of potential ‘anti-heroes’ into comedies of transgressive and unambiguous victory.

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C Chapter 3 CONVERGENT REALITIES: GHOSTS AND THE UNCANNY

Introduction: For the supernaturally inclined It is a common belief that when children are born that they possess only two fears: of being dropped and of loud noises. All other dreads and uncertainties accrue over time, such as fears about not being heard, fed, held, comforted, and of being separated from and abandoned by a parent/guardian. Individuals also acquire fears about the dark, failure, attractiveness, adequacy, motivation, disorder, even success. Some develop fears about being unbalanced, lost from oneself, while others have fears about being friendless or un-partnered. Suspicion and fear of others can give rise to an inability to engage, trust or be intimate with another, to gender hostilities, class anxieties, homophobic stances, and xenophobic and racist attitudes, dispositions and behaviours. Fears about humankind’s positioning, presence or relevance in a vast, unexplainable universe can provoke a deep-set dread. An understanding of the limitations of human awareness or perception, plus the acknowledgement of the precariousness of living, enters consciousness not entirely as a luminous awareness, but as a sense of something vast always beyond, outside, different, elsewhere and unknowable. The fear of not having really lived life to the full is matched by a fear of not having really died. Illness and accidental death feature in McPherson’s Eclipse and Girl, in Veil there is a strong sense of characters persecuted by mental health issues, in Alive, Maura dies after slipping on ice, in Shining, Mari is killed in a car crash and in Weir Niamh dies in a swimming pool accident. Hannah’s father in Veil, and Malachy in Eclipse kill themselves. Paula’s James goes on a killing spree. A heightened awareness about death, and fears about loss, bereavement and dying can give rise to other deep-set anxieties. An intermeshing of a being-in-life and a being-in-death consciousnesses can give rise to confusion, ambivalence, irony and the sense of the absurd.

The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson

External calamitous forces perceived, encountered or imagined are often regarded as overwhelming, and as being sourced in the non-human. It is little wonder that apocalyptic anxieties have always featured in storytelling. Contemporary popular culture is, it would be fair to say, unduly obsessed with cataclysmic moments. Forces that threaten existence can be aliens, ecological disaster, pollutants, viruses, war, terrorism, the consequences of scientific and/or psychological experiments that go astray or the resurfacing of malignant energies that were long buried, concealed and contained. Abnormal creatures, zombies, vampires, poltergeists, phantoms, devils, trances, apparitions, possessions, night-terrors and exorcisms are commonplace, leading to a sense of blood-taking, mind-control, possession, colonization, near-death experiences and dehumanization. Since the 1970s, in work as varied as The Exorcist and The Shining (both influential films on McPherson), Sixth Sense, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead, Harry Potter, Twilight or Stranger Things, barriers between the malign and benign, the living and the dead, the real and the supernatural play out. States of liminality exist, where the challenge is to maintain the integrity of subjectivity and to ensure that bodily functions, movements, gestures, demeanours and mind can be retained, and not lost or overpowered by sinister forces. A surrender of conscious awareness is often used to signal possession or evidence of the workings of demonic/otherworldly/alien powers. There are many ways that the (almost always) innocent figures are conscripted by evil to do its bidding. Invariably enslavement faces little or no internal resistance, and once a body/mind hosts a force of evil, willpower dissipates, and conscience is surrendered. The possessed do the bidding of dark forces, while the variables that make humankind distinctive, namely, empathy, feeling, rationality, thought and choice are eliminated. If such supernatural powers are so omnipotent and over-whelming, odds of survival and victory may be low, but never as insurmountable as first insinuated.1 Ghosts exist in most theatrical traditions, from classic Greek theatre (Aeschylus, Euripides) to the work of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, from Noh drama to the writings of modernists like Hendrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, from contemporary African writing (Wole Soyinka) to modern and contemporary British theatre (J. M. Barrie, Caryl Churchill, Noël Coward and J. B. Priestly). In theatre, ghosts are summoned from the darkness to warn, threaten or incite revenge, serve as a manifestation of destructive energy, and can persuade characters into thinking and behaving in ways that they have not done previously. Geraldine 66

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Cousin identifies ‘the existence of alternative, spectral topographies alongside, or just beneath, “real” ones’.2 Stephen Greenblatt outlines how Shakespeare drew on classical Hades, ‘popular Hell but also the banished realm of Catholic Purgatory’. Shakespeare’s ghosts raise issues that are at once theological, psychological and theatrical. Uncertainty about ‘the very possibility of ghosts was itself, valuable theatrical capital’.3 Greenblatt differentiates between ghosts as figures ‘of false surmise’ (mistakes or delusions) or ‘the effects of anxious misreadings’ (unintended to incite fear), ‘the ghost as a figure of history’s nightmare, the ghost as a figure of deep psychic disturbance’ and the ghost as a ‘figure of theatre’,4 and associates the latter with the ‘spirt of self-conscious theatricality’.5 As Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin note, ‘Illusion and trickery lie at the heart of theatre, a fact which performers and playwrights have always exploited to the full.’6 Fight, flight and freeze reflexes of spectators can easily be triggered in theatre, yet the liveness of theatre problematizes the staging of encounters with the supernatural or the unknown, partly because it is so difficult to do it well. Of course Irish playwrights as various as Sebastian Barry, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Marina Carr, Anne Devlin, Hugh Leonard, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Tom Murphy, Stewart Parker and W. B. Yeats have found ways of staging ghosts as ‘deep psychic disturbance’, as the nightmares of history, are slow to dismiss the idea of the supernatural as a ruse, are more comfortable with the device of the ghost as a theatrical conceit; however, they consistently focus on what is considered banished, exiled, repressed, mysterious or the afterlife. Indeed, while it is not a uniform tradition per se, no Western tradition of writing seems to be as obsessed with the uncanny and the paranormal as the Irish.7 Often there is a sense of that the ghost is less an inciter of revenge, and more a mischief maker, for example, in Hugh Leonard’s Da, or the idea of ghosts is linked to mock resurrection, whereby those considered dead, come back to life in work as various as Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun or Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. For many, McPherson’s work is most associated with the paranormal or supernatural; his plays and films seem obsessed with ghosts, doppelgängers, the uncanny, premonitions and hauntings. Sometimes the supernatural materializes through storytelling, through fleeting appearances of ghosts on stage, manifested through manipulations of time and space. There are encounters with vampires in Nicholas, the devil-incarnate appears in Seafarer and the ghosts of young children haunt Weir, Veil, Paula and Girl. Ghosts of dead lovers, partners or in-laws are conjured in Paula, Shining 67

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and Eclipse. Christopher Murray notes: ‘McPherson thinks allusively and analogically. He knows that ghost stories are and are not hokum: that the both hold an audience rapt … and at the same time offer entrance to the dark works of the Jungian unconscious and its disguised truths.’8 From the start of his career, McPherson has been tinkering with the supernatural. In Rum, while in Myfanwy’s home, the narrator looks into a mirror and wonders if he is dead or alive; the combination of rum and vodka is one that Declan claims to have ‘the power to wake the dead’.9 At twenty, Phil, another mate of the narrators, dug up a grave to retrieve a letter that a young girl had left in a coffin for a boyfriend of three weeks, six years after he was killed by a car. Phil then broke into the girl’s house and read the letter out to her; her distress led to a breakdown. In Thief, the narrator has an out-of-body experience while being tortured, and he has discussions about other dimensions of awareness. In Birds, Diane’s reasoning for leaving their shelter is in part because of her feelings of being haunted by the ghosts of Julia and her unborn child: ‘Anything would be better than the cold ghost of the girl – and her child – blowing round here in the evenings’ (209). Girl demonstrates the existence of a parallel dimension, which suggests a constancy of an eternal self; human existence is just a short-term manifestation. In the Noelia Ruiz interview McPherson states: The more we learn from science the more mysterious everything becomes, the more we find out the more questions arise about why everything is the way it is. To me that is a very consistent feeling, it is very present all the time: the mystery of time and space, and the mystery of infinity and the mystery of actually being aware, of being conscious of it; how you are a human being, an animal that can actually understand that you are in a mystery. To me it’s a supernatural experience. I don’t see any line between the natural and the supernatural. To me nature is a mystery, completely, and that’s what we live in. To me that’s life, so when I write anything its borders have to be those borders otherwise the story makes no sense to me.10 And in conversation with Anthony Roche, McPherson talks about how theatre can trick an audience into a liminal childlike space, where you can see something that is actually beyond and before language; it just scares you as an animal, not even as a human being – just freaks you 68

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as a creature. If you get into the reptilian part of the human brain and freak people out on that level, then you’re dealing with the part that actually is still connected with God and still connected with the beyond and the unknown. Because it’s the part that is the id, the life force. It’s just the little spark that comes for a while and is gone. If you’re connecting with that place, that’s the theatrical experience I try to go after.11 From comments made to Roche and Ruiz one can see that McPherson’s ambitions are to stretch and unnerve audiences, activate the more primitive aspects of awareness, and to link recognition with a deeper acceptance of the complications and depth of living. Talking about Eclipse, McPherson notes: I don’t really like stories where there’s a ghost haunting the house and they bring in people to figure out why and then they help it ‘go into the light’ or whatever the f**k. I just find that really boring. There’s nothing mysterious about that. For the early apparitions that Michael sees, we’re not sure if they’re a premonition or if they’re manifestations of everything he’s not facing up to. And when he sees the ghost of his wife, is that coming from within him or somewhere else? You want those questions to remain unanswered. I think that allows a movie to stay with people longer.12 Within such supernatural scenarios, there are fears affirmed and alarms raised, but also decisive and subtle, peculiar and precarious, rewards in the persistent unveiling of the supernatural.

St Nicholas: The gift/thief of a story Nicholas (1997) was McPherson’s first London premiere, and he was exceptionally fortunate to be able to cast Brian Cox.13 Nicholas’s narrator is a theatre critic/media figure who is jealous of talent, obsessed with his own notoriety, keen to express his disgruntlement with others, and eager to take whatever opportunities arise to manipulate, disparage, undermine and humiliate both colleagues and those who perform on the professional stage. His scathing critical disposition is matched by an equal self-loathing.14 His familial relationships are predominantly dysfunctional: he despises his wife, has no time for his son, and only his daughter’s creative 69

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impulses inspire any level of enthusiasm in him. Despite his narcissism, Machiavellianism and ruthlessness, this critic has the wit and charm to appease his newspaper editor and the producers and commissioners from other media outlets; as he tells it, he remains admired, even respected, by many of his peers. This journalist then is no common hack; he is in the papers, on television and is a highly paid columnist. The narrator has the cars, the house and ‘money to lose’.15 He thinks that others see him as ‘a big shot’ and that women want to be with him – so he has his ‘pick’ (140). The narrator is accomplished enough to deceive others by feigning empathy, but he has no real respect for reciprocity. This narrator has little or no sense of a life purpose, or anything that instils a sense of joy or pleasure. He is dismissive of productions appearing at various Dublin venues, walks out of shows early, has rows with directors and usually he has a review written before a performance has ended. He holds nothing but disdain for the art form that he reviews. Seeing himself as a champion of the general public, and helping them avoid the incompetencies and self-indulgences of the theatre community, the critic acclaims his objectivity and impartiality, whereas he is anything but that. He writes with intolerance and creates arguments based on half-baked concepts. In many ways, he is the opposite to what art criticism should be: informed, impartial, analytical, reflective, measured, generous and with an ability to situate and contextualize a work. He takes pleasure in the terror and loathing he observes in the responses of others towards him, realizing that his ultimate weapon is to incite fear. Having attended the opening of Oscar Wilde’s Salome at the Abbey Theatre, the critic joins the cast and crew in the Flowing Tide pub. To the director, Peter Hamilton, and his cast, the critic lauds the work, claiming the production has indeed changed his life, promoting a type of euphoria among the cast. However, the filed review is scathing. Having become infatuated with Helen, the lead actress in Salome, the critic follows the production to London, where its brief planned run has been shortened thanks to the generally poor notices it received in Dublin. After the narrator turns up at the digs where the company is staying, he tells them that he has resigned from the newspaper in protest, after they had tampered with his glowing review of the production, but most do not trust his explanation. Later, having fled the digs and having rejected the impulse to sexually assault the sleeping Helen while he was drunk, now exhausted and hallucinating, the narrator enters a different dimension, when he is lured 70

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out of Crystal Palace Park by a vampire, William. William invites him back to a coven of predominantly female vampires. William warns: ‘Fall under their care and you’ll wish you were dead, believe me’ (163). The vampires are sexual predators, seducing men and women, so that they can extract their blood. Collectively, their energies confuse thoughts. Because the critic procures subjects for the vampires, they endow him with the gift of conviction, charm and of being at ease. In some ways his new role in luring, aiding and abetting in the exploitation of others is an extension of what he does as a theatre critic: in both instances he takes advantage of what seems like mutual self-interest and thrives on the gullibility of others, who accept his bona fides and do not question his ulterior motives. In the transition of the narrative to the realm of the vampires, the critic poses questions directly to the theatre audience and makes to address the queries that they might have. The narrator reflects on the issue of credibility and wonders, despite the laws of nature and the existence of gravity, why spectators are not floating off their seats? It is a subtle turning of tables. If one treats vampires as something that does not exist, then there is no need to fear them. But if we accept that vampires exist, then we need to work with that particular logic. For we don’t really know why the laws of nature exist. Clearly, these are not the vampire scenarios found in most films and popular culture, where to be bitten is to be possessed by the same blood lust, the same night living conditions, the trauma of sunshine and the same eternal stigma. Here, McPherson’s vampires just want the blood of unsuspecting humans. There is a certain irony in the fact that the narrator’s first cohort of donors include Dominique, who works for a magazine, and her friends are those she went to college with in Oxford – echoing Myfanwy’s college friends in Rum. His final target is group of ‘rich kids’, actors and artists (172). After they party, the victims fall sleep and, upon wakening, are none the wiser as to what has happened. To be bitten induces an out-of-body experience that is euphoric. Tellingly, figures like Bower’s Sarah Comisky or Rum’s Maria, who are sexually assaulted, are barely or not at all conscious of their own violation. The vampire violators face no accountability. Even though the narrator thought he knew from being a critic what power was, it is only after his encounter with the vampires that he comprehensively grasps the nature of power and evil. He states: ‘They have power. Not the power to make you do what they want. But real power. To make you want what they want. It hurts to consider things in their company. It becomes 71

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hard to make sense. They appeal to the older part of us. What we share with animals’ (158). This sense of pursuit is reinforced by a later comment: ‘They see what they want. They get it. Do anything to get it’ (170). Their achievements are the awakening of unconscious drives, prompting people to go after what they want, deep down. The vampires reflect the animalistic, exploitative and predatorial aspects of human nature, even as they are entirely dependent on the blood of others. (To run simply with the notion of the critic as vampire would not be apposite. The relationship between the theatre and critics is neither entirely symbiotic nor parasitic, and much is done to disguise such antagonism.) In their instinct and compulsion-driven world, vampires operate without conscience, moral scruples or, most importantly, the capacity to make rational choices. (The story that William tells about the grains of rice is important, because it affirms that vampires cannot evade the impulse/ instinct to count, no matter what.) Later the narrator lingers over William’s inability to choose, as ‘he couldn’t buck nature’ (171). Further, the narrator claims that William pretends to think and that he ‘wanted a conscience. He fucking regretted not being able to regret the things he did’ (170). However, that thought is checked when he wonders ‘maybe wanting a conscience is the same as having one’ (177). As the play progresses, the narrator realizes that he has lost a great deal of his vitality, recognizes the immorality of how he has lived and begins to take a certain pride in discerning the wrongs that he has been doing. Yet, despite running with the binary distinctions between instinct and conscience, human and non-human, these prove to be false dichotomies. Vampires feasting on his blood is sustenance for them and restorative for him, suggesting something more empowering rather than a parasitic and disabling relationship between good and evil, light and dark. If there ever was a play where the sensitivities and objectivity of critics would be given additional scrutiny, Nicholas would be a perfectly good example. Paul Taylor praises Cox’s performance, identifying ‘Even when – or especially when – recalling his now defunct idealism and creative ambitions, the tone is one of sardonic self-contempt, the lines timed with a wonderful off-hand scathingness and many a collusive hoist of the eyebrows by Mr Cox who, with his great, craggy, sensitive face and fleshy build, looks like an ex-university rugby player run to fiftysomething seed’.16 Charles Spencer notes that ‘Cox’s unnamed character is full of contempt and his monologue creates a persuasively bleary, often scabrously comic, hack’s-eye view of theatrical life in Dublin, all booze and bubbling bile’.17 72

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For Charles Hunter, Cox ‘offers up the brutality of his character here with confident delicacy and refuses to overplay the depth of his failures. His powerful, defeated presence gives you both as he charms the audience into accompanying him on a monologue [journey]’.18 Hunter has a problem with the second part, especially the end: ‘A final discussion about the nature of reality seems curiously trite compared to the rollicking action of the critic’s earlier, gloriously clumsy stab at redemption.’19 Taylor was also less taken by the second part, which he saw as ‘a rather clumping and contrived meditation on, and demonstration of, the responsible human need for stories to mean something. That rationale for its fancifulness did not, I’m afraid, stop the attention of this contemptible critic from drifting.’20 In contrast, Spencer notes that ‘it’s at this point that you would expect me to start writing the show’s obituary, yet McPherson's account of life among distinctly unorthodox vampires turns out to be as funny, fresh and unsettling as anything that has gone before’.21 Ben Brantley’s review of the production that transferred to Primary Stages, New York, in 1998, notes with insight how the ‘bloated self-importance’ of Cox’s character ‘is matched only by his ironic awareness of it, which means Mr. Cox can get away with all sorts of overripe gestures and line readings. He toys with tantalizing pauses in a way that approaches sadism.’22 Brantley is also ambivalent if curious about the play’s ending, remarking: ‘The play betrays itself only in its final speech, an explanatory postscript of what has come before. On the other hand, there’s a certain poetic justice in letting a critic end his own play with a self-sabotaging whimper.’23 Gerald C. Woods notes that Saint Nicholas was ‘canonised for his piety and abstinence, St. Nicholas, the Bishop of Myra, is revered in Russia and Greece for his chastity, especially in the company of woman, and for his protection of children’.24 Although St. Nicholas is the patron saint of giving and protection, here it is the un-chaste vampires who do the benevolent deed; our critic returns to Dublin and to his family with the gift of a story, through which he finds meaning and purpose.

Shining City: Hiding in plain sight Shining is set in an area close to the ‘Mater hospital, Mountjoy prison and the church spires of Phibsboro Church and the church at Berkeley Road’. Indeed, ‘one or two church spires loom outside’ Ian’s office. This is an old 73

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part of Dublin, but ‘is not a salubrious area’. The stage direction reads: ‘It does not feel like a suburb, if anything it feels like a less commercial part of the city centre, which is only a short walk away.’25 Cousin connects the play’s title with the ‘Celestial City in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part One of which ends with Christian being welcomed by the Shining Ones into the city that shines like the sun. Heaven however is twinned with Hell.’26 Kevin Wallace reflects in a different way: Indeed, the play’s title is a biblical allusion to Matthew 5:13–16 in which Jesus tells the people: ‘You are the salt of the earth. … You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden … let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds’; and one that directly echoes Ronald Reagan’s use of that biblical image in his inauguration speech as President of the United States: ‘I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life.’ What this play attempts to do is contrast a profound Christian idea of community, openness and connection with a contemporary sense of isolation, alienation and ambivalence towards the Catholic Church in Ireland. In such a reading the term ‘shining city’ becomes a cynical note on life in Dublin in the 2000s, shining with commercial light but darkened by the loneliness and disconnection of its inhabitants.27 Dublin’s Northside is twinned with both heaven and hell, and the links between the church, prison and hospital suggest an ideological convergence in keeping with Michel Foucault’s work.28 John is a widowed 54-year-old, who works as a sales rep for a catering suppliers. He has two encounters with the ghost of his dead wife, Mari. She died as the result of a car accident after a stolen car crashed into the taxi in which she was a passenger. At the time of the incident, John and Mari were not on talking terms. They always fell out over small things, he felt that he could have done better in his choice of partner, and then when John became fixated on Vivien, their relationship worsened. John and Mari’s partnership was troubled by the fact that they could not have children. Mari’s visitations prompt John to leave his home, to take up residence in a bed-and-breakfast and nudge him towards the office of therapist and ex-priest, Ian.29 Initially, the therapeutic encounter shows John to be bereaved, exhausted, confused and not yet able ‘to accept that the world is not as orderly and predictable as he thought. He has always found problems to arise from what he regards as other people’s ignorance’ (7). John’s annoyances and grievances 74

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with Mari were part of something broader, and if she was deemed to be a life-mistake, aspects of his own life seemed to be missteps as well. John slowly realizes the extent to which he disconnects from life and disassociates from everything that he regards as hassle, inferior or second best. In part, the guilt that he feels has to do with Mari’s death, his contributions to the poor standing of their relationship, and his own role in orchestrating unnecessary levels of interpersonal dissatisfaction. John’s attempt at an affair evoked a sense of foreboding: ‘I knew then that something bad was going to happen, because I deserved it, because there was like some kind of evil in me’ (40). And after his first encounter with Vivien at a party, and the consequent text messages that led to them meeting in a hotel, John was left unnerved by his botched attempts at an affair. These feelings led to John making any excuse not to come home from business trips. A seemingly out-ofcharacter visit to a brothel on the South Circular Road ended badly, giving rise to another significant argument at home, where he became aggressive, insulting and violent towards Mari. John realizes that he has let Mari down and that he now feels responsible for what has happened to her, even if there is no direct causal link between his behaviour and her dying. The ghost seems to serve as a lingering sense of trauma and shock, but is also associated with guilt, remorse, dishonesty, disloyalty, duplicity and self-punishment. That said, John also proposes a counterargument: John  Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. You know? Maybe I’ve got the whole thing arseways. (Pause) Maybe she’s … Maybe she’s just trying to save me, you know? (46) Might punishment be displaced by a rescue imperative, and damnation by salvation? If John is simply viewed by spectators as being an irresponsible, aggressive, unfaithful and not a very loving partner, then there is probably little to like about or little scope to empathize with such a character. However, John’s willingness to admit to things that he had refused to recognize previously and his struggles to unpack his own guilt and address his culpability are emotional markers that may invite a degree of compassion. In the play’s premiere, Stanley Townsend’s performance as John captures the caution, confusion, grief, incomprehension and terror of a character unaccustomed to disorder and the gruelling need to face down himself. Townsend’s gestural reticence and initial tentative vocal delivery 75

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denoted his character’s mindset very well: the hesitations, pauses, and the ‘you knows’ that litter the published script carry the burden of a subtext that is compounded by his absolute confusion and the daunting and taunting need to make sense of his life. By Scene Three, the lengthy narrative Townsend delivers, with short interjections from Ian, is a masterclass in composure and pacing. Here is an actor intent on engaging the spectator with the power and attraction that self-revelations, when done well, can evoke in the theatre. Townsend has the confidence, stamina and focus to maintain the energy for such a lengthy narrative, trusting in both his own craft and the material with which he is working. Michael McElhatton’s Ian is the only character to feature in all five scenes. Stage directions describe Ian as ‘a man who has struggled with many personal fears in his life and has had some victories, some defeats. The resulting struggle has made him very sharp. He is essentially a gentle man, but sometimes his desire to get to the lifeboats, to feel safe, drives him in ways that even he himself doesn’t fully understand’ (7). Although Ian is new to therapeutic practice, and his professional training/ methodology is never revealed, his inexperience is counterweighted by the long period that he has served as a priest. Ian’s relationship with Neasa is troubled; the fact that they have a young child does not compel him to suppress his anxieties about relationships and commitments. Ian’s desire to have sex with another man problematize matters further. Indications of professional commitment as well as signals of mental distraction and uncertainty were clearly captured by McElhatton’s approach to his character. There is little that is consistent about Ian as written, moreover, there is almost a randomness to his actions and emotions, something only very good actors can convincingly realize. McElhatton shows his character working hard to maintain a professional distance in response to John’s unease, but also how his own dilemmas keep getting in the way. It becomes clear that Neasa has sacrificed a great deal for Ian, supporting him as he transitioned away from his vocation, accepting his moods and anxieties, and taking on additional overtime in the pub where she works to fund Ian’s studies. McPherson’s description of Neasa’s presence on stage is significant: Maybe at the beginning it looks like a therapy session. She is in her thirties and is more working class than Ian. She is rooted in 76

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a harder, less forgiving reality. She has always had a stubbornness which has kept her focused, but has also sometimes blinded her so that while she is a strong person, often it is others who have used her strength. (17) Kathy Kiera Clarke plays Neasa as if she knows from the off what is at stake; if Ian cuts loose, there will be no turning back. Like many of McPherson’s working-class characters, her achievements are compromised by others being over-dependent on her, and by how others have exploited her willingness to give. Neasa is unnerved by having to live with Aisling in the box room of the house owned by Ian’s brother and his wife. Such dependency does not suggest an equating of working-class characters with victimhood or with the absence of a get-up-and-do-it attitude, rather it serves more as an indicator of consequences where there is little or no financial independence. Ian’s family believes that Neasa has ruined Ian’s life. Neasa says of Ian’s mother, she is ‘looking at me like I’m going to rob something, like she has anything’ (20). If Townsend brings a degree of measured gravitas to his character’s emotional confusion, and McElhatton offsets his character’s personal chaos with a degree of professional acumen, Clarke’s determination to stick with her relationship with Ian is a mixture of resoluteness, vulnerability and exacerbation. Hers is not a desperation to which the middle-class characters, John and Ian, can entirely relate, and the young child complicates matters even further. While it appears as if these two male characters have the luxury of facing down or accommodating failure, Clarke plays her character as if she grasps that the possibility of losing out is almost impossible to countenance. As Clarke’s Neasa confronts McElhatton’s Ian she shakes with rage, fear and dread. Now, it is not so much that she is wanting that investment in him to be repaid, more, her future and that of their daughter are on the line. Clarke ensures that her character is nothing like the fantasy that John has in his head about Vivien as a nurturing, settled and stable mother. A one-off fling with a work colleague, Mark Whelan, ensures that Neasa’s commitment and fidelity are neither routine nor simple. In that respect, she mirrors Vivien’s propensity, someone in a committed relationship who can countenance infidelity. Crucially, monogamy and interpersonal commitment are as problematic a trade-off for female characters as they are for male ones. A major question to ask about any piece of writing is to discover what are the forces, obligations, duties and fears that keep two or more characters together in a room; effectively what stops either from 77

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exiting and simply walking away from it all. In the scene between Ian and Neasa, what both have at stake is brilliantly captured by the fact that neither opts to walk out and leave for such a long period of stage-time. During this exchange, Clarke and McElhatton powerfully play against one another, and their conflicts and individual positions are forcefully expressed. Despite Ian’s ambition being to put things right for Neasa, a solution looks unlikely. The subsequent scene between McElhatton’s Ian and Tom Jordan Murphy’s Laurence is of a very different order: Jordan Murphy brings a humble vulnerability to the role of Laurence, capturing Laurence’s precarious living situation. Laurence is a father, temporarily homeless and someone who occasionally works as a sex-worker. Laurence belongs to the same social class as Neasa and is disconnected from his own life purpose in ways different to John or Ian. Desperation brings him into the dangers of the sex trade, and, like Aimee in Alive, he has experienced the violence and brutality of prostitution. Laurence is on the game because he has to repay money he stole from a woman’s handbag in the accommodation offered to him by his cousin. In this scene Ian is risk attentive, but willing himself to see the situation through, despite the reservations and anxieties he may have about a same-sex physical encounter with someone that also involves the payment of money. McElhatton exposes a range of complex and contradictory emotions – self-loathing, weakness, paralysis, guilt, remorse, desire, alongside a determination to challenge sexual inhibition and repression. While displaying an empathy for Laurence’s plight, Ian is still willing to exploit him for his own sexual needs. Ian’s repressed desire is an unappeased energy haunting him in many respects. Collectively, Neasa’s infidelity, Ian’s encounter with part-time rent-boy Laurence, John’s presence in the hotel room with Vivien and his visit to a brothel where he gets beaten up, all suggest that sex can be a dark and destructive force, while also being a liberating and pleasurable one. But it is not simply in this patterning of details where there is example of mirroring and overlap between each of the characters. The final exchange between Ian and John is set during the day, rather than at night, ‘bright sunlight streams into the room’ (55). John has a new apartment, close to St. Anne’s Park. John believes that he can now move on and that life is not quite over for him. He has arranged a second date with a woman and he has also met Vivien: ‘And do you know what was really weird? I realised we had nothing in common. What about that, you know?’ (62). Additionally, he realizes that he did not even like her. As a gift for Ian, 78

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John brings a ‘stunning antique lamp’ (57). Ian is also moving on, packing up to go to Limerick to live with Neasa and Aisling. Ian sees his role as nudging his clients forward, coaxing and steering them towards a new perspective on trauma and loss. Therapeutically speaking, Ian has supported John by telling him that he does not believe that he is making it up about seeing Mari: this is not the same as him necessarily believing in ghosts. Ian has maintained a certain control over John’s understanding of his spectral experiences, placing events within an ambiguous holding frame of anxiety, need and desire, a haunting of the present by the past. John  … But, I’ll tell you, you know, even if I saw one, Ian, it’s not … I mean, seeing something is one thing but … it’s how it makes you feel, isn’t it? It’s how that makes you feel. That’s what’s important. Someone could see something and it doesn’t really matter. Someone else’ll see it and … it’s the end of the world, you know? Ian (affirmative). Mmm. … Ian  John, there was a time I would’ve given anything to see one. Just to know that there was … something else. Do you know what I mean? John Sure. Ian  Just something else, besides all the … you know … the pain and the confusion. Just something that gave everything … some meaning, you know? I’m talking about God, really, you know? John  I know. Where is he? Ian  I know. But don’t get me wrong. I think you had a real experience. I think you really experienced something – but I think it happened because you needed to experience it. John  Yeah, I know … . (54) This exchange captures the ways that both men are connected through particular language patterns, and through unconscious needs to make sense, formulate and justify a belief system. And, their final exchange confirms that both are struggling from within the same psychological space: John  I’ll tell you, the mind, it’s mad isn’t it? Ian  John, we know nothing. We just know nothing really. John  We’re just barely fucking hanging in there, really, aren’t we? 79

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Ian  Well, some better than others. But you’re doing good, John, you know? Considering, I mean, you know? John  I know. I know that. But I had to fucking go there to find that out. Do you know what I mean? Ian  I do. I know. (55) Both embrace the acceptance of the unknown and unknowable, alongside a commitment to resilience. However, once John leaves the office, the atmosphere changes again: ‘In the darkening gloom of the afternoon, we see that MARI’s ghost has appeared behind the door. She is looking at IAN, just as JOHN described her; she wears her red coat, which is filthy, her hair is wet. She looks beaten up. She looks terrifying. IAN has his back to her at his desk, going through some old post. But he seems to sense something and turns’ (56). The appearance of Mari’s ghost is accompanied by ‘the faint sound of an ice-cream van’s music’ (55), a sound John previously associated with her appearance in their home. This is not a friendly ghost, but a traumatic, troubled one. Mari’s terrifying appearance suggests that although Ian does not quite see her, the fact that he has only a small intuitive response ensures that it is all the more chilling in terms of performance reception. (Some commentators found this moment too much, others found it accomplished and unnerving.)30 Mari’s red coat and black hair are almost from the world of fairy-tale; red is a colour associated with Christmas, and also with sexual desire, in some cultures. If the purchase of the expensive red coat as a gift is decided upon under the intoxication of illicitness and secrecy, it is also associated with Mari’s unexplained presence in the taxi, as it is the coat she was wearing when she died. This moment gives presence to what has been evoked and made tangible through language up to this point, but until now has remained visually absent. Her appearance on stage, just as John disappears from Ian’s life, is also notable for the fact that Ian senses her presence, without directly seeing her. The play relies on this intuitive sensibility to confirm the nature of environment in which the play is set, a world beyond the quotient. The presence of Mari in the room does not suggest that Ian has somehow inherited the ghost, or that the ghost has been transferred from one to the other, and even less so that this woman character, rather than being sexually exchanged between men and objectified within a patriarchal economy, is instead being ethereally swapped. While it could be argued that her appearance occurs because of forms of therapeutic transference or displacement going on between analyst and analysand, more important is 80

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the notion that John and Ian are, perhaps, one and the same. If, as this play suggests that space and time may be continuous, both characters may form part of some greater unity as well. Ian and John share the same root name. John and Ian’s connection is signalled linguistically, in the manner that they often echo, repeat and return to a similar range of phrases and concepts. In Shining, the characters are challenged by the delusion that the past can be accounted for, accepted and forgiven. There is nothing John can say or do, such as sell the house, move on from his fixation on Vivien or go on a date, that can lead to the erasure of Mari’s subjectivity. Mari trumps his attempts to compartmentalize and suppress her. The sensational theatricality of the moment when Mari appears possibly assists the spectator in keeping at bay the full implications of the play’s dark turn. It is not that a woman can only appear as a ghost, rather Mari’s appearance confirms a presence or omnipresence, not of a God-like figure per se, but of a force that must be encountered, accommodated and appeased; the revenant must be encountered, befriended and embraced. That is not to say that McPherson is simply neutral on the merits of the dark. While darkness is nearly always seen as a destructive proposition, there is optimism in the perspective that the darkness can be creative, generous or even benign, as I will argue it is the malign figure of Lockhart in Seafarer who gifts. While there is a sense of a religion ghosting the world of Shining, more importantly it is the sense that the characters truly need to embrace, less the supernatural, but more the irrational, that space beyond conscious awareness and control.

The Eclipse: Eleanor/Lena Cobh’s Writer’s Festival (1–14 September 2008) is the backdrop for Eclipse (2009),31 which is directed by McPherson and co-written by him and Billy Roche.32 Ivan McCullough’s cinematography is very effective in establishing mood, using light, shadow, stairways, candles, and windows and numerous shots take in the backs of characters rather than frontal perspectives. St Colman’s Cathedral and the old ruined Abbey are central landmarks, crucial to the film’s cinematography. Furthermore, Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin’s score for the film is sacred in orientation. The demise of the Celtic Tiger economy forms part of the film’s economic backdrop, with the then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan, the Minister of Finance, appearing on the television cautioning the public that ‘we should not underestimate the scale of the problems that we face’ 81

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(8:44), but the channel is switched off, as if there is a need to tune in to an alternative sensibility. The relatively recently widowed woodwork teacher Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) serves as a driver and local guide for the London-based, writer of horror fiction, Lena Morell (Iben Hjejle). (The Eclipse is also the name of one of her novels.) Braggart writer Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn) previously had a casual affair with Lena and is temporarily obsessed with rekindling their connection. Nicholas claims Lena brought out a gentleness in him that he thought long gone. He also talks about connections with her through the lens of past life experiences. All three characters form a not quite intricate love triangle, that is further complicated when Nicholas’s wife, Susan Holden (Jean Law), arrives unexpectedly. In her accommodation, isolated from Cobh, Lena sleeps on a couch with the lights on. Out-of-sight sounds, possibly the howling of a fox or heron birds, discombobulate her. Lena had her first sighting of a ghost when she was staying with her family in a hostel in Italy; she saw a little ghost girl (Mia Quinn), who was looking for her sister. The ghost incited Lena’s interest in theoretical physics, which she studied for a year at university. Lena is comfortable speaking about ghosts at the festival and she acknowledges that she uses her writing to make sense of her life: When you see a ghost, something very interesting happens. Your brain splits in two, one side of you is rejecting what you are seeing because it doesn’t tally with our ordinary idea of reality, and the other side is screaming that this is for real. In that moment reality itself is collapsed and reconfigured in a way that changes you profoundly. (25:33) Despite getting by on a day-to-day basis with work and with the parenting of his children, Thomas (Eanna Hardwicke) and Sarah (Hannah Lynch), Michael is unable to sleep soundly as he is tormented by the death of his wife, Eleanor (Avian Egan). (Eleanor died on 6 September 2006, so the festival coincides with the second anniversary of her death.) Photos of Eleanor are visible in the kitchen, hallways and bedrooms. Michael starts to have premonitions about the death of Eleanor’s father, Malachy (Jim Norton). He associates being kept awake at night with Malachy’s presence in the house, and even calls Malachy’s nursing home to see if he is in his room. Malachy tells Michael that he dreamt that Eleanor was in his home the previous night, but she looked like she did when she 82

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was three or four, suggesting a palimpsest of times. Later, Michael’s car veers off the road, when he is shocked by an apparition of Malachy, who is seen sitting in the passenger’s seat covered in blood. This experience comes just after Michael has dropped Lena home and had thoughts about sleeping with Lena. Then, Michael is awoken from a dream whereby Malachy is trying to pull him into the earth, only to discover later that Malachy had committed suicide that same night. Ciarán Hinds notes to Orange: Michael is feeling guilt, because he cannot look after this man. He is trying to deal with his children, and he doesn't want to show his children any grief towards that. He is bottling it up … [Malachy] hates Michael. He blames him for letting his daughter die. … Michael is filled with this man's sense of vile and rage. That's what manifests itself. That is what made those elements of the supernatural so horrible.33 When Michael shows Lena the bruising on his hand, the flesh trauma is consistent with someone aggressively pulling on his arms like he had experienced in his dream. Lena tries to convince Michael that the injuries may have happened while sleep walking, and that there is an explanation beyond the supernatural. Despite the growing connection between Michael and Lena, when Michael is asked by Lena if he had seen the ghost of his wife, he lies, and answers in the negative. Eventually, the ghost of Eleanor appears to Michael, in two versions of herself; one during her period of ill-health, the other as her healthy, younger self, and the couple embrace in silence on his bed. The incident does not terrify him, but when Eleanor disappears, Michael cries inconsolably. Ghosts in McPherson’s work are embodied, but many like Eleanor remain silent, including Mari in Shining and the young girl in Veil. In an interview with Orange, McPherson says: The ghost of his wife, that he sees towards the end, I wanted to change her. She appears sick. She is in a hospital gown with a scarf on her head. When we cut back to her, she looks younger and more vital. She has regained her lovely hair. That kind of change is something I took from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Where the character is lying in that strange bed. Towards the end, when everything gets really weird. And he sees himself as a young man and an old man.34 83

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In response to a question about Michael’s ghosts, McPherson adds: ‘Are they coming from within him? When he sees the ghost he wants to see, which is his wife at the end, I don't know if that is coming from him or if it is coming from somewhere else. I suppose this film wants to keep that question open.’35 Michael makes sense of his experiences by writing things down, and the fact that he shares such stories with Lena is important, but he is not after a literary career per se, it is more about fashioning narratives that give perspective, order, coherence and some closure to existence, to the without and the within. Lena departs without a goodbye, and her short telephone message sent to Michael is not fetishized or over-read. Although the film ends with Michael alone on a deserted beach with his dog, it is not a scene of abandonment, aloneness and desolation, but one of solitude, fortitude and resilience. Here the funerary consciousness is less about a destructive obsession with death, and more to do with acceptance and resolve; a being towards life rather than towards death. The names Eleanor and Lena are patterned to be similar like many of the ways that names are varied across all of McPherson’s works. The interdigitization of Lena/Eleanor is a function of that intermeshing of life and death, death and life. The film is also a reflection and summation of McPherson’s career, something that Ashley Taggart picks up on in his analysis of this film; he comments on the barely discernible three figures in the eighteenth-century paintings that open the film: Certainly, you might think, a strange, almost perverse, certainly anachronistic way to open a film set in modern Ireland. … And looking back to the very first shot – the very first landscape painting, in the film, it becomes clear that it is actually, if you look very carefully, the depiction not just of a river, but of a weir. Consistent to the end, and in a last piece of temporal sleight-of-hand, McPherson has secreted his own authorial past and future in the fine grain of his [then] latest work (Veil).36 Eclipse serves not only as a mediation on the need to write, shared by Lena and Michael (and others), but also the release that writing might bring. Lena ghosts in and out of Michael's life without much ado: fiction and reality interface with an unnerving seamlessness. Writing has functioned an act of exorcism for Michael, as it has for McPherson, who states: ‘If I wasn’t plagued by needing to write things … that would perhaps be a blessing.’37 84

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Paula: Immaculate deception/fatal distraction McPherson wrote and created Paula for Cuba pictures, and it was directed by Alex Holmes for broadcast in 2017 by both the BBC and RTÉ. Paula, is a type of Scandi-noir psychological, erotic, gothic thriller.38 This three-part television drama with a total running time of about three hours has Dublin secondary-school teacher Paula Denny (Denise Gough) as the central character. Paula appears to be relatively affluent, speaks with a refined and precise Dublin accent, and lives alone in a large terraced, purple-doored house, with a basement. Her parents live in Clontarf and Paula teaches in a feepaying and rugby-playing boy’s school, St. Edmunds. As an educator, Paula seems respected, articulate and assured: she does not have trouble with class discipline and is clearly at ease in her professional surroundings. Overall, there appears to be little that is precarious about her employment arrangements and financial circumstances or little that is unusually volatile about her life circumstances. For Liam Fay, ‘contemporary Dublin is a recognisable presence, but this is a tale of two cities: the everyday capital and the shadow metropolis beneath it’.39 The discovery of rats in the basement of Paula’s house leads to the chance employment of an Irish-born builder or D-I-Y Scouser (Liverpudlian) James (Tom Hughes) and takes the work into the ‘shadow metropolis beneath’. Damp-proofing carried out by previous owners no longer keeps vermin at bay. Symbolically, basements take one into the territory of the unconscious and the abject. The repair work is followed by a casual sexual encounter between James and Paula. For her it is an incidental dalliance; however, now infatuated and fixated, James wants more. Over the course of the three-part drama, in addition to the sexual episode with James, we learn that Paula has had an affair with a married colleague, Philip Bryden (Edward MacLiam) and has sex with the detective McArthur (Mac, Owen McDonnell), an overworked cop and separated father. Paula’s sexual activities exercise critics in ways that James’s sexual desires do not. Some critics were inclined to link Philip’s death to promiscuity, or Paula’s eventual trauma to her willingness to have sex with a stranger. Sarah Hughes’s perspective is that ‘it is the story of an outwardly respectable young chemistry teacher (Denise Gough) who finds her life spiralling rapidly out of control after she comes into contact with James, a charismatic drifter’(my italics).40 In a feature piece prior to its broadcast, Kirsty Blake Knox describes the work as a centring on ‘a respectable chemistry teacher … whose life 85

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spirals out of control following a disastrous one-night-stand with James, a devastating and dashing drifter’ (my italics).41 Liam Fay over-stretches the point with the claim that Paula ‘lives alone in a large house that’s as rickety as most of her relationships, but wouldn’t have it any other way’.42 Peter Crawley regards Paula’s relationship with ‘love-rat’ Philip as ‘an ill-advised affair’ and goes on to suggest that she ‘impulsively slept with the handyman’ (my italics).43 Then in his review of the second episode, Crawley utilizes the term ‘rash affair’ and the words ‘rashly slept’ are used twice, while also tagging Paula’s erotic life as ‘gloriously silly’.44 Crawley even relates her ‘promiscuous’ behaviour to the television drama’s own genre of promiscuity.45 These sorts of judgemental takes on her casual encounters are not implied or indicated by Gough’s performance; there is nothing rash or silly, nothing lacking in respect or promiscuous about her behaviour. Paula’s sexual encounters are neither spectacular nor a disaster, neither abusive nor anomalous. None of Paula’s dalliances reveal any hangups about sex, nor is there anything uneasy, rickety or transgressively psychosexual signalled, even if Paula claims that it is not something she regularly engages in. Intentionally, the sexual encounters here have nothing to indicate guilt, shame, repression, perversion or dysfunction, frames of mind that too often appear as the default reflex in much Irish writing about sex. Indeed, the outcomes of sex in such writing are hardly ever pleasure or intimacy, rather sex tends to result in disease, unwanted pregnancy or calamitous relationship collapses. Sexual desire is one of the factors in James’s psychological frailty, but that is his issue, not hers. Paula does not lead him astray. Although rebuked by her school principal for having an affair with a married colleague, Philip does most of the chasing, unwilling to take heed of her rebuffs and rejections. Apart from sex, Paula does not want anything from Philip other than discretion, and she does not feel in any way responsible for the marriage between Philip and Diane (Aislín McGuckin). After Philip dies, Diane accuses Paula: ‘For some reason I can’t help thinking you opened up a door in his life and let all the bad things in’ (Episode 2, 4:44). Paula refutes the woman leading the weak man astray trope that serves as convenience in the unpacking of infidelity more generally. McPherson’s insight on the character is telling, he notes: The thing about Paula as a character is that her life has no guiding framework. On the outside it looks as though it does because she is surrounded by all the trappings of her status, but she’s existentially 86

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a very free person and that’s incredibly dangerous because once she feels threatened then all bets are off.46 Across the three episodes, Gough establishes her character as variously independent, thorough and caring, spiky and humorous, compassionate and distant, sincere and ruthless, generous and selfish. When she adopts a stray dog, she addresses it as ‘dog’, maintaining distance, but also hinting at the limits of her affection. If Paula’s disposition towards her parents is complex and somewhat cold, her actions towards her off-the-rails, alcohol-addicted brother, Callum (Jonny Holden), are driven by a combination of annoyance, frustration, compassion and acceptance. However, Paula’s claim that she does not feel anything is clearly a statement that does not hold true. So, even in her generosity and professionalism, I do see a guiding framework, in contrast to McPherson. McPherson acknowledges in an interview with Sarah Hughes: I can’t help but be aware that as a male writer I’ve drifted towards an expression of maleness in my work. But maybe as I’ve got older I’ve become a little bit more confident and able to tell stories from a female point of view. … One of the hang-ups I’ve had is that the characters at the centre of my stories are usually messy. I understand how men’s lives are messy and finally I allowed myself to say, ‘well, so are women’s lives’.47 The notion of messiness is about establishing characters for whom nothing is clear cut, where contradictory impulses abound, and where good decisions are not invitations for audience commendation and bad decisions for indignation. Fay’s review picks up on the concept of messiness: ‘Her life is messy but it’s a mess of her own making.’48 James enters Paula’s life, and she arrives in his; each is coming from radically different vantage points, and with very different cravings. If Paula has her own place and is living independently, James has difficulty in paying the rent for a dingy, cramped apartment over a shop. Crystal (Aoibhinn McGinnity) and Morgan (Siobhán Cullen) live with James in a polyamorous relationship: he is the father of Crystal’s two children and Morgan’s one child. This polyamorous co-habitation says something about his magnetism, and their desperation. All social indicators propose that Morgan and Crystal belong to a different social class to Paula. There is no explanation 87

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as to how such a domestic arrangement is arrived at, but if it appears that James has somehow steered both women towards this ménage à trois, almost a position of enslavement; Morgan’s later defiance of him challenges any perspective of his omnipotence. James pilfers a picture of Paula and Callum (as children) from items stored in her basement and steals the sexually explicit drawing that Philip has given to Paula. James’s fixation on Paula is associated with the memory of his dead sister, Mary Morecroft, and is also based on him somehow seeing in Paula’s eyes a pathway out of his personal hell and into the light: ‘She’s shown you [Mac] the steps up from out of hell and into the light’ (Episode 2, 49:00). It is his mind which provides the cross-link between different realities. Paula becomes James’s obsession; a fixation tied to his need to possess and take control of her. She has no equivalent counter-need. James’s instant infatuation with Paula leads not only to him murdering Philip but to his breaking in to Callum’s living quarters and starting a fire which leaves Callum badly burned. The police are content to view Philip’s death as a suicide and have no forensic evidence to suggest that Callum’s injuries occurred other than accidentally. The limitations of the law, whether through ineptitude or insubstantial evidence, leave Paula driving the investigation. Prompted by clues, insights and intuitions, Paula tracks James down and points the police in his direction. When Morgan denies that a conversation with Detective Laurence (Emily Taaffe) took place, Morgan is bound, gagged and locked into a cupboard by James and Crystal. Even after James attempts to assault or kidnap Paula, and his later attack on McArthur, the police are still not able to press for more serious charges. His lawyer spins a tale of class disadvantage and neglect, and with James released on bail, the viewer anticipates that the stakes will now become even higher. To this point, the writing has combined elements of horror, supernatural, erotic thriller, revenge and Holmes’s use of shadow, darkness, colour and sound create a complex mood-frame for the work. In addition, flashbacks, hallucinations and the appearance of ghosts also reinforce the multiplicity of genres circulating. For instance, during a moment of intense grief, Paula sees Philip’s ghost; initially his voice is a whisper and normal, then it distorts and finds a heightened, piercing pitch, while he explains how his body was found. Additionally, McArthur imagines Morgan coming around to his home and them having passionate sex just prior to a realistic moment went she indeed calls on him to make revelations about James. Also, Paula tells 88

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McArthur of a childhood experience, of her camping in her back garden with her brother when she had him choke her until she lost consciousness. Before she was revived, Paula saw herself living another life, with another family and in another era, epoch or dimension, where she was happy and really loved (Episode 2, 47:59). Sex brings that experience back to her. Paula sees her life as a ‘fucking bad dream’ (Episode 2, 48:20). So, sex can be darker than I have previously suggested. It is from necessity and fear that Paula turns to the wisdom of her scientific training and her forensic understanding of the body in order to protect herself. She arms herself with a sedative garnered from a visit to a veterinary office and researches the impact of it on herself. Paula transforms the basement into something altogether different, it becomes not a space to be feared or avoided, but a site of courage and fearlessness for her. Freed on bail, James approaches her in the basement having killed the dog; she passionately kisses him, but then injects him with the sedative. James is confined in a cabinet (womb/tomb), beneath a concrete floor. While there might be a tube with nourishment, and a way to extract bodily waste, this is a prolonged form of torture, intended to maximize his terror. All that is left for James to do is to embrace and take comfort from Mary’s ghost. James had first seen his sister’s ghost in his van; her lips are stitched together, and on another occasion, he sees her in the prison cell.49 It emerges that James and Mary had been locked in a cupboard by their father and she had died there, so her fate becomes his. James’s determination to destroy Paula, or as he sees it to take possession of her, is trumped by Paula’s self-preserving instinct. Although, she is provoked to a point of absolute ruthlessness, Paula’s pitiless and precise actions complicate notions of compassion, mercy, justice, punishment, retribution and revenge. She goes well beyond what could be regarded as a legitimate punishment. What makes Paula so distinctive is both the range of actions that she opts for, as well as the ferocity and singlemindedness with which Gough plays her. Such calculation is countered by the trauma she illustrates when she turns off her brother’s ventilator; there is considerable empathy and compassion in this act of mercy killing. On one level, Paula is simply a revenge/self-preservation at all costs story, but on another level, it read it as a form of revenge on patriarchal order, resulting in the destruction of James’s dominance. That said, the fact that the school principal has the power to sack Paula because parents disapprove of the scandal that Paula seems to arouse is appalling, but also is a re-articulation of hegemonic power. 89

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Gough’s general comments on roles that have come her way is interesting: ‘I’m always given parts of women who could otherwise be played as victims. … And then I get the chance to give them a bit of, “F*** you”, I’m playing women who don’t apologise for themselves.’50 It is clear from McPherson’s writing that there is no intention for Paula to be played as a victim, but the aggressiveness that Gough identifies chimes with the energy she brings to her screen performance. Rather than showing any compulsion to punish her for what she does, Paula is rewarded by pregnancy.

Conclusion All cultures and societies have tried to address, through religious and ceremonial practices and myth, folk and fairy tales, what is liminal, unknown or out there, beyond life. The unappeased or distressed dead are rampant in drama and fiction more generally, and the often Christianinspired motif of death and resurrection is at the core of so many plays.51 Trauma, bereavement, loss and grief can in some ways explain the unburied and the undead. While ghosts tend to be perceived as malign energies, cautionary voices, trapped energies or unappeased spirits in need of release, McPherson’s incorporation of the supernatural is more complex. In McPherson’s work the supernatural is incorporated through the presence of doppelgängers (Ian and John and Lena and Eleanor), near-death experiences, ghosts, vampires and hauntings of various sorts. Fears need to be accepted, faced down and embraced. In work discussed in the next three chapters in this book, supernatural is variously incorporated, as Diane believes in Birds, as earlier mentioned, that she has absorbed within her the spirits of Julia and her dead child that she murdered, included through the presence of the demonic, through séances in Veil, summoned in the form of Lockhart, the devil-incarnate, in Seafarer, and evoked through folk tales, ghost stories and Ouija boards in Weir. It is not just the supernatural that haunts, spectres of the barely surviving poor and dispossessed are signalled as crucial offstage presences in Veil and Girl. As I will argue in Girl, characters are not presented as figments of a narrator’s imagination nor as phantasmal, insubstantial distortions or a delusion about betterment, but something concrete and un-faded, existing not in a liminal or afterlife space, but in an eternal dimension. The eternal is not reality’s shadow. Indeed, this chapter’s deliberations haunt all of those to follow, the reverse also applies. 90

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Introduction: Safe houses and parallel universes It is not only in Irish theatre but in theatre globally where the notion of home is regularly linked to issues of identity formation, self-discovery, support and enablement, ownership, inheritance, belonging, as well as with conflict, rivalry, disablement, inhibition, rejection and repression; effectively a character’s multiple positioning within a family/community dynamic. Rather than home being a place of collegiality, repose, acceptance, privacy or sanctuary, it is more often associated with conditions of intrusion, dislocation, abandonment, banishment, alienation and exile, and these sensations find expression under the umbrella term of unheimlich, the ‘unhomely’. Home localizes the intersection of the personal, communal, familial and the social, but it also serves as a site that mimics or mirrors broader social dynamics or as a place where the contestations of such dominant forces can be found. (Public/social spaces can be homely, even more so than one’s own living quarters, something that Weir demonstrates.) Britain’s extended 800-year colonial rule of Ireland led to the absence of political autonomy and freedom, and, more specifically, self-determined nationhood. Accordingly, the ownership of land and property, issues of tenancy, unfair rents, and the conflicts surrounding ascendancy rule and the blight of absentee landlords have given rise to endless dramatizations of conflicts about land, homesteads and the legitimacy of ownership. The motif of strangers in the house has been an important, if not a dominant trope in much of Irish writing. Imperialism it not just Ireland specific. It is little wonder then that in the four plays discussed in this chapter each deals with ideas of home, sanctuary, ownership, dispossession or eviction, during periods of significant economic disequilibrium; two are set in Ireland and two in America. Girl is set in 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota, during the Great Depression; Birds is set in the near future in New England. Veil is set in Jamestown, Co. Leitrim, in 1822 and considers the financial

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demise of an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy family. Ireland’s recessionary period, from 2008 forward informs Alive, but the work is simply not just about the impacts of recession on marginalized characters.1 Each play deals with circumstances that are less and less under any character’s direct control. It is not about localizing the impact of recessions, but more about seeing them as part of larger, almost generic economic cycles, booms followed by downturns, with fallouts in terms of itineracy, vagrancy, homelessness and destitution, the cyclicality and consequences of the boom/bust capitalist model.

The Birds: Unfitting survival Numerous science-fictional portrayals of dystopia often propose a return to pre-industrialized societies in the aftermath of some devastation, where populations are almost wiped out, apart from small pockets of survivors. Fear of extinction exists and near chaos reigns. Civic order and regulation collapse; nothing seems fit for purpose. These works often mark the return to social orders that are severely hierarchical and un-democratic in orientation. Daphne Du Maurier’s novella, The Birds (1952), provided the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). So, when Dublin’s Gate Theatre announced that it was presenting a version of The Birds, many assumed that the theatre was attempting to cash in on the trend for staging versions of classic work in commercial venues as was happening on Broadway and the West End.2 However, McPherson’s script for the Gate has little in common with either the novella or the film. In McPherson’s work, the birds, in tune with the tides, are cyclically attacking a house that Nat and Diane have taken shelter in. Cars are abandoned, the media has stopped broadcasting and food is sparse. As the play opens, Nat and Diane are barricaded in the house. Diane nurses Nat through a fever. The arrival of Julia changes the dynamic between Nat and Diane. Julia claims that a man tried to assault her, but that the birds got to him. Much remains unanswered about Julia. Later when food goes missing, Diane tries to blame Julia. Nat seeks to cover for Julia, by claiming he ate the food. There is little privacy, a rising sense of claustrophobia, and time passes slowly. During scene four, the arrival of the birds leads to the cutting of the lights and silence; an ominous sense of foreboding is caused by the flapping, 92

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scratching, pecking and thumping of the birds outside, and the sounds of people being attacked are heard in the distance. In the theatre the realization of such sounds effects becomes very important, as does the sense of danger that actors communicate in this instance, but there is no direct contact between characters and birds. Julia’s importance and dominance increases as the play evolves, leaving Diane feeling as if she is being usurped. This is a world where allegiances are under constant negotiation. All communal trust becomes laced with primitive suspicion, increasingly social decorum is cast to one side. While Nat and Julia undertake the six-hour round trip to St Thomas, Tierney, a farmer living nearby, drops in to proposition Diane, offering to trade food and resources if she will have sex with him. For Tierney, they are surviving under a new order, and because Julia and Nat are now together, Diane’s ‘days are numbered’.3 Tierney also claims that Julia has been part of a rampaging gang that killed a woman, but there is no way to determine if he is telling the truth. The love triangle becomes even more complicated when Julia declares that she is pregnant, and Diane is compelled to argue that Nat may not necessarily be the father. Pregnancy is Julia’s way of gaining Nat’s protection in some sort of primitive fashion, and Diane’s denial of Nat’s possible paternity is her way of countering this. Such is the tension that Julia thinks about killing Diane with an axe, but she cannot bring herself to do it. Julia’s underestimation of Diane’s ruthlessness leaves her locked out of the house and at the mercy of the birds. Diane, the suave, touchy-feely and caring, middle-class author of some renown, has no problem murdering a pregnant woman. This can happen when ‘society’s gone’, and there is no one ‘keeping score’, as Diane proposes (199). In a dog-eat-dog world, invariably, the ruthless survive. Although Diane finds herself more at ease with the act of murder than she might ever have thought, she does admit that her action has led to the absorption of the soul of the person slain: ‘But then as time goes on, you realise that you not only have that person’s power. Something else has happened. You have their soul inside you. And it’s impossible not to feel their pain, their rage and their embarrassing frailty, which joins with your own. You get it all’ (204–5). This notion of merging with those that one kills reinforces this idea of an interdependent universe that seems so evident across McPherson’s work. As the birds are now nesting in the eaves, Nat and Diane take to the roads like the tramp figures in Synge or in Beckett’s work: Nat’s ‘old coat is 93

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tied by a piece of string across his belly. He holds a stick like a pilgrim’ (209). Diane’s calling back to God is a significant detail. Diane notes: ‘And I realise that God is real. Because I am God. But I never realised before how helpless God is – in the face of reality and eternity. And how alone God is’ (209). It is not just simply the sense of foreboding that haunts this work, rather the play expresses an awareness of the omnipresence of violation, alongside a strong sense of engulfment that is prompted by fears about extinction. Democratic worlds are informed by values that insist on a duty of care, and values that urge the protection of the weak and vulnerable, which contrasts sharply to when one becomes absolutely committed to one’s own survival. Decency and trust are impossible in a world where everyone has only their own interests at heart. As Birds opened in 2009, this work is not simply a warning about ghost estates, negative equity, home repossession or how asset strippers, financial predators or vulture/ventures capitalists pick over the bones of a vulnerable economy. In this catastrophic, apocalyptic world, with an inverted order of preying, anything goes. The diaries that Diane leave behind capture the ruthless aspect of the survival imperative that has no recourse to conventional morality.

The Night Alive: The banks are bust In Ireland from the early 1990s, improved pay and working conditions, and more high-end jobs led to a rise in affluence. Many young people did not emigrate in such large numbers as they had previously, and chose to settle in Ireland. Significant numbers of inward migrants meant that population increase invariably led to stronger demands for housing.4 With property prices rising, the number of investors in property grew year on year during the Celtic Tiger years. For many, property was marketed not only as a solid investment decision without risk but also as a form of alchemy, a short cut to material security and financial gain. Many people could not believe their initial luck, celebrating their get-rich-quick schemes with more and more borrowings.5 There were cheerleaders across all of the society, government, banks, builders, media and estate agents. Primed by such positivity, people took huge risks, borrowing too much that left them vulnerable to a recessionary downturn, over-investing in bricks and mortar. This is not to take personal choice out of the equation, but it is to acknowledge that there existed a deluded cultural consciousness, shaped 94

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by a mixture of anxiety, desperation, opportunity, greed and naive belief in speculative gain. This was not a localized situation, rather one that mirrored what was happening with property investment almost globally.6 In Ireland, a huge drop in construction activity and property prices, an extensive government bailout given to prevent the banks collapsing, plummeting tax revenues and increased spending on welfare payments as unemployment approached 1980s levels were the outcomes of all this speculation and unchecked markets.7 From late 2008s, the neo-liberal dream became a neoliberal nightmare.8 Set in present-day Dublin, Alive captures many of the more unequivocal, immediate, indirect and longer-term consequences of the drastic economic collapse and the social devastation it brought in its wake.9 Tommy (Ciarán Hinds), a separated man with a lock up and a van, is a down-on-his luck, wheeler dealer, chancer or petit-entrepreneur.10 Tommy has made a range of rash decisions; he bought his daughter, Michelle, a Connemara pony that knocked down the coal shed and a dividing wall between the family home and a neighbour’s. Tommy’s support payments to his estranged wife, Suzanne, go unpaid. It is his precarious and ill-considered business investment in ‘two outdoor live-gig rigs’ that has left him broke and caught up in legal wrangles with his bank.11 The rigs, imported from Belarus, have been impounded because of health and safety concerns. During the Tiger period, rigs like Tommy’s served a growing market in outdoor events, and these also hint at the boom in corporate and, in particular, family parties held in temporary canvas/marquee venues. In this investment one also sees the connection between bank lending practices and some of the misjudged entrepreneurial activities that flourished during the boom years. Many people had vibrant business ideas, and did especially well from them, but there were other business ideas, where proper cross-checks and evaluations of loan applications failed to be carried out appropriately, as banks all too easily, carelessly, imprudently or recklessly backed such enterprises. When the recession started, many businesses collapsed in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector. Furthermore, what happens with Tommy’s rigs business investment serves as a metaphor for the ill-considered investments in property, which left many in negative equity, unable to pay their mortgages, financially stretched, bankrupt and facing the repossession of their homes. To make it a play simply about property would be overly literal. Tommy is a lodger, living in a converted bedsit in the drawing room of his Uncle Maurice’s Edwardian home, close to Dublin’s Phoenix Park. The 95

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bedsit has no fridge; most things in the room are makeshift, such as the toilet in the corner. In Soutra Gilmour’s set for the Donmar production, Tommy’s living-quarters is littered with discarded work clothes, take-away food containers, bundles of newspapers and consumer food packaging. Tommy lives in a sort of detritus of a consumer, neo-liberal world. Tommy’s living space speaks both to the dark world of subsistence living and to his unwillingness to take care of and be in some ways responsible for himself. When Tommy takes Aimee Clement (Caoilfhionn Dunne) into his accommodation to clean her bloodied face, he is forced to jimmy the lock on the metre to generate some electricity. Hinds’s Tommy attempts to do his best to make the space a little tidier, and the more time he spends moving things around and putting things in black sacks, the more the audience realizes just how unkempt the place really is. Hinds not only captures the impulse to clean but also signals the scale, if not the near impossibility, of the task, so he approaches the duty with a wonderful, frustrated ambivalence. He picks a mug up from the floor, sniffs it, then deems it ready for use. Aimee claims to have been beaten by a random male stranger that offered her a lift, but it turns out that the damage to her face was done by her exboyfriend and pimp, Kenneth. Aimee’s child has been taken from her and is in foster care. The power/material relationship between Aimee and Kenneth is mimicked somewhat by the one between Tommy and Doc (so called as in Doc Martens boots), played by Michael McElhatton. Tommy owes Doc for two days work, amounting to €30, but Tommy is reluctant to pay him in cash and instead wants to give him stale cigars for Doc to sell on illegally. If Tommy, as a seemingly unscrupulous employer, is unwilling to pay fairly, he is still the one who regularly offers Doc a place to stay, either in the van or on a camp-bed. When Aimee starts to exchange hand jobs for Tommy’s cash, the lines between Tommy offering her sanctuary and taking advantage of her are clearly blurred. Neo-liberalism is advanced by an un-hindering of the markets, what David Harvey calls ‘liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’.12 Harvey adds: ‘Individual success or failure are interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings (such as not investing significantly enough in one’s own human capital through education) rather than being attributed to any systemic property (such as the class exclusions usually attributed to capitalism).’13 96

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Opportunism in Tommy’s instance is miscalculated, but either way he does not have the ‘virtue’ of entrepreneurial capital, as he remains sullied by his illegal transactions. While Tommy does not exude ‘entrepreneurial virtues’, he does possess more communal-oriented virtues. Brian Gleeson’s Kenneth joins a long list of those who exploit Doc. When Kenneth indirectly accuses Doc of flashing outside a nearby school and of cruising for homosexual sex in the Phoenix Park, McElhatton captures the spiking in Doc’s fear levels.14 Kenneth’s ferocious assault on Doc is truly unnerving to experience in performance as it is as close to an authentic staging of violence that I have ever seen in the theatre. Gleeson’s performance as Kenneth has a casualness that is eerie and unnerving, as Gleeson makes it obvious that his character is the sort of sentimental predator who feeds off the docility of Doc and off the helplessness and dependency of Aimee. When Aimee kills Kenneth, Dunne’s performance ensures that it is regarded less as an act of murder and more as a complex combination of opportunism, punishment, retribution and delayed selfdefence, much like Paula’s. If Kenneth’s predilection for violence serves as the negative unconscious of the piece, then Tommy’s Uncle Maurice (Jim Norton), is in many ways Kenneth’s opposite, but that does not necessarily make him some sort of idyllic, benign figure. Despite his alcoholism, and despite the sadness and responsibility he feels over his wife’s Maura’s chaotic and accidental death, Maurice is Tommy’s guiding paternal figure. When Maurice aggressively turns on Tommy, Norton does so with great conviction, confronting him initially for not attending Maura’s anniversary mass, then challenging him to regain much of the ground he has lost in his life, stating: ‘I’m just asking, what happened to all that sweetness … is what I want to know.’15 To that plea Tommy claims that he is only another ‘moocher’, effectively implying that Maurice may well be deluded (63). When Tommy’s plan to flee with Aimee to Finland collapses and then Aimee disappears, Doc’s place is again secure. Doc takes the rough with the smooth, accepts more than most, the vagaries of fate. McElhatton achieves this sense of his character’s resilience with telling ease. Alive is a work lit up by a tragicomic impulse, whether it is Doc’s belief that he gets a bargain in his purchase of a double CD ‘The Rockin’ Sound of the Vuvuzela’ for 2.99’, in his reading aloud of sections from the survival book, How to Survive Life-Threatening Situations (44), or in the collective dancing to Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Goin’ On?’. To that list one can add the massive pair of red runners that Aimee steals from the 97

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sport’s shop as a gift for Tommy, and the great comic exchanges like how a banana sandwich shared in a van is deemed almost equivalent to a carvery lunch by Tommy. The play’s final momentums are unexpected, but close attention to the play’s details will see how it has been signalled; even so, the ending leaves some spectators and reviewers somewhat perplexed.16 Tommy’s daughter Michelle extends an invitation to all three males to her eighteenth birthday. A now pregnant Michelle is to train as a hairdresser, and the heroin/crack cocaine habit hinted at earlier seems to be no deterrent. In preparation for the party, Tommy is suddenly well groomed, wearing polished shoes, newly dry-cleaned shirt and trousers, a scarf and Crombie coat (he is almost dressed like Seafarer’s Lockhart), which contrasts with the denim jeans and the old Dublin Gaelic football jersey that he wears at the start of the play. Tommy is also restored to something like his former self as Maurice had imagined him once to be, and is now buttressed by Maurice’s promise to leave the house to him. Instead of bearing the strains of her life as previously performed, and instead of assuming the worst about Aimee’s ongoing circumstances, based on Doc’s second-hand reported sighting of Aimee on the steps of the Custom House that suggests she has quickly aged, is lost, probably readdicted and close to death, Aimee’s hair is now long, clean and healthy looking, her clothes and shoes look expensive. Like Tommy, she is utterly transformed, walking around the space with confidence and assurance. The stage direction is pertinent: ‘She stands there while TOMMY comes back into the room. He does not see her at first. … After a few moments he sees AIMEE’s reflection and turns. They stand looking at each other. For a moment he wonders if she is real’ (91–2). There are echoes here of the ending to Shining. It could be argued that this ending is a false one and that the ending delivers a sort of summative or transposed optimism that is not in keeping with the trajectory of the piece. Or, in contrast, that these moments might be regarded as functioning either a dreamscape or death-space. In the published text, there are no scene breaks indicated and in performance there is a consistent almost seamless fluidity between the scenes, achieved by a simple use of music, fading lights combined with characters almost appearing, dissolving or disappearing in space. Also, the exits and entrances to the space through windows and rear entrances rather than standard points of access are thus regularly non-

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conventional. Additionally, characters appear unannounced, unanticipated and emerge almost from nowhere, so to speak, as if the dramaturgy is jettisoning many of the conventions of tokenistic realism. The following moments captures another level of awareness: Aimee  You don’t even know me, Tommy. Tommy  I do know you. I do. I’ve always known you. I’ve always known you. (81) If this exchange raises the idea of time as a continuous present, then Aimee’s dream-world provides another example of a parallel universe when she wakes from a nightmare in which she imagines Tommy and herself ‘in here and two men came in and told me I was dead and I had to get up and go with them’ (37). However, through the various reflections on dreaming, time and blackholes that Doc offers, the dramaturgical rationale for the play’s ending is clearly signalled. Doc shows a certain awareness of other philosophical traditions and has a premonition about a Pope’s death. Doc also is somewhat assured in discussing time waves: ‘Just like sound waves – a day will come when we understand what time is and that we can perceive, you know, time waves, waves in time. Vibrations from another time – like why not?’ (47–8). Further, rather than gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, Doc’s gift from the Magi in his dream is an awareness of blackholes, time, a sense of an eternal present. Just as Ian in Shining wonders if the presence of ghosts would be an affirmation of God, Doc suggests that if timelessness is the cosmic order, why is there not a space for a notion of a God-like presence? Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli explains that black holes ‘populate our universe in great number. They are regions in which space is so curved as to collapse in on itself, and where time comes to a standstill. As mentioned, they form, for instance, when a star has burned up all of the available hydrogen and collapses.’17 Rovelli summarizes current thinking about gravity, space and time: The backdrop of space has disappeared, time has disappeared, classic particles have disappeared, along with the classic fields. So what is the world made of? The answer now is simple: the particles are quanta of quantum fields; light is formed by quanta of a field; space is nothing more than a field, which is also made of quanta; and time emerges

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from the processes of this same field. In other words, the world is made entirely from quantum fields.18 He adds: ‘The world, particles, light, energy, space and time – all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.’19 Doc’s insights are proposing similar awarenesses about the interfacing about time and space. Doc says that he was told by the Magi to tell Tommy what heaven is: ‘Yeah, apparently, when you die, you won’t even know you’re dead! It’ll just feel like everything has suddenly … come right, in your life. Like everything has just clicked into place and off you go’ (91). The play’s ending suggests that in death everything clicks into place, that there is a redemption of sorts. Father John Misty’s ‘Funtimes in Babylon’ contributes to the overall mood of the final moments and also reinforces the play’s working ambivalence.20 During these final moments, Hinds and Dunne’s performances hold open the possibilities of transformation, however improbable it may seem. Hinds and Dunne bring both a collective vitality and the impetus of renewal that is simultaneously about getting into the groove of living and death, maybe – perhaps – how they might be even one and the same thing. As Ben Brantley notes: ‘In the play’s benediction of a final scene, which seems to take place outside of time – there’s an ineffable, all-answering rhythm to life. That’s the redemption of great art, whether it comes from a song out of Motown or a play out of Dublin.’21 Across the whole performance, Hinds is simply superb – funny, generous, cantankerous, argumentative, belittling, encouraging and exploitative. Equally, Dunne convincingly demonstrates how her character can be both frail and hardened by brutality, can withstand great distress and still push her traumas to one side, can easily get into a situation where she is charging Tommy for sex, can grieve for a child taken from her and can potentially free fall back into a life of addiction and on the streets. As McPherson presents the possibility of simultaneous and different time frames, notions of continuity are resisted, but equally importantly is the issue of causality. This ending of Alive suggests a form of ‘non-time’ but also a collage or abundance of times. If the play is seen as a nativity play, biblical, mythic, perpetual or eternal time collapse into one, the chronometric time line of the Celtic Tiger’s demise is shattered by way of offering some form of consolation not only of things ending, but also of perpetual beginnings, a future perfect. 100

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The Veil: Gothic dominoes Veil22 is set in 1822 in Mount Prospect, near Jamestown, where the Lambrokes live. In an interview with Maddy Costa prior to the opening of Veil, McPherson attempts to open up on how the play might be received: ‘There was a big economic crash following the Napoleonic wars. So a place like Ireland, which was very poor, was just on the floor.’23 In an interview with Liz Hoggard, McPherson steers potential spectators in another direction, noting how Ireland had gone from being poor, to one of the richest countries per capita in the world (during the Celtic Tiger), to being broke again: For the first time, I realized the public can share a dysfunctional psyche, and that psyche can be generational. The Irish Famine is only five generations ago. I began to realize the mess we’d got ourselves into must have come from some tremendous trauma. For the first time, I accepted I am Irish – up till then I’d always felt European or a citizen of the world.24 Then in an interview with Caroline McGinn, McPherson expresses it slightly differently: ‘We never felt we owned our country, it was all: “Get what you can cos it’ll be gone soon.” I could see we’d done it to ourselves.’25 Despite such steering, most reviewers failed to pick up on the play’s contemporary resonance.26 The Lambroke’s big house is in disrepair, paint is peeling from the crumbling walls, and as Rae Smith designs it, a tree is looming in the background and seems to be trespassing on the living space.27 If tenants are not paying rents to their landlord elites, then families like the Lambrokes are in no position to pay their staff. The Lambrokes now are reliant on Colonel Bennett to extend credit to them, but even he, when he takes over, is going to have to reduce rents by half to avoid mass evictions. More soldiers are moving into Queensfort, public works are in the offing, and everyone is endeavouring to hang tough until the next crop. Indigenous staff members, the estate manager Mr Fingal (Peter McDonald), the housemaid, Clare Wallace (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and the housekeeper, Mrs Goulding (Bríd Brennan) do their best to attend to the situation, but they cannot keep the realities of the household’s existence at bay. The servant and managerially employed characters are despised locally. The hospitality that the Lambroke family might once have provided for guests is no longer possible. 101

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Seventeen-year-old Hannah Lambroke (Emily Taaffe) has gone missing and there is a fear that her ‘old complaint’ has returned.28 The defrocked Anglican priest, Reverend Berkeley (Jim Norton), and his philosopher travelling companion, Charles Audelle (Adrian Schiller), arrive at Mount Prospect, intent on escorting Hannah to England so that she can be married to the Marquis of Newbury and to stave off financial ruin. He is the eldest son of Lord Ashby, whose seat is outside Northampton, England. Hannah knows that her potential groom does not love her. There is a suspicion that it is the Marquis’s father, who seems more interested in Hannah. For Hannah’s mother, Madeleine (Fenella Woolgar), Hannah has little choice. Hannah sees her ordeal as if she is being sold into a hellish existence and that she is being evicted. Hannah intends to punish her mother by leaving behind Madeleine and her great-grandmother, Maria, also called Grandie (Ursula Jones), who lives with Alzheimer’s disease. Mrs Goulding knocks her own kind, signalling their ingratitude, wildness and badness, and criticizes locals for hoarding supplies when given to them and remarks that they are also ‘in league with the devil the half of them’ (248). Brennan’s performance convincingly captures in part the indigenous internalization of imperial values. The beating Fingal doles out to the unseen James Furay, a relative innocent, is appalling, and fundamentally undermines any idea of the native under imperialism simply being a hapless victim. During the first act, Grandie tells a story of St Patrick, in which he is a gold prospector rather than the religious visionary and leader. The story highlights issues of foreignness and the taking of local material resource and also accounts for the dispossessing of the pagan belief systems among the indigenous peoples. In the published text, Grandie has a second narrative about money and profit, where when someone looks into the face of the king with mirror’s eyes, they see only themselves. This king has told Grandie a story about gentle fishermen and hunters who existed before St Patrick’s arrival. The arrival of farmers brought the arrival of a different God. What is striking in this story is the sensibility of living harmoniously off the land, in a world free from a profit-driven economic imperative. This second speech was eliminated during the rehearsal process and perhaps indicates that McPherson was concerned that the play was trying to do too much. The editing back of the second story hinders the establishment of a more direct relationship to the contemporary situation, but its absence does not take away too much from the overall sensibility of the play itself.

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For the National Theatre production, Rae Smith’s scenography evokes Big House Gothic sensibilities, even as the design itself uses roman design features. Jerrold E. Hogle notes that ‘gothic fictions generally play with and oscillate between the earthly laws of conventional reality and the possibilities of the supernatural’.29 Hogle distinguishes between ‘terror gothic’ and ‘horror gothic’ (Ann Radcliffe’s distinction). The former, ‘holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity [which are] kept largely out of sight or in the shadows or suggestions from a hidden past’, while the latter ‘confronts the principal characters with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms (including the repressions) of everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting, consequences’.30 Hogle adds that there are two levels of unconsciousness within the Gothic, one that is normally associated with individual repression, and the second, a socio/political unconscious, where ‘deep-seated social and historical dilemmas, often of many types at once’, become more ‘fearsome’ the more they are ‘covered up’ and ‘fundamental rather than symbolic resolution is what should be desired’ when encountering them.31 In Veil personal and public dilemmas meet in strange ways. On the one hand, Ireland, for Berkeley, is a romanticized repository of beauty and wildness, and, on the other, it is a place of Gothic marginality, where ghosts are active, where it seems as if there is a validation of nature over culture, the supernatural over politics. Nearby, children are dying from illnesses like scarlet fever and, because of the economic hardships all round, those who are surviving or subsisting are effectively the living dead, so haggard and decimated are their bodies. If Mount Prospect is a space mired in the material, it is also a haunted space. As Berkeley, Norton excels in maintaining that deluded, overconfident fixation that leaves his character comfortable and assured in attempts to summon the dead through prayer. Hannah claims to have heard voices and when she plays the piano she could hear someone singing or crying, probably a child. Further, Hannah is haunted by the discovery of her father’s body as an eight- or nine-year-old. A capacity to engage convincingly in philosophical discussions is another aspect of Hannah’s complexity, something which Taaffe relates with great assurance. Ireland itself seems to be the perfect domain for Audelle to test his skills as a sensate. Madeleine is also susceptible to the otherworldly, as she has seen a ghost in London, that of a young man who had been murdered in

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the room in which she was staying. Madeleine did nothing to protect the unnerved Edward, as she was enraged by him, saying all the things that she thought of him: when he went out of the house distressed, she did not pursue him, knowing full well that he should not be left alone. Madeleine apportions her lack of compassionate action to ‘anger and evil’. Berkeley believes that Madeleine has the ‘darkest instinct for second sight’ (283). Mrs Goulding wants to see Hannah taken away because ‘the glow that comes off Hannah will bring her good luck there. Here it will only darken all her evenings. The fairies are jealous of her’ (248). Brennan plays Goulding as if her character holds an intense and unambiguous belief in that observation, despite it been prompted by superstition and alcoholism. When Berkeley leads the others in prayer, his invocation of the dead is a seminal moment in performance, as there is a strong sense of some sort of rupture or psychic disturbance. There is a loud noise, a deafening bang that unnerves them all. This sensational moment sets challenges for McPherson’s own direction, Rae Smith’s scenography, Paul Arditti’s sound and Neil Austin’s lighting designs.32 Sound, candlelight, shadow play and the positioning of the actors on stage create some very memorable and unnerving moments in the performance. There is a demented, delusional quality to the acting of Norton, a despairing self-deception pivotal to Schiller’s Audelle and a superb unnerving vulnerability and susceptibility to Taaffe’s Hannah during the moments leading up to the thunderclap. While the loud thunderclap did have an impact on the performance, this crucial happening is not quite as sensational or as disconcerting as one might imagine it to be on reading the play. However, the knock on the door that soon follows lead to reports that indicate that the living quarters of the local poor have collapsed, leaving many dead, and more trapped in the rubble, including numerous children. Hannah links both the collapse of the housing and attempts to summon the dead and is distressed by the implications of such a connection. Audelle especially annoys her because of his disregard for the lives of others, as he is more concerned with what has transpired, what he believes that he has witnessed. Act Two opens with Audelle and Hannah just back from their visit to the Queen’s tomb, and both have taken laudanum. Hannah is less committed to self-revelation and is pushed by Berkeley to reflect on how her father still lives in her mind. Proposals as to how the dead exist in some other dimension are made. In this three-way exchange, Audelle and Berkeley 104

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want to exert influence over Hannah. Taaffe responds to their pressure with a mixture of assertiveness, hesitation and confusion, but also with an open vulnerability, driven by some need to make sense of her paranormal experiences and to push back psychic boundaries. Appearing normal is taking its toll on Hannah. If Hannah can uncover the divine within, then her fears of ghosts and haunting will pass and Berkeley suggests a séance so all those that haunt her can also find that inner light. Furniture moves overhead, Hannah starts to sing, searches for a child the others cannot see, then, uncannily, a small child with long blond hair appears, staring at Audelle. Grandie witnesses the event, and she mocks him, hits Audelle with a stick, and terrifies him. Indeed, Grandie is the silent witness almost throughout the work and Jones’s stage presence ensures that it is another haunting of sorts, as her mental frailties trouble the performance. In response to the child’s appearance Hannah believes that she is witnessing her future, her perishing in childbirth, and her leaving behind a child to survive alone. Eternity for her will be spent wandering and looking for a child she cannot trace. However, Audelle admits that the child is not from Hannah’s future, but is in fact the ghost of his own dead child. The rupturing of the veil, of course, has strong Christian connotations of the rending of the veil in the temple to coincide with the death of Jesus Christ. In the Gothic novel more generally, the veil denotes modesty, virginity, concealment, disguise, something that divides or sets apart. Marriage and patriarchal exchange confirm the significance of sex. (Sexual desire is Audelle’s downfall in his quest for the sublime.) Interestingly, the word ‘veil’ is used in association with Daniel O’Connell, a figure who shaped political change in terms of Catholic Emancipation – Mrs Goulding reports the line ‘it will take a strong draught to blow back the veil of confusion’ from an O’Connell speech at Loughferry (245). O’Connell’s voice of protest helped define the future of Ireland, and he, like the other indigenous characters who die in the building collapse, haunt this work. In the 1820s, land ownership for an Irish indigenous population was almost impossible, indeed as it was for many generations of people until the 1990s. While the play somewhat distances itself from the traumas of the recessionary realities of the late 2000s, it does not slip into victim mode. Therefore, one could say that what is pivotal in the performance is not the tragicomedy mode one gets in Chekhov’s plays about social decay and rupture, but instead one experiences a celebration, if one can call it that, of resoluteness and pragmatism, which Madeleine and the other characters 105

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show in the face of chaos. It is McPherson’s greatness as a writer to recognize the chaos, but also to insist on resoluteness and not despair at moments of great transitions. There is hope in Hannah’s compulsion to defend figures like James, for whom she has feelings of love, against the likes of Fingal. Her sentiment rings through, even if she cannot match it with substantive action. And if by the play’s end, Hannah does leave to marry, with Madeleine and Grandie to follow, Clare Wallace also departs Ireland for Canada under a different set of circumstances. Clare agrees to marry Fingal, knowing his weaknesses, but also realizing it is the best option for her and for them as a couple. Wallace is a solid and alert character, making the most of the dire circumstances, and, as Dunne plays her, she has the tenacities and convictions and the energy of someone likely to succeed, as many of the Irish diaspora did when they emigrated throughout the world, before and after the Great Famine. She invests and places her trust, as does Hannah, in the future.33

Girl from the North Country: The great escape Girl is set in 1934 Duluth, Minnesota,34 during America’s Great Depression.35 Duluth is the birthplace of Bob Dylan, but not the place where he grew up. Dylan’s music and lyrics from over twenty songs are embedded in this piece of theatre, but is it a drama with music or music with drama? Nick Laine (Ciarán Hinds), the proprietor of the boarding house, faces bank repossession of the family’s only source of income. Nick has no head for business; an ill-conceived investment in a fairground enterprise falls flat (just like Tommy’s live-gig-business in Alive). Only for the initiatives of his wife, Elizabeth (Shirley Henderson), the boarding business would be long gone. Elizabeth has early onset dementia, and, falls in and out of lucidity. Their son, Gene (Sam Reid), is not able to secure a job and is addicted to alcohol, while wanting to be a writer. The Laines’ adopted daughter, the nineteen-year-old Marianne (Sheila Atim) is pregnant. Marianne is African-American, and experiences blatant, rampant racism. Nick’s attempts to arrange a marriage for Marianne with the elderly shoemaker, Mr Perry (Jim Norton), is doomed to fail. Nick’s mistress, the widowed Mrs Neilsen (Debbie Kurup), expects to inherit a substantial amount from her late husband’s will, but it fails to materialize, so plans to move away and open a business with Nick collapse. Mrs Neilsen also announces she is pregnant before she moves out of the guest house. 106

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Other long-term guests include Mrs and Mr Burke (Bronagh Gallagher and Stanley Townsend), who board with their intellectually challenged son, Elias (Jack Shalloo). The Burkes are most likely on the run for a crime that Elias committed. The Burkes want to extend credit, in the apparent hope of tracking down people that owe them money. The cycle is one of indebtedness and inability to pay one’s way. Two other short-term guests are Joe Scott (Arinzé Kene), an escaped convict, who pleads his innocence, and Reverend Marlowe (Michael Shaeffer) – a bible salesman, who McPherson suggests represents both ‘God and the Devil’.36 Each character in their own way faces eviction/destitution, and distressed people do desperate things. Ciarán Hinds captures the full range of emotions for this complex patriarchal character. Although Nick is out of his depth in business, in his community, in relationships and in his life, he spends most of his time looking after others with a genuine interest in their fates. Hinds flits from impatience to deep empathy, from despair to guilt, from joy in the here and now to an aggressive and animated anger. Imminent repossession means Nick needs to get his family and visitors out from under his roof, and if necessary drive them away. Nick declines to shirk on the ruthless nature of what he has to do: disturb, unnerve, confront and evict all of those connected or associated with him. His purpose is to leave them free and unencumbered by any obligation towards him. Such is his dilemma, and while he holds a gun in his hand during the play’s early moments, and later tells Gene about his plans to take Elizabeth’s and his own life, the only time a gun goes off is when Elizabeth fires it in the direction of the Reverend Marlowe, who has tried to steal the miniscule savings that she has hidden under her chair. Only Elizabeth understands why and what Nick is doing. Shirley Henderson steals the show in many ways as Elizabeth, expertly drifting in an out of different modes of being and consciousness: she is suitably alert to have driven her husband away from her once she realizes the extent of her deteriorating health. On some occasions, Elizabeth is swift to intervene with a telling insight, but more often than not she seems oblivious to what is going around her and speaks in childlike ways. Sometimes she behaves in highly sexualized, disinhibited and inappropriate manner. The economic forces of the Great Depression era dominate this play’s offstage space: these are powers so monstrous that they cannot be evaded. Tales of harrowing destitution are frequently reported; hungry people are 107

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sleeping by the roadside in tents with little clothing; there is a high incidence of suicide. Nick sees pregnancy as the ruination of Marianne, and persists with the idea of a pragmatic marriage, out of which he can also to gain. Perry is of the conviction that he already knows Marianne, indeed the life-change was confirmed to him by the ghost of his wife. Perry’s desire for intimacy prompts his offer to Marianne, and then as the deal becomes less and less likely to be made, he even offers to relinquish the expectation and obligation of marital sex. Perry desires the presence of another person in his everyday life more than he needs the comfort and rewards of sexual pleasure. This marriage arrangement cross-connects personal need and money transactions; normative interpersonal transactional modes are blurred and merged. Nick’ accepts the interdigitization of family and communal values with market-related ones. Alternatively, Elizabeth suggests that the marriage of convenience would effectively leave Marianne sleeping next to an almost dead body, and that in a whore house, Marianne could at least name her price. In Veil Madeleine is unconcerned when Hannah’s marriage is not a union of beloveds, but an arrangement of convenience. In Girl Elizabeth rejects the marital proposition. Yet, any perception that Marianne is a passive party to some abhorrent patriarchal exchange is problematized. In Nick’s lack of conviction about the deal there are indications that what he proposes is not quite what he wants, that the strategy is intended as a provocation, knowing deep down that Marianne will not settle for it. Joe’s offer to take Marianne with him to Chicago is based on a hunch, and they do not have much to leave with, only the money that he steals from a convenience store. Stealing to survive complicates all forms of definitive moral tenets. Marlowe tries to steal Elizabeth’s few dollars, and while theft is outlawed by his Christian beliefs, he is unable to quell the instinct to do what it takes to survive. The situation of the Burkes is even more complicated, particularly when Mr Burke leaves Elias in a place where an accident is likely to happen. Stanley Townsend’s performance in the role clearly hints at that reality. Elias is too much of a burden to the family and he is a danger to himself and the world around him. The attempts by Marlowe to blackmail Burke over Elias’s previous assault of a woman, seems another likely trigger of the ‘mercy killing’ action. From the narrative accounts provided by Doctor Walker (Ron Cook) close to the play’s end, Mrs Neilsen finds shelter with her sister, Nick and Elizabeth take to the roads and end up living in hostels for the destitute, but 108

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at least they are comforted by being together, until she dies from bronchitis. Gene goes to work for the shoemaker. He later dies in battle in Okinawa, during the Second World War. Joe and Marianne remain as a couple, and she has her child, who survives, and together they make a success of things. This play maps the realities that strike when the safety net offered by family and community are almost removed. While the immediacy of a survival-of-the-fittest consciousness are explored, the play also opens on to other dimensions. This drama’s register shifts in a variety of ways – by the supernatural account of conception given by Marianne, by the inclusion of the paranormal and by the ways that Dylan’s music functions in the work.37 Each of these facets complicates the play’s idiom and mood, alters time and distorts ideas of space. Marianne regards her pregnancy as being the result of an ancient wind coming to her as she lay in bed, resulting in a form of immaculate conception. Rather than seeing her explanation as being provoked by delusion, an attempt to deceive Joe or to deter Joe’s interest in her, her claim is motivated more by her need to be utterly frank and open, and this instinct is something Sheila Atim persuasively captures in her performance. The doctor interacts in the play’s present, and also serves as the plays narrator.38 He is effectively communicating memories and insights from beyond the grave, so it is a ghost story of sorts. He observes the play’s action as if he and the events exist in another dimension: ‘My name is George Arthur Walker. I’m a doctor. Least I was. Back when this was our world’ (12). Walker admits to his drug addictions, like Audelle in Veil, and he seems to view most things pragmatically and non-judgementally. Furthermore, optimism rather than regret emerges from the framing of all events and circumstances through the lens of the eternal. Indeed, the play opens with the mention by Elizabeth of the girl down the hole that Nick hears. This aural haunting is only heard by Elizabeth and Nick. The doctor later explains the outcome after Nick’s six-year-old sister, Leonora, fell down a mineshaft and could not be rescued. Further, after Elias dies, his return from the dead sees him described in the script as having shed his previous bodily limitations, and his spirit is now without affliction. In performance, as Elias, Shalloo re-enters the stage wearing a white suit and waistcoat, and is followed by a bright spotlight as he does an upbeat, jubilant rendition of Dylan’s ‘Duquesne Whistle’. Shalloo’s expressive, extrovert and vibrant performance mode, contrasts sharply with the prior introversion, linguistic struggles and maudlin and ineffective 109

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attempts made by Elias to sing. Shalloo reinforces a feeling of ecstatic exuberance through movement and vocal delivery, as if Elias’s disability is merely a temporary state of being. Additionally, when Gene’s ex-girlfriend, Katherine Draper (Claudia Jolly), calls over to return his grandmother’s St Christopher’s medal and to tell him of her plans to marry another, outside of this moment of separation and rejection, their love for each other is captured when they sing Dylan’s ‘I Want You’ as a duet. The stage directions specify: ‘We see what their souls are doing despite everything that’s just been said.’39 Of course, this and Elias’s song are but two of many songs from Dylan’s discography. Girl emerged after Jeff Rosen, the manager of Dylan’s record label, approached McPherson about doing something for theatre with Dylan’s material.40 Initially, McPherson was unsure. The play as eventually written is set seven years prior to Dylan’s birth, using musical instruments consistent with that era. Once McPherson proposed the project and once Dylan agreed to the outline, forty albums arrived by post to McPherson’s door. After that, McPherson was given absolute creative licence, and attempts by him to run drafts of the script by Dylan were passed over. As the script evolved, songs were provisionally decided upon, tested in rehearsal, some were kept, some dropped and new ones were added as the rehearsal process progressed. As McPherson notes in the play’s introduction, the final songs selected were a matter of ‘fit’ (6). Some of the anthem songs from Dylan’s earlier folk fusion albums are notable by their absence, songs that were the voice of a protest generation who were opposed to war, racism and in favour of peace. Dylan’s back catalogue is appropriated in unusual ways by McPherson, while there are some very recognizable songs even for non-devotees, and some very short instrumental samplings of the well-known ‘All Along the Watchtower’ or ‘Lay Lady Lay’, the twenty songs, either sampled slightly or extensively reproduced, are taken from across Dylan’s career, many from what critics describe as his evangelical period. In performance, the ensemble comprises sixteen performers, and the original three-piece band Scarecrow Hat (Charlie Brown, Pete Callard and Don Richardson, who played violin and mandolin, guitars, double bass). Musical director, Alan Berry, also plays piano and harmonium. On occasion, Bronagh Gallagher accompanies the actors on drums. Michael Shaeffer and Jack Shalloo plays harmonica on some tracks. Dylan’s songs are re-interpreted and re-worked, led by orchestrator, arranger and musical supervisor, Simon Hale. 110

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They are sung as solos, duets and full-ensemble harmony and are delivered in styles that are a ‘mix of saloon-bar jazz, blues, folk, gospel and country elements’, as Stephen Dalton notes in his review.41 Some songs are sung individually, sometimes two songs are sung by turn, side by side or simultaneously, and sometimes a song previously performed returns as a refrain. A few other songs are performed instrumentally. Sometimes actors interact during moments of song in character, sometimes they sing and dance, as if no longer in character and sometimes performers sing into antique standing microphones. Ensemble performers/understudies, Kristy Malpass, Karl Queensborough and Tom Peters also contribute to the collective. The songs do relate to specific moments in the play, yet characters gone from the play’s action return to lead up numbers; Claudia Jolly, who plays Katherine Draper, re-appears to sing ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, pitted against the ensemble singing ‘Jokerman’, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ and ‘True Love Tends to Forget’. In addition, characters are associated with certain songs, Joe Scott appears as if materialized from ‘Hurricane’, Dylan’s song about the boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter. The story of the song is about an unjust conviction for a triple homicide, that was later set aside, yet it only partly determines Joe’s character. Equally, the dilemmas of love that haunt many characters reverberate the sensitivities and sensibilities of some of Dylan’s songs. Such songs do speak to the mood and dispositions of the characters, but equally the songs counter their temperaments. Inevitably, the uniqueness of Dylan’s voice and his charismatic presence is lost, but the gains are to be had in terms of hearing the songs sung with wonderful clarity, transposed into different styles, interpreted in different ways, and these changes often add a mesmeric beauty to already wonderful songs. These different registers, multiple voices and different styles complicate the experience and expectation of the spectator, particularly if one has a real familiarly with and affinity for Dylan’s work. Girl is not a jukebox musical like Mamma Mia, We will Rock You, American Idiot or Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical, based on the works of musical careers of Abba, Queen, Green Day and Meat Loaf respectively, nor is it Bob Dylan the musical and offers no account of Dylan’s life. So, what is it, and how does one go about categorizing it? Dylan arrived on the American music scene in the early 1960s and was heavily inspired by blues, jazz, soul, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, jive, and folk music. Artists like Gene Vincent, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, Joan Baez, John Lee Hooker, Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie influenced 111

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him. In the early 1960s, self-accompanied on guitar and harmonica, Dylan wrote and performed some of the most important anti-war and pro-civil rights songs of the era, including ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They are a Changin’ and ‘It’s a Hard Rain that is going to Fall’. The early 1960s saw the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and President John F. Kennedy. Dylan was a rebel with curious detachment. McPherson suggests that his play ‘is a conversation between the songs and the story’.42 McPherson tells Sarah Hughes that ‘there’s no musical instruments used that wouldn’t have been there in the 30s and that allows us to reveal the prehistory, as it were, of those songs from before Dylan was born, almost as though that music flowed from the airwaves and into his DNA’.43 McPherson’s intention was to ‘free the songs from the burden of relevance for our generation and make them timeless’.44 Matthew Warchus, the Old Vic’s artistic director, observes in his Program Note that ‘Music unlocks the irrational. Singing gives voice to the soul.’ He adds: ‘The text and songs are assertively independent of each other – a deliberate collision sometimes, and sometimes an embrace – yet somehow soulmates and walking in step.’45 In an interview with Dominic Maxwell, McPherson notes: ‘We are trying to lead the audience into Bob Dylan’s soul, not just his catalogue of hits. That’s the idea, anyway. It just feels a more interesting journey.’46 Girl’s hybrid genre drew diverse critical responses. Matt Trueman’s perspective is: ‘Officially, it’s a play with songs; in practice, songs with a play; a fusion of drama and gig.’47 Trueman continues: ‘Dylan’s songs becomes the soundtrack of the Great Depression.’48 From Ian Shuttleworth’s viewpoint: ‘These numbers, however, aren’t integrated into the action; they are not “sung dialogue” but are delivered as performances, facing the audience and using stand mics.’49 For Michael Billington it is ‘the constant dialogue between the drama and the songs that makes this show exceptional’ as the songs are seen to ‘articulate the characters’ innermost feelings, while also catching ‘the mood of hope’.50 While for Paul Taylor: ‘The dislocation to the 1930s and Simon Hale’s ravishing arrangements liberate the songs from their niches in the discography and embellish our sense of the world from which Dylan’s art arose.’51 Each critical response struggles to capture the interfaces between dislocation, liberation and the articulation of the inner worlds of characters and times beyond the theatre. Ben Brantley’s perspective is far closer to my own. He is not so much discounting the conversation between play and song, instead he suggests that song often becomes the ‘conduit to that unmapped place’, where the 112

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characters find ‘a holy rhythm that reality denies’ them as their characters. But it is more than that: ‘Without conventional segues, the performers pick up instruments, gather around microphones and move with the blessed synchronicity of people ineffably tuned into one another.’52 Ultimately for Brantley, this is ‘a Minnesota of the mind, a bleak and soulful place conjured by the songs of Bob Dylan’.53 The realities of the Great Depression mingle with Dylan’s lyrical and musical imaginings, as characters find solace in others, intuit a rhythm beyond their own reality and find communion and collective cohesion through song. The beaming of songs back to a time inconsistent with the period in which they were first recorded creates dissonance, but the tactic is to return the work to a landscape, soil and circumstances from which they originate, without stressing a direct link between reality and imagination. McPherson proposes that ‘even though Mr Dylan will say he’s often not sure what his songs mean, he always sings them like he means them. Because he does mean them. Whatever they mean’ (7). Addressing Dylan’s musicality, McPherson notes: ‘Firstly, writing something that sounds original is rare, but writing something that sounds original and simple at the same time is the mark of genius’ (7). Towards the end of 1970s, Dylan became a born-again Christian; he is of course of Jewish origin. Albums from this period drew McPherson most. McPherson tackles the inclination to dismiss these albums, as if they were lesser or out of character works. Instead, McPherson lingers on the significance of the mystical dimensions to these songs and points out how such a religious sensibility is seen as somewhat nostalgic and pejorative. (See the interview with McPherson in the Critical Perspectives section of this book for more on his perspective on Dylan.) Breffni Cummiskey reports McPherson’s comments: ‘People don’t quite understand what he was at, but he really believed it and he put a huge amount of passion into his song-writing, just as much he ever did. … In a way, it was almost a kind of renaissance for him.’54 McPherson adds, ‘When he comes out with this stuff where he is just singing about Jesus, “I’m pressing on to the higher calling of my lord.” In some ways you start to suspect that he didn’t change at that point, that actually he just revealed who he was. … Wow! Okay! It kind of all makes sense.’55 McPherson concludes: ‘I’m mixing songs together – it starts as one song and turns into another halfway through. And because the lyrics are real writing, real poetry, they have that ambiguity that almost anybody can say them and it means something. So you have got this tremendous freedom with the 113

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songs.’56 McPherson locates a religious consciousness as central to Dylan’s work and adds in the play’s Introduction: ‘Sometimes God appears as an impossible reflection of yourself. Sometimes as someone you could never know. But however God appears, however Mr Dylan begs for mercy, you understand that cry’ (7). Rather than deep-set fear, which is the usual paradigm anchoring McPherson’s early work, ‘mercy’ seems to be what is most central in this play, set in a world of ferocity and desperation. That said, Brian Appleyard notes that neither McPherson nor Dylan sees or considers ‘the possibility of a world view’.57 Appleyard reports McPherson saying: ‘I don’t know what it means but I believe that mystery is holy. Why is there something rather than nothing? Its mind-blowing. I don’t go any further than that. I just sense this mystery that lies beyond us.’58 Then McPherson adds in his conversation with Appleyard: ‘They (the songs) don’t drive the narrative forward, but they do something else. I don’t know what it is, but I like it. Sometimes they are oblique and that’s better, because it makes them somehow universal.’59 Rather than seeing the songs as simply offering rival perspectives or the access to alternative ways of seeing, articulating or perceiving, it is more important to grasp how the songs interface with the realities of the circumstances that the characters face, without offering alternatives or solutions to their dilemmas. (See Maha Alatawi’s in-depth analysis of narrative and music in her essay in this book.) Additionally, McPherson’s understanding of Dylan’s ability to shift focus, amalgamate rival perspectives or coalesce worlds in unusual ways leads to a feeling of listening and perceiving in one space or dimension, and then the song shifts register to dwell elsewhere. Although Elizabeth, has early onset dementia and moves in and out of consciousness, she is the character who gets to sing the last songs of Acts One and Two, the former, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and the latter ‘Forever Young’. (A short instrumental version of ‘My Back Pages’ finishes the piece out.) If the former song captures the notion of change, rises and falls, of cyclicality being a consistent phenomenon, the latter song captures the idea that integrity is both an elusive and eternal aspiration. There is something hopeful even in the fantasy of solace in something beyond one’s grasp. To afford the play a continuity between scenes, between action and song, between the real and the supernatural, Rae Smith’s design keeps the performance space relatively uncluttered and fluid. There is minimal use of stage objects; on occasion projections of winter scenes from the Duluth of the play’s time period are used. (A dining room table is central to the 114

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serving of food for the Thanksgiving meal and also during the harmonious Laine family meal that ends the play.) Smith’s stage scenography alongside Mark Henderson’s lighting and Simon Barker’s sound design accommodate triggers to different dimensions of consciousness, as it is a world designed to easily appear and disappear. Shadow and light, music, sound and silence afford the stage environment both a permeability, but also sustain a reality that counters the bleakness and devastation of the world in which the play is set; and none more so than the final moments of the play. While Walker summarizes the demise of Elizabeth, Nick and Gene and accounts of the return of Joe and Marianne to Duluth, a year after their leaving together, all four members of Laine family sit together to eat and celebrate in unison. It is as if their souls have settled into some form of uniformity, a communal solidarity: modes of reciprocation are realizable, even if they are utterly at odds with the realities that befall them all. (It is similar to that sense of a substituted consciousness which ends Alive, a resolution that comes out of nowhere.) This moment is not a nostalgic corrective, nor is it a shying away from the horrors of the Great Depression, more it is the affirmation of a form of communion that runs counter to the material destitution that drives this family apart. Girl is neither a play with music nor music with a play, in that McPherson writes a work that declines easy categorization; indeed, he may have evolved a style that is pretty inventive and unique. Curtis suggests, ‘The music, meanwhile, supplies the transcendent dimension that the supernatural added to his other plays.’60 While Curtis’s summary is not entirely correct, it ignores the supernatural in Girl; and while Dylan’s music does not quite haunt the work in a metaphoric sense, his music is as much about presence than absence, soulful supplement and aspirationally transcendent rather than simply a supernatural evocation. In comments to David Browne, McPherson observes ‘This gives it a feeling of the Nativity: that when Bob entered the world, everything changed.’61 It is an originary moment: the notion of Dylan as nativity consciousness is something that has further resonance in terms of Alive, and discussions about Christmas in Chapter 6.

Conclusion Across all four works places where characters find themselves living are seldom permanent homesteads, but temporary accommodations 115

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and shelters that are abandoned by necessity or by eviction; these are anything but safe. In Veil, an entire estate is lost, yet what is happening to those external to the Lambroke situation is even worse: the poor in the diegetic space are at an even more extreme, as many are in 1934’s America of Girl. In Alive, although Tommy no longer lives in the family home, he ends up inheriting his uncle’s place, so there is something more optimistic being signalled here, and the play’s ending, as argued, concludes a with connection between Aimee and Tommy that is substantial, supernatural, if fleeting. In Birds the characters from comfortable backgrounds become displaced squatters, sanctuary seekers, almost refugees, under threat in a world that is calamitous, and by the play’s end have to abandon even their temporary dwelling, taking to the roads at the risk of life. Both Veil and Girl end with demonstrations of endurance and resilience, with the latter assuredly signalling alternative, more eternal realities. The plays not only speak to each other, but, in the case of Veil and Girl, seem almost dramaturgical doppelgängers of each other. Veil’s ensemble of family members, staff, visitors and neighbours/tenants living nearby is in many senses duplicated in Girl. In addition, poor mental health, unrequited love, complex love triangles, exploitative visitors, pending marriages of convenience, the imminent loss of one’s home/business to speculators and banks, evictions, impoverishment, large-scale destitution in the diegetic spaces of pre-Great Famine Ireland 1822 link with 1934 Duluth. If the poor have little or no choices, the wealthy in both Veil and Girl still have something to trade other than themselves.

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C Chapter 5 SEASON’S GREETINGS

Introduction: Christmases past In the Program Note to the 2008 production of Seafarer at the Abbey Theatre, McPherson talks a good deal about fairy stories, natural cycles and how the Neolithic monuments at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth offer evidence that ‘Irish stone-age farmers sought to locate our place in the cosmos’.1 He continues: ‘I think that Christianity (and particularly Catholicism) took root so well in Ireland because we are a superstitious race. Our superstition is embedded in ancient knowledge and rituals which echo dimly through time but always catch our ear.’2 It is not only such a superstition that echoes but it is also the connection between pagan and Christian sensibilities. Talking to Cassandra Csenscitz, McPherson states ‘Seafarer is a very Catholic play. It sorts of accepts that Christian framework, the Devil and God, redemption. I use those archetypes but hopefully more toward pagan ends than Roman Catholic ones.’3 It is that Christian/Pagan tension that informs my reading of the works in this chapter and beyond. In Chapter 3, I focused on the negative aspects associated with a spectral consciousness in terms of anxiety, fear, death and a funerary sensibility, this chapter looks at how these dispositions can be offset, undermined and integrated.4 It is not only about the connotations of Christmas with rebirth and salvation in terms of Christianity, but is also about the significance of a pagan sensibility associated with the winter solstice and the renewal it promises. McPherson’s obsession with Christmas and the winter solstice is apparent across his work. A tangential focus on Christmas is evident in Rum when the narrator notes, ‘I was a good family man. I remembered birthdays and I was Santa.’5 In Weir, Finbar jokingly refers to the fact that the Christmas period is the signal for the local bachelors to do their annual change of bedsheets. In Port, Joe’s first encounter with Liz, his future wife, is at a Christmas Dance in 1956. In Shining, the potential affair begins after a conversation between John and Vivien at a Christmas party, and it is added

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to by texts swapped during the Christmas sales. The chance encounter causes havoc, it is a perverse seasonal gift of sorts. The coat Mari wears when she dies has been purchased during the sales period. In Veil, Mrs Goulding recounts a tale of her sixteen-year-old son falling for a woman who was a fairy, and who had him under her spell, during the Christmas period. Works extensively considered previously, namely Nicholas, Alive and Paula afford insights into the complex formulation of Christmas. Clearly, the critic in Nicholas fails to honour the codes of compassion, generosity and the awareness of kindredness associated with St Nicholas, the patron saint of Christmas. This critic, with his red cheeks and a ‘stomach [that] is like a brick wall’, is Santaesque in stature and appearance, without ever trying to disguise or pass himself off as Santa Claus.6 While in London, he notes his longing for something else: I found myself trying to miss my family. But something wouldn’t let me. I could only miss what they were like years ago. And that’s the way life is, you can’t have that, can you? You can’t light a stranger’s face with the mention of Santa. You can only do that to certain people for a certain time. And then nature makes everyone a cunt because one day you look around and you’re all in each other’s way. (160) The significance of ‘Santa’ lies in his fleeting recognition that relationships with a history and intimacy are important connections, yet from a perspective of isolation and disconnection it appears that everyone else is an irritant to him, getting in the way of self-centred expression. From the latter point of view, mutuality disappears along with any sense of communal connection. When the critic attempts to write creatively he notes a contrary feeling: ‘And so, there I’d be trying to write something. Trying to capture the care I once had, you see. My kids on Christmas Eve. Something like that’ (167). In such writing, he latches onto Christmas as a grounding event, a core occasion imbued with an awareness of interconnection and affection. This narrative fragment potentiality challenges some other aspects of his behaviour and his reflexive dispositions. This awareness signals an opportunity to move away ever so slightly from his spontaneous and reflective cynicism, and towards something more heartfelt, where the impulse is to be aware of mutuality, the need for generosity and reciprocation. That said, he 118

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does benefit from the vampires’ gift of a story, which prompts him towards a way of narrating a version of himself that is somewhat more positive in perspective. In a way, narrative becomes a strange gift, even when springing from a very dark vampiric or funerary consciousness. Alive does not have a Christmas setting per se, and one of the play’s few specific time-frame indicators has one of the final scenes on 10 November, during which Doc untangles Christmas lights. Alive’s epigraph is from St Matthew’s Gospel, which accounts for the birth of Jesus Christ in a stable in Bethlehem, under humble circumstances. For Christianity, the birth of Jesus announced a new beginning for humankind, as the Christ is sent by God to redeem the world. The four Gospels of the New Testament provide no coherent narrative of this birth, and many commentators have reflected on the many similarities between the account of this birth and the foundational narratives of various faiths and belief systems. Furthermore, many critics connect this Christian marking of a saviour’s birth with pagan practices of worship and celebration of the winter solstice, the marking of the shortest day and longest night and the signalling of an imminent new year. In an interview with John Patrick Shanley, McPherson notes of Alive: ‘It’s almost like a Nativity play for me, where the human beings are really yearning for the transcendent. And that seems to come for them in the shape of the idealized feminine, which comes into their world, and she sort of shakes everything up.’7 McPherson’s various manifestations of a Christmas sensibility in this play do not constitute a re-enactment of a Christian narrative of the birth of a saviour, and there is no simple calling on an original narrative, which McPherson knows all too well to be a fool’s errand. Still less, there are no pregnant travellers, innkeepers, stables, shepherds or magi arriving bearing gifts and announcing a new world order. While there is no simple essence of Christmas in terms of the ultimate signalling of salvation, there remains something considerable in terms of sanctuary and the obligations towards the protection of the incapacitated, the lost, and the helpless. In a dream Doc is gifted an understanding of everlasting time by the Magi. Doc’s comments: ‘Will I tell you the good thing about Christmas? No-one can turn you away. You see that light in the window. In you go’ (89). Tommy problematizes the sentiment by suggesting that ‘you can’t save everybody though, can you? I mean …’ (89) Throughout Paula, there are frequent mentions of Christmas; Paula’s father Terry (Sean McGinley) talks about her looking forward to a break from teaching over the Christmas period, songs by Slade, Chris Rea, and 119

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George Michael associated with Christmas are heard in the public spaces or on the radio. Paula and McArthur express their dislike for this holiday period. When McArthur and Paula share a meal, there are Christmas decorations visible in the background, Paula’s announcement that she is pregnant also taps into the notion of renewal that McPherson builds into his structuring of a Christmas consciousness/sensibility. Paula’s response to McArthur’s query as to who the father is, is for her to simply say that it is hers. This is Paula’s claim over her own womb, but also over her trauma. Paula’s pregnancy brings forward an important optimism. (Girl is set during the run up to Thanksgiving, and Marianne is also pregnant – a conception she accounts for as an immaculate one of sorts.) Paula’s Dublin is thus less a funerary city or, as Crawley sees it, a ‘city dark as a sepulchre’ and more a space that affords the marking of movement into light.8 For the spectator witnessing specific plays associated with Christmas, audience identifications, memories, ritualizations and projections are vitally important to such performances. Indeed, audiences provide the unconscious feeling-frame or sensibility-frame for such work. For some Christmas is too commercial and not an enjoyable time; for others it is one of reflection and remembrance, an occasion to take stock; for still others it is a cue to become detached from the craziness of Christmas; for others it is a time to steady the ship; and for others it is a period of leisure and recreation to enjoy and appreciate what one has.

Dublin Carol: Till life do us part All of Carol’s three parts are set on Christmas Eve in an undertaker’s office in an unspecified part of Dublin’s Northside.9 The stage directions describe the office as including ‘old wooden desks, carpet, comfortable chairs, filing cabinets, tasteful paintings, elaborate lamps. But all a bit old and musty.’10 The set also includes ‘terrible scrawny Christmas decorations. A few fairy lights. A foot-high plastic Christmas tree on one of the desks. A little advent calendar with just a few doors left to open’. (79) Such objects suggest an aspirational, tokenistic and desperate sense of the marking of Christmas rolled into one. Church bells are prominent as ‘distant church bells ring out’, (84) as they also do in Shining and Port.11 John Plunkett has been dependent on alcohol for a long time, and this in part led to the collapse of his relationship with his wife, Helen. John’s 120

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addiction has variously impacted on the lives of their offspring, Paul and Mary, now adults.12 Noel, the owner of an undertaking business, has just been hospitalized. He supervises the drinking of his employees, limiting their intake rather than steering them towards total abstinence. Noel offers John both shelter and employment. That sense of sanctuary ties in with the overall concept of Christmas, alongside the association of Noel’s name with Christmas. John has not protected his family sufficiently, and has not sacrificed anything on their behalf. Such is the distance between father and son, that on the one occasion Paul drops in to see his father, after receiving his Leaving Certificate exam results, John tells colleagues to pretend that he is not present. Mary has not seen her father for ten years and bears news that Helen is terminally ill. As Mary looks so much like her mother, John is reluctant to see her. Whatever distance John Kavanagh brings to his role as John in his conversations with Noel’s nephew, Mark (Sean McDonagh), and whatever irony and misplaced sentiment he brings to the articulation of his own failings, he does not conceal the fact that Mary’s (Donna Dent) arrival forces his character to think and behave differently. McDonagh’s Mark is attracted and appalled by Kavanagh’s John, yet he is a reluctant son-substitute, sometimes standing as if transfixed by John’s dialogue, sometimes trying to get out the door and away from him. Kavanagh’s John is happier chatting to strangers than those familiar to him. Mary regards her individuality more as an eccentricity than as independence. She loves and hates her father, hurt by his negligence but now needs something from him. The urgency and barely concealed anger that Donna Dent expresses brings real urgency to her role. Dent’s Mary, while appearing tired, worn out and very unsure of herself, effectively and convincingly accounts for her own life to her father and explains her difficulty in forming relationships with others. Kavanagh captures just how utterly uncertain his character is about how best to respond to things outside his control. Confusion, ambivalence and guilt are rolled into one, but in a way whereby there is a perverse confidence in the perpetuating of narratives that allow him to remain indecisive, and less than committed. Whether the assurances he takes from defining himself, quasi-sarcastically as ‘eejit boy’, (94) or the comforts he finds in the fact that others should know not to rely on him, John’s anti-heroic, non-committal disposition is convincingly foregrounded in Kavanagh’s performance. Kavanagh flits impatiently from idea to idea, in a way that 121

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illustrates his lack of mental focus. Whatever rationality and motivation John brought to his attempts to turn things round in the past, his addiction has always won out. So, withdrawal and non-commitment are clever, if not attractive, holding positions in the face of a fear of failure. Throughout the production, Kavanagh is all the time grooming his hair, consistently wiping his nose with a handkerchief or rubbing his hands on his face. John seems to want to be left alone, to be what he is or what he thinks he is. He expects that no conditions or expectations to be attached to his behaviours, so he wants free reign, to be ungoverned by obligations, such as fairness, loyalty or reciprocation. Kavanagh captures that essence with a brilliant ambivalence. John’s negative self-conceptualization includes cowardice, destructiveness and an ability to be non-responsive to the dilemmas of others. Much of this fear and negativity have been shaped by his inability as a child to respond to domestic violence that his father doled out to his mother. So scared was he of his wife-beating father, and so powerless in the face of the abusive incidents, that when his mother was struck, he did not respond so that it would not happen to him. However, to label such inaction as cowardly fails to capture the vulnerability of his position. Abusive situations thrive on fear, and if someone else ends up bearing the brunt of violence, that is often experienced as a mercy of sorts. Powerlessness results from grasping the futility of fighting back, regret from the realization that self-preservation comes at someone else’s expense. In terms of his own family, John knows he might not be able to hang tough or step up to the plate, telling Mary that he let them down, to get it over with. John also sees his own idiocy in terms of stubbornness, perversity, stupidity and of doing things and not thinking of the consequences. His are not risk-adverse behaviours, not prompted by a calculating mindset, but instead by a casual and disruptive disposition. Still, John does have a selfcritical stance to offset, but not quite match, his self-justification mode. The insight that Noel has been good to him is important, but John’s admission that, in contrast, he has ‘never been good to anybody’ serves as a potent moment of self-awareness (109). Across all of the plays children make the relating of characters even more complex; sometimes children are the source of the conflict, sometimes they reward characters, but on many occasions, children get in the way of characters fulfilling their own desires or characters cannot treat them the way they would like. In Rum, the narrator is a young father, and he can only play at being a father and in Port, Dermot’s reflections of parenthood capture the emotions and duties he thought being a father would bring, but 122

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these do not materialize. When his son is bullied, Dermot leaves it to Mary to intervene, and he accuses his son of being fragile and sickly. In Carol, John is not even capable of marking the eventful transitions in the lives of his children. Mary’s life is complex in a different way: she does not see herself as either confident or together. When she states ‘But I don’t know if it’s your fault. I’m a kind of an eejit, as well on my own, like, you know?’ (109), there is a sense of her mirroring her father, not so much though because he is her father, but more because it is easier to be in such an anomalous state of being. Her use of the word ‘eejit’ speaks to his description of himself as ‘eejit boy’. But such a descriptive repetition is important as it gives rise to a form of laughter between them. (John asks if Paul is an ‘eejit’ to which Mary says ‘no’ [109].) Mary is alone, like him. She talks about her own feelings, how ‘everybody hated her as well’ (110). She is not a needy daughter trying to get something from her father, rather she wants him not to romanticize his isolation or his negligence. She thinks that she might be looking for the same thing, to fall into destructive patterns that incite someone else to offer a helping hand. Mary is clearly not simply a victim of failed family dynamics, and the indicators of hardness, confusion and self-awareness that Dent physicalizes in her role is especially impressive. Mary’s request that John does not drink for the rest of the day before their visit to Helen in hospital is a complex request. Her plea is a test for him, a form of blackmail based on opportunism derived from a back-tothe-wall scenario. It is also something she is desperately in need of him to do. Carol is another character in the diegetic space, and her name is also reflected in the play’s title. John has had a somewhat sustained if ambiguous connection with Carol; a relationship based on her unconditional acceptance of him. It is a dynamic fuelled by her unrelenting giving, a sharing prompted by desperation rather than generosity. For John, God had simply sent him a ‘drink angel’ (121), a notion that corrupts the usual association of angels with stewardship and guardianship. Although still relatively young, and somewhat directionless career-wise, Mark has been in a reasonably stable relationship with Kim for fifteen months. He wants to end it, but picks Christmas time to do so. John does not downplay Mark’s commitment anxieties, rather he is more disposed to inflaming them. Having been at the receiving end of John’s worldview during Part One, Mark returns during Part Three to explain his failed 123

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attempt to break up with Kim. Mark has been drinking and is not ‘very full of Christmas cheer’ (116). Kim’s despairing response to Mark’s attempts to end the relationship leads to his decision not to go ahead as planned. The piercing wail of Kim’s grief got to him. Mark explains: ‘Like no one should … [cause this much hurt]. I basically told her I didn’t mean it’ (119). Again, as with Mary’s comments, it is Mark’s ‘you knows’, the unfinished or unfinishable sentences where most of the real uncertainties and heartbreak resides. (Ben Brantley’s reflections pick up on this point in the Critical Perspectives section.) Such pauses, hesitations and unfinished comments are far more complex than simply labelling it as subtext. But for John, even in Kim’s ‘freak attack’, even in her despair, there remains ‘an element of blackmail’ (119). From John’s vantage point, Mark is now the troubled one, whereas Kim is back home being pampered by her mother and planning Christmas television viewing. In effect, she has turned the tables on him. Mark feels guilty and is annoyed by John’s worldview: ‘You’re here telling me what to do? (Fiercely.) I just feel like a fucking eejit!’ (122). (Note the use again of ‘eejit’.) John does apologize to Mark. (The first three letters of their names are shared by both Mary and Mark, perhaps inciting the observation that they are the male and female aspects of a younger self-provoking John.) That Christmas Eve morning, Mark and John have just buried a young man, a drug addict, whose girlfriend and a very distressed second girlfriend, are among the crowd attending the funeral. Death is also foregrounded throughout the play by the various mentions of the ways that people die, though illness, suicide, accident and murder. A few deaths remain with John: the suicide of a man whose room was full of Buddha statues, and a fourteen-year-old girl, abused by a relative who gave birth to a child, not knowing she was pregnant, and who then tried to flush the baby down the toilet.13 This funerary frame obliges pertinent questions about life and values. While John understands the heartbreak he witnesses at some at funerals, he just wants to ‘slip away’ (88). When John states, ‘I wish I’d never been born. It’s all been awful’ (my italics) (105), there is an intense sense of deep existential crisis that Kavanagh is so good at capturing. John is locked into a funerary consciousness, where guilt, regret and self-hatred dominate his mindset. John sees his own self-destructiveness as being linked to religion, and this reinforces Witoszek and Sheeran’s arguments about Catholicism, Ireland and a funerary consciousness. They illustrate the centrality and relentless 124

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continuities of funerary codes, dependencies, motives, preoccupations, obsessions and tenacities in Irish writing. This funerary code is shaped by ‘folk representations, popular rituals, the rhetorics of the Irish media’, and by a ‘funerary mythology and experience’ which underlies ‘the Irish construction of place and landscape’.14 This funerary mindset is evident in the play’s following lines: ‘Failure reaching up and grabbing you. We were brought up like that a little bit. You know? That we were all going to hell or somewhere. You know?’ (111). That sense of damnation and futility is clearly linked to a Catholic consciousness of original sin and worthlessness. But what shifts this work away from the relentless grip of a funerary culture are three things: humour in the form of savage irony, John’s attempts to get himself ready to visit Helen even if he cannot remain sober and how the play exalts the significance of the renewal associated with Christmas. The following exchange humorously moves the notion of Christmas in strange directions: John  Get into bed before Santa comes and checks. Mark  And leaves me a bag of soot. John  Or slips Kim in your stocking. Mark (a slightly sad laugh)   Oh fuck. (126) There is a complicating of the notion of gift, punishment and reward. Humour is also found in the exchange during which John proposes a yearround advent calendar, to dole out a bit of advice, some wisdom and, Mark expects, a few jokes. Additionally, like the narrator in St Nicholas, John has memories of giving and sharing tied in with a particular festive sentiment, an awareness of alternative ways of being or doing: ‘Jays, it was great. I used to love all that, you know? The bloody lengths I used to go to. I was worse than the kids. Hiding presents all over the place. Leaving out cake and drink for Santy’ (89). If the audience thinks that they are getting uncomplicated, unadulterated sentiment, there is yet a further shift when John notes: ‘I spent an hour one Christmas Eve telling them Santy didn’t like Sherry. He likes Macardle’s’ (89) – his own tipple of choice. These moments of humour also map onto the laughter shared by Mary and John, around the notion that both are ‘eejits’ of sorts. When John asks Mark for help in removing the hapless tree and taking down the decorations, abandoning the tradition of waiting until Twelfth Night to do so, initially it seems as if he wants to bring the festive occasion 125

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to a premature end; the illnesses of Helen and Noel don’t leave John with not much to celebrate. After Mark leaves, John gives himself a wash, fixes his tie and puts on his jacket and overcoat. Then he takes a comb and does his hair in a little mirror, even if he is not in the state of sobriety that he had promised Mary. For the first time in the play he is steadying himself, working himself up into a state of focus and resilience. How temporary or permanent that might be is not overly important. These actions are not in isolation. In his decision to re-decorate the space with the trappings of Christmas, the mangy Christmas tree and the advent calendar, there is a signalling of hope and possibility, if not quiet redemption or transformation. Out of the bleakness, there is a semblance of new order, a tentative resoluteness to resist old patterns and an attempt to put new ones in place. The gesture of putting back up the decorations is accompanied by the sound of church bells ringing out the time; it is 5 p.m. The bells also coincide with the playing of music associated with the season, a further marker of hope and possibility. The marshalling of energies of renewal is so important here.

The Seafarer: Hook, line and sinker If Mari in Shining is a ghost that cannot be banished, it is a devil figure, Mr Lockhart, who is summoned in Seafarer (2006), a play that draws on the myth of an incident at the Hellfire Club, Dublin, during which the devil plays a game of cards with a man for his soul.15 Seafarer is set in the basement of the unkempt home of Richard and Sharky Harkin, a space which has over time transformed into a pub, having accumulated numerous ‘artefacts’ from various public houses.16 In the Abbey production of 2009, directed by McPherson, Paul O’Mahony’s set design includes an extensive staircase, stage right, that leads down into the living quarters, where the furniture is mismatched and threadbare, and the carpet that covers a wooden floor has obviously seen better days.17 The stage space is extremely untidy, pizza boxes and empty crisp packets are scattered across the floor. Backstage left, close to a small corridor that leads to the downstairs toilet is a scrawny artificial Christmas tree, which the script proposes ‘haunts a corner’ (61). In this Abbey Theatre production, it is a small artificial tree, the type that can be separated into two parts, ensuring that it is easy to dismantle and store. The ‘scrawny’ tree is a gesture towards the sentiment surrounding Christmas, as much as it is an indicator of the minimal monies allocated to such paraphernalia. More importantly, 126

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it is this symbolic design object that ghosts the consciousness and sensibility of the play. Seafarer opens on Christmas Eve morning, and the fallout from a previous night’s drinking is apparent. Richard has slept on the floor in the Abbey production (and on the sofa in the National Theatre one), Ivan, his mate, is still worse for wear and Sharky is annoyed by the untidiness of the place. When Liam Carney as Sharky wakens Maeliosa Stafford’s Richard, Richard’s costume and disorientation suggest that it is probably only the roof over his head that distinguishes him from the winos that loiter outside, who seem to be consistently aggravating him. Ivan, played by Don Wycherley (yet another variation on the name John), staggers outrageously down the stairs, one step at a time, holding on to the bannister for dear life, and is not helped by the fact that his glasses are missing. Once Wycherley, reaches the settee, he has to lie down, doing so to great comic effect. Then Wycherley’s Ivan mooches around and drinks whatever leftovers he finds. In Ivan’s inability to bear the sunshine, and in his abject failure to recollect what happened the previous night, Wycherley’s confused state contributes handsomely to this production’s overall comic sensibility. Blackouts induced by alcohol are part of the reason Ivan speaks with such hesitation and uncertainty. That Richard needs to be escorted to the toilet is also an opportunity for a good deal of comedy. The absence of toilet roll adds to the fun, particularly when Sharky reluctantly hands him in a roll of kitchen paper. Carney’s heavily signalled discomfort with the task incites audience laughter, as does the fact that when Ivan goes into the toilet to help Richard, he covers his nose with his jumper. After Ivan emerges from the toilet, he has toilet roll stuck to the sole of his shoe, and stumbles, falls on the range and burns his hand, a specific gesture that is not in the published text. There is considerable comedy found in the fact that Richard does not regularly wash himself; the delight he takes in talking about the ball of dirt discovered by Sharky as he previously cleaned his upper thigh/groin area, signals his lack of disgust and transgressive pleasure he takes from his general unkemptness. Stafford’s vocal, facial and gestural expressions capture the glee he has around his sense of hygienic abandonment. Later such intemperance is reinforced when Stafford, as scripted, wipes phlegm on the arm of his chair, a gesture which seems to prompt a degree of disgust in some spectators, captured by the archived video recording. Because Richard cannot see the plaster on Sharky’s nose, Sharky’s futile attempts to stop Ivan from remarking on his facial injuries is very funny. 127

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Sharky’s offer of breakfast to Ivan and Richard comprises a selection of cereals from a Kellogg’s Variety Pack, something that is marketed towards children and not adults, and this really confirms where they are at in terms of nourishment and body awareness. Food is an afterthought, alcohol their priority. When Ivan dumps the remains of his cup of tea on the carpet and wipes it into the floor with his foot, so that he can pour some left-over whiskey into his cup, his desperation for a quick drink is made very clear. That Ivan does not see such behaviour as either unhygienic or delinquent is important to the play’s sensibility. Humour is again found in how his disregard meets his desperation. There are two further instances that signal Ivan’s desperation, and both are staged to incite laughter: one when he finishes off the bottle of whiskey while telling Richard that the bottle is empty, and the other is a staging choice, when Ivan pockets coins that he finds down the back of the settee. All three characters reference Christmas differently. For Richard, it will be his ‘first Christmas here in the dark’ (91), and he also wonders how many Christmases he has to live. For Ivan, ‘Christmas is great!’ (81), yet he only imagines that the presents are sorted for his kids; he is as uncertain about this as he is about almost everything else, but as this is a play that relies on an uncertainty principle, nothing will be straightforward. Ivan’s best Christmas ever was when he won €12,000 in a game of cards and blew it all in three weeks; it was ‘great’ because he remembers so little of it other than the excesses, in terms of food and drink, and the bodily impact of such extreme forms of consumption. Later in the day, Ivan’s plan to make it home is scuppered when he spends too long in pubs consuming free Christmas drinks. Once ‘spotted’ by his wife, Karen, she confronts him. Upset that the kids saw the couple fight, Ivan feels that he has ruined Christmas for everybody. Wycherley’s performance as Ivan illustrates that he may feel some guilt, but regardless, his tone and body language suggest that he will not be engaging in any corrective or restorative action anytime soon. Alcohol is often the most dysfunctional item in the lives of characters, in their relationships with themselves and with others. Alcohol is their hook, addiction, passion, pleasure, fixation, escape and comfort blanket. For many characters, alcohol is not only part of their extended reality, it is their reality. Dermot in Port is alcohol addicted as is the narrator in Rum; in Veil, local folklore has it that a man trades his child for drink with the fairies. The various characters gathered for Christmas drinks in the Harkin household in Seafarer exemplify that fixation and respond emotionally in different ways to alcohol intake. 128

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Sharky, once a seafarer, has been sacked from his job as a chauffeur, after he got too close to Miriam (another Mary), the wife of his employer: this dismissal and his involvement in a street brawl in the lead up to Christmas are two factors that shape his decision to quit drink. Sharky is separated from his wife, Eileen, and expresses no real interest in connecting with his children. Carney’s Sharky is especially cranky from being off the drink. Being called either a ‘Christmas wrecker!’ (83) or accused of being someone who is ‘gonna blow the whole Christmas atmosphere’ (85) have no impact on him. As an ex-seafarer, Sharky’s patron saint would, of course, be St Nicholas. As Christopher Murray notes ‘The original Seafarer is a Christian archetype, his seafaring a symbol of the hard and lonely journey the individual must make toward salvation.’18 Ivan and Richard are of the conviction that only a renewed bout of drinking is the appropriate response to their hangovers. Among those who seek out the next drink as quickly as possible, alcohol incites seemingly common purpose and empathetic collegiality. Christmas shopping becomes their excuse to get outside and go drinking, and the food-stuffs associated with Christmas that they intend to purchase are merely supplementary items rather than the indulgent focal point of the festive celebration. It is too late to get a turkey, so a chicken will have to suffice. Ivan’s plans to go home fall flat; and when he returns he wears a Christmas hat, and the way that Wycherley delivers his explanation as to why he has come back again is really comedic. Richard’s view that Karen is being completely unreasonable is the response and assurance that Ivan wants to hear, reinforcing his own inclinations and avoidance strategies. The relief of the pressure prompted Wycherley’s Ivan to down a can of beer in one go. The arrival of Nicky and Mr Lockhart ups the play’s tension; they are effectively taking up Sharky’s symbolic invitation to come inside, after he put the traditional red candle in the window to signal a welcome to strangers. Their arrival coincides with Richard singing a tuneless and inaccurate version of ‘Let it Snow’. The stage directions are particularly pertinent: ‘He [Richard] suddenly hunches and shudders, holding his shoulder as though someone has walked over his grave. … It is completely dark outside by now’ (90). Phelim Drew’s Nicky looks dishevelled and worse for wear. Nicky takes delight in the fact that his Versace jacket, although very much in need of a dry-clean, is made from dog skin. What Nicky sees as an opportunity to raise his status proves to be an opening for others to mock his naivety. Later, Drew brings great enthusiasm to Nick’s description of opening a cheese 129

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mongering business in a shop that is a discount, rather than a premium goods-orientated, store, and his convictions are not dented by the negative responses from those he tells. Drew ensures that Nicky is viewed by the spectator, not as a rogue, not as a chancer, but as a likeable dreamer – the fact that he is now with Sharky’s former partner, Eileen, is a source of particular tension. Mr Lockhart notes Richard’s ‘fine holy glow’ (91) (emphasis added) and initially toasts ‘old friends and old times’ (93). However, Lockhart clearly belongs to a very different social class to the others, especially in this Abbey production. While the other characters are casually dressed or in clothing that is well worn (Stafford as Richard is costumed with a very old suit jacket), Nick Dunning’s Lockhart wears a three-piece suit, an expensive looking coat and hat, and he had a party streamer wrapped round him. Lockhart’s brown socks not only match the colour of his waistcoat, but also chime with the earthy colours of the costumes worn by Richard and Sharky. Also, Nicky’s purple shirt picks up Lockhart’s purple tie. Further, Lockhart is from Howth, an area of Dublin usually associated with wealth, and his accent distinguishes him from the others. Dunning plays Lockhart with a mid-Irish Sea accent, that combines British and elite Dublin at the same time.19 The others address him as ‘Mr’ Lockhart throughout, and he never offers nor is asked his first name. There is little variation in Dunning’s rhythmic tone, but it carries a particular confidence and assertiveness, and it also estranges him as a character by establishing him as not entirely real. Lockhart is willing and comfortable in imposing a sense of his own rank on all of those that find themselves in his company, but they are also willing to indulge him in his class distinctions. It emerges that Lockhart is anti-music, anti-sing-song, anti-celebration and antiChristmas. Dunning captures this disdain especially well. Lockhart has a (sinister) purpose and he cannot access any joy, much like the narrator in Nicholas. Lockhart’s mindset is almost the opposite of that of the other revellers, who attempt to make as much as they can of the festivities. What appears to be a gathering of friends and a stranger for a bout of drinking becomes altogether different when it emerges that Lockhart is a stranger intent on making Sharky stick to his old promise to play him another game of cards for his soul, after Lockhart helped Sharky evade a charge for the murder of Laurence Joyce, twenty-five years previously (24 December 1985).20 Sharky only has a vague recollection of the encounter in a holding cell of a police station. Pacts with the devil are a commonplace across cultures. Trade-offs with the devil include love, sexual freedom, 130

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power, magic, gifts, potencies, wish-fulfilment and the ability to postpone fate, to save a life or to bring the dead back from the underworld. In return the devil claims a soul. Once Sharky and Lockhart are left alone, not only does Lockhart’s tone and disposition change, but the longer Sharky refuses to accept what is happening, the more insistent Lockhart becomes. This culminates with Lockhart taking control of Sharky’s mind, causing him to grimace in great pain. In the Abbey production, the stage lighting adjusts, first becoming dark, before altering to be a brooding red colour; this signalled both a change in mood and also a shift in genre.21 Lockhart as a supernatural force, or as Sharky’s shadow, represents the disappointments, failures, dark deeds, losses, fear, dread and poor choices that bring an additional brooding quality to Sharky’s consciousness. That said, Lockhart is a cut-out figure, horrific, omnipotent, malevolent, as well as melodramatic, histrionic, even comedically pathetic in his selfaggrandizement. Talking to Cassandra Csenscitz, McPherson states: The devil, Lockhart, was a force of nature coming into the play. He’s scary, but he’s also an agent of change for the characters. He is the darkness we need in our lives to recognize what’s important and hopeful. But it really started with the idea of Newgrange – that darkest moment, darkest day of the year, where at the end the light comes in.22 So despite the destructiveness, Lockhart is an agent of change; the darkness enables or prepares for light. The first act ends, as if it is determined by a gesture made by the devil, who clicks his fingers as the lights go dark. This devil believes that he is in control and is not going to lose. In the Abbey production, Act Two opens with the ‘Ave Maria’ playing in the background, which is an addition to the published script. A game of cards in progress. Drew’s Nicky wears a pair of poker glasses to stop the others seeing his eyes, and throughout he plays the game with a combination of bluster and false confidence that re-affirms the overall sense of him being delusional. Nicky (a variation on St Nicholas or Nicky as the devil) has also encountered Lockhart; however, his memory is as vague as Ivan’s of his experience. Ivan was previously found not responsible when people died in a hotel fire: his luck was in, perhaps abetted by Lockhart in evading punishment for his negligence. Ivan’s big win in a game of cards is also associated with the Ardlawn Hotel fire incident; the bet was an expensive boat against a requirement for him to tell the truth as to what 131

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really happened on the evening of the fire, if he did not have the winning hand.23 The drinking and bonhomie that seem to signal a celebratory mood during the card games is offset by Carney’s brooding presence. Lockhart, at one stage, gestures towards Sharky causing Sharky’s head to ache, but others do not see the incident. The second exchange between Sharky and the devil is prompted by another initiative to move the winos away from the back lane. Lockhart is all too keen to point out Sharky’s uncanny ability to ruin everything. Richard also says similar things to his brother. When Sharky relents on his sobriety and has a drink, Carney captures the flaring anger, destructiveness, fatalism, abandonment and surrender of his character with telling skill. The devil is a maudlin drinker and loses some of his composure. Lockhart’s disdain for humankind is made abundantly clear. As the tension mounts through the card games, and at the point that Sharky sees himself as having gambled and lost, he aggressively turns on Richard and Nicky. Nicky is forced to defend himself with a golf club, while Sharky attempts to assault him with the Christmas tree. Sharky flings the Christmas tree, bangs it against the back wall, and it comically falls apart. Then as Ivan attempts to hug Sharky, Ivan is pushed on the sofa and it falls over. Such slapstick comedy is part of the flamboyant consciousness that is maintained amid the growing gloom. Ivan’s attempts to reassemble the tree fail, as he is not capable of joining the two parts together. His quick abandonment of the task demonstrates his lack of persistence and contentiousness, and just how uncoordinated he is from drink. And during all of this, thunder and lightning strike as additional forms of stage business on the Abbey stage. As Sharky obediently follows Lockhart up the stairs, supposedly with the intention of retrieving money owed to Lockhart from the hole in the wall, there is a sense of him surrendering to his fate.24 Commenting on the Faustian pact between Sharky and Lockhart, Patrick Lonergan notes: ‘What happens when you place a monetary value on something that should never have been sold or gambled away? And what happens when a debt that you have spent years building up and ignoring suddenly falls due?’25 Lonergan also links the portal to hell and the ATM (‘hole in the wall’). As Lonergan reads it, in the Faustian pact, informed by work by Marlowe and Goethe by way of Tom Murphy’s The Gigli Concert (1983), prosperity is the diabolical pact, the cheap credit that promoted the conspicuous consumption and property investing would come to an end, and the material excesses would inevitably have to be countered by 132

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austerity – payback time for living beyond one’s means. Sharky makes no attempt to outwit the devil. Ondřej Pilný notes that ‘what initially looks like an ironic appellation is revealed to bear a symbolic, spiritual significance at the climax of the play. This is where Sharky’s life of aimless, miserable wandering is described by Mr Lockhart as an inferno that is quite alike to being ceaselessly at sea.’26 Just when all seems lost, Ivan’s finding of his glasses and discovering that he has held the willing hand all along (four Aces and not four Fours) ensures that the mood moves from fatalism to rapture. The intermediary figure Ivan, is clearly no saint. Temporarily defeated, the devil is exiled until Good Friday when his return will coincide with the death of Jesus. Dunning plays Lockhart as a very sore loser, evident when he kicks a stool over out of frustration. This devil’s track record of losing does not seem to hamper his confidence of victory. Maybe the devil is always destined to lose, but he is unaware. As always with McPherson’s work, the devil is as much within as without. It is neither the denial nor banishment of Lockhart that is important, but the fact that Lockhart’s certainty is trumped by the myopic, the incidental and chance rather than a definitive victory or decisive heroic deed based on cunning, self-belief, endeavour or fortitude. It is not just the devil as scapegoat or sacrificial offering whose banishment draws no sense of loss from the other characters, but rather it is the indifference towards him which matters most. Additionally, Lockhart can also be seen as an accidental Santa Claus, the bearer of unexpected gifts. Despite the anti-music and anti-joy sensibility that Lockhart revels in, the devil forces Sharky back into the light of a new day. Lockhart’s banishment brought very positive audience responses in the Abbey Theatre productions in 2008 and 2009, triumphantly achieving what Eric Weitz describes as a reversal that prompts a ‘groundswell of feeling from a genre diametrically opposed to the one previously thought to be in force’.27 Only Sharky knows the nature of the victory on Christmas morning, over the devil, over himself, even over a funerary disposition.28 As Christopher Murray notes ‘good fellowship or ordinary humanity is more powerful in its frailty than the terrible representative of the forces of evil’.29 Those remaining in the house will go to the church for prayers and inevitably drink some alcohol, courtesy of the monks, and they will celebrate what they have. One of the CDs sent by Miriam includes ‘Sweet Little Mystery’ by John Martyn, which ends the play. It is a song that heightens the optimism and prompts a semblance of joyful renewal, even though renewal is not dutifully earned. 133

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As the Abbey production ends, Sharky cleans up, while Ivan tries to dance badly to the music, but suddenly, Ivan falls asleep, oblivious to all that has happened. Further, a beam of light enters through the back porch, mimicking the way that light enters the Newgrange burial chambers on the winter solstice.30 That movement into light appears to be the dominant impetus behind this play. Across his body of work, McPherson links black holes and ghosts to God, and Seafarer proposes that animals and insects serve as proof of some celestial design. Victories over the devil appear to have spiritual implications, without a doctrinaire approach.

Conclusion As Judith Flanders notes, ‘Christmas has assimilated traditions from half a dozen cultures and countries, and therefore appears endlessly flexible.’31 She adds: ‘While the holiday has altered, it has survived, it has thrived, because, ultimately, Christmas is not what is, or even has been, but what we hope for.’32 Christmas is about hope and expectation, and theatre audiences provide the necessary inputs and reception frames. In a postmodern world, it is easy to regard contemporary drawings on traditions as being forms of redundancy, hokum or inefficacy, resulting in pulp practices of sorts. But in these Christmas-orientated plays by McPherson, there is the sense of witnessing the challenges of renewal that the Christmas period offers, and a tapping into traditional customs and older seasonal rhythms aligned with the natural world and its relentless cycles. The affiliations with Christmas do bring to consciousness the arrival of a newborn child/saviour and the Christian triumphalism associated with a saviour’s birth. The various positive traces, gestures of goodwill, and reciprocation that inform the various vectorizations of Christmas in McPherson’s work, suggest epiphanic, alchemic and euphoric energies, sensibilities and feelings that are almost, in Jill Dolan’s words, an ‘utopian performative’.33 McPherson infuses many of his plays with fragments, relics, artefacts, patterns and dispositions associated with Christmas, from advent calendars to decrepit Christmas trees, from seasonal lights and decorations to lights in the windows of homes inviting inside those passing by, from wanted and unwanted Christmas gifts to misquoting Christmas tunes, from Christmas parties to unpaid Christmas bonuses, from the gathering and non-gathering of family and friends to the fallout from illicit relationships nurtured over 134

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the Christmas occasion, from the re-enactment of ritual antagonisms between couples and family members attempting to end relationships during the festive occasion, and from visits from the Magi to the mention of Santa Claus. These Christmas-orientated plays are not simply an attempt to dilute a funerary disposition, nor replace it with sentiment, optimism, renewal or life as victory rather than death as triumphant sentiment. These works are not an easy synthesis of a funerary disposition and the hope and salvation that a Christmas sensibility or belief system affords. In its spontaneity, or in a reflex beyond consciousness, John’s re-fitting of the decorations in Carol is part of such an instinct and it is more a life-in-life rather than a deathin-life imperative. More generally, McPherson’s dramaturgy tends to be a beginnings- and continuous present-orientated dramaturgy rather than a past-focused, resurrection-orientated or end-obsessed one. The ghosts of past cosmic awarenesses, evident in what remains at places like Newgrange, seem to offer an opportunity, as McPherson suggests, to ‘intuit that we are part of everything that exists’,34 of which Seafarer is an uncanny exemplary.

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C Chapter 6 CONSPICUOUS COMMUNITIES

Introduction: A pastoral sensitivity When the Royal Court commissioned Weir, the agreement between the writer and the theatre stipulated that the new play must not be a monologue.1 Weir was inspired by McPherson’s visits to his grandfather’s home in Jamestown, Co. Leitrim. It is a village which hosts a small weir,2 and is situated in close proximity to the larger town of Carrick-on-Shannon. The death of McPherson’s grandfather ‘casts an influential shadow over the play’s creation’, according to Scott T. Cummings.3 Weir came very quickly to McPherson, and in personal comments to me, he suggested that the work went through very few drafts and required little re-writing.4 The first production garnered major critical acclaim, and later, it transferred to the Royal Court’s temporary main house, Duke of York’s, on the West End. The work went on to win numerous awards, including the Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle, and Olivier (best new play) Awards. It played for over two years, with successive cast changes, and in April 1999, the play had its first American production in the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway. Since 1997, there have been numerous productions of the play around the world, most notably Josie Rourke’s landmark 2013 production for the Donmar Warehouse,5 which would transfer in 2014 to Wyndham’s Theatre on the West End.6 For a number of reasons I dedicate much of the chapter to Weir. First, because it is the best known of the plays. Secondly, for the reader focused and selective in the criticism that they want to consult, this is the chapter most likely to draw their attention. Finally, Weir is the ideal play to allow me to return to arguments made in other chapters so that I can evolve ideas further and substantiate the connections that can be made between the works themselves; by so doing, some of the artificial divisions required by the formation of distinct chapters can be undone. Weir is located in a public house in the west of Ireland, or more precisely in ‘Northwest Leitrim or Sligo’,7 but its location is not clearly signalled.

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A spectator at a performance would not necessarily be aware of that stage direction and its lack of specificity. Theatre audiences more generally often share a romantic view of rural Ireland, drawn by the sense of its proximity to nature, moved by the perceived and actual ruggedness of landscape, and ensnared by associated histories and the profoundities of myth. Such places are often linked to a time when either religious or pagan practices were significant to a population, where people by necessity worked outdoors, sometimes precariously and under inclement conditions, and where people were more inclined to participate in events organized by their extended families and local communities. The pace of life, the growing of one’s own food, the rearing of livestock, the need to make and mend one’s clothes or to repair tools, machinery or domestic objects set up a rural way of life as being vastly different in very many respects to contemporary urban living.8 Accordingly, Nicholas Grene notes: ‘Ireland is always available as a site for pastoral, in its greenness, its littleness, its location as the offshore-island alternative to the major metropolitan societies of Britain or America.’9 Grene explicates the alignment of the pastoral with the ‘archaic, traditional and originary’, ‘wholesome jollity’ and a ‘harmony with nature’, adding that the pastoral is a space/sensibility ‘marked by quaintness, the charm, the lyrical otherness of Hiberno-English’.10 Such a pastoral consciousness is in many respects essential to Weir.11 (Here I only want to signal the significance of the pastoral as I do not want to re-articulate the previously comprehensive arguments I made about how Weir embraces and subverts the pastoral.12) Equally, Weir’s pastoral sensibility couples with the general public’s over-familiarity with commercially designed, twee, often kitsch, ‘Irish’ pubs that are to be found in many cities around the globe, where ‘Irishness’ has the potential to be enacted, transacted, substituted and romanticized in a variety of ways that have little purchase on the real. Such pubs can provide a way of performing Irishness in some participative manner.

The Weir: Sleight of register/sleight of consciousness In Weir, Brendan’s bar serves as a hub for the sharing of information, as a place to pass the time, pose life questions and perhaps to get inebriated, but also it serves as a displaced home place of sorts for its customers. The pub also provides a space for the telling of stories. Scenography becomes so important in creating the right feel for the piece.13 For Rourke’s production for the Donmar Warehouse – a 300-seat theatre in the heart 138

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of London’s theatre district – Tom Scutt’s design incorporates exposed wooden beams overhead with a tiled rather than carpeted floor.14 Behind the bar there is a calendar signalling that it is April 1997. The centre stage serving area of the bar has a limited range of beer taps and alcoholic spirits on its shelves. Bacon fries, crisps, peanuts, and a small amount of domestic provisions are some other design objects that define the characteristics of the space. Additionally, an uneven collection of drinking glasses compliments the seeming functionality and randomness of the other design objects present in the performance space. Board games, a fire extinguisher, a box to collect money for religious missionaries, an electric fan, a bird cage, and some postcards all litter this space. I could make out the details of some of the old photos on the walls, but others are not so clear. Also, a somewhat visible small back room is full of clutter. Downstage right there is a stove where peat burns, and its smell suffuses the theatre space, without being overwhelming or intrusive. Mix and match furniture pieces are set out to form clusters of tables and chairs; these offer a number of different drinking areas where the characters can congregate and also conjure distinct storytelling spaces within the overall mise-enscène. The layout of the furnishings also makes it possible for the characters to rotate regularly between these loosely indicated spaces. The capacity of the actors to move with a degree of fluidity helps to avoid any sense of a static or restrained performance idiom. Both the public and the private nature of these mementos illustrate the intermeshing of the domestic and the communal, the private and the collective that exist in this run-down bar that needs both de-cluttering and refurbishing. Ian Dickinson’s subtle soundscape opts not for the boisterous windy conditions that are often very prominent in other productions of this work, but instead settles for something subtler and more gently evocative in terms of the wind. These aural and scenographic specificities relate to, integrate with, and accommodate, Neil Austin’s lighting design, whose primary use of golden and amber colours assist in creating an atmosphere of warmth, welcome and potential foreboding. In many instances shadows are created as if to suggest that this is almost a spectral space, haunted by those figures in the photos who have passed away, by the lingering energies of the pub’s previous customers, and by the moods and sensibilities generated by what one assumes to be the regular narration of ghost stories. Scutt’s scenography, Dickinson’s lighting and Austin’s sound designs are notable for an intense level of detail, but the stage environment is established in ways that do not necessarily suggest a desire to embrace fully the notion of authenticity. 139

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The script proposes that upon entering the empty pub, and seeing that there is no bar person present, Jack takes the liberty of serving himself a drink, which he does, unhurriedly, casually and confidently. Initially, the beer tap does not work. In the Donmar production, Brian Cox’s Jack incorporates into his performance a great deal of humorous stage business, and he coaxes considerable audience laughter with emphatic, exorbitant gestures, as he checks the price list, opens the till and pays for his alcohol. Although there is something romantically civil, even innocent or naive in the customer arrangement which opens the play, it does not necessarily mean that the banter which follows is mutually cooperative, free from the pulling of rank, naively romantic or utopian in perspective. Apart from Jack, who lives alone and runs his own garage, those who gather for this evening of drinks include Brendan, the proprietor; Finbar, a local character who now lives with his wife and family in the nearby town of Carrick-on-Shannon and runs multiple businesses; Jim, who does odd jobs for Jack and takes care of his elderly mother; and a stranger, Valerie, who has just moved into the locality, and who has held a good but unspecified job in Dublin City University. Finbar’s offer to introduce Valerie to her neighbours does suggest a certain generosity, but his chaperoning or parading of her before them can be seen as a form of one-upmanship. Equally, there is also a sense – given the kudos accruing to Finbar’s local knowledge – that he may somehow be trying to associate or entwine himself with Valerie’s need to find comfort in rural isolation, and for him perhaps to be identified or allied in some ways with the remoteness and sanctuary that she seemingly craves. In terms of status and allure, Finbar can tick the pastoral, entrepreneurial, urbane, even cosmopolitan boxes, even if it is a small town out of which he operates. From the off, Risteárd Cooper as Finbar appears comfortable, confident and suave, and his character is not signalled simply as a sexual predator or as a repulsive alpha male that he could potentially be. In contrast, Ardal O’Hanlon’s Jim is consistently on edge, embarrassed, stammering, eager and overly fixated on Valerie’s presence. The inexpensive polyester jumper, scruffy trousers and dirty boots that O’Hanlon wears, contrasts sharply with Cooper’s sophisticated, casual attire of cream jacket, trousers and brown leather shoes. Jim’s prowess as a tipster of horses is part of his local acclaim, and Jack gladly champions his skills. Brendan’s role as the affable proprietor is cunningly played by the casually dressed Peter McDonald, who remains behind the bar for most of the evening. Dervla Kirwan brings to her role 140

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of Valerie a real intensity of focus, and also demonstrates a willingness to engage with this predominantly male environment. At times, Kirwan nervously and cautiously laughs off the inadequacies of the bar’s facilities – with no working women’s toilet and no chilled white wine to hand. Rourke’s ensemble convincingly handles the boisterous, edgy, jibing and competitive small talk that is evident throughout the relatively convivial introductions. By energizing the space with a great deal of physical action, Rourke extracts far more humour from the work than I remember from the other performances of this play that I have seen to date. This comedy is seen in either the exaggerated cantankerousness of Cox’s Jack’s self-defence mechanisms or in the gentle gestural comedy of the piece, evident in the instance when Brendan pours Valerie’s un-chilled white wine into a halfpint glass and filled it up to the brim.

The story realm Finbar encourages Jack to tell a ghost story about strange happenings involving fairies and fairy roads that occurred in Maura Nealon’s old home and now Valerie’s new abode. At this point, the consciousness of the play starts to be steered towards the uncanny. Geraldine Cousin notes how ghost stories in Weir ‘destabilise its realistic setting, creating an imagined, spectral halo (of an alternative, haunted landscape) around what is depicted on stage’.15 Surprisingly, in Cox’s delivery of the first ghost story there are very few pauses or delicate hesitations and there is a slightly strained uncertainty evident in the telling, but what is especially striking is the speed at which he delivers the story.16 Cox’s performance has a routinized, almost aggressive bluster to it, and his Jack is generally more of a trickster-like figure – somewhat different to how one might be inclined to imagine him while reading the work, as it is easier to see him more as a passive, curmudgeonly, paternal or sage-like figure with particular life regrets. Cox’s Jack is a strong, assured, even a domineering presence, seemingly comfortable as a notional rival to Cooper’s Finbar, O’Hanlon’s Jim and McDonald’s Brendan, each of whom is closer in age to Kirwan’s Valerie. Kirwan’s Valerie remains relatively nonplussed and modestly selfconscious throughout Jack’s first narrative. Equally perhaps, Finbar’s prompting of Jack to tell this story is not simply an innocent mistake: it is as if he wants Valerie to be wary of her new surroundings. It might also be 141

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deduced that he may have hoped that Valerie might not want to be alone in her own bed on this particular night. How Cooper scrutinizes Kirwan’s reactions to the opening story makes this reading plausible. His denial of sexual interest in her as written in the text, does not carry the weight of absolute truth and a production can suggest that his claims about his own motives are suspect. Either way, Jack’s opening story kicks off the sequence of stories for which Weir is renowned. The second story, Finbar’s, accounts for what happened on one occasion to ‘blow-in’ neighbours, the Walsh family, and it involves Ouija boards, premonitions, ghosts and terror. This sequence of macabre events prompted him to move away from the locality and to quit smoking. Again, it is narrated with that strange pace I mentioned earlier. Cooper, as Finbar, does not make it clear if his character’s motivation is to trump Jack or to put Valerie under further pressure. There is no sense as to whether he truly believes what he is saying. From a performance point of view, this is the right thing to do; keep ambivalence to the fore. Jim’s story about the supposed appearance of a recently deceased man who requests to be buried not in the grave being readied for him but in that of a young girl’s is of a different order. While O’Hanlon’s delivery remains at the same high tempo as that of the two previous stories, what now surprises is just how emotionally wrought O’Hanlon’s Jim becomes. If three out of the four male characters have had their performance turn, Valerie effectively lays claim to the next slot, and it is then that Kirwan’s performance becomes even more impressive and complex. As Kirwan’s Valerie tells her own harrowing story, the dynamics of the play shift radically. The other characters are uncomfortable in witnessing her story, in light of what they have already narrated, partly as entertainment, partly as self-expression and partly to impress or scare her. The revelation that Valerie has split from her husband, Daniel, prompted by the unbearable grief of losing Niamh, their daughter, in a swimming pool accident explains some of Valerie’s early unease. Neither partner could protect, console nor bolster the other. It is a trauma that refuses to respond to the empathy and consolation offered by those who are close, familiar and proximate. Downstage right by the stove, Kirwan lays claim to her own distinctive story space, which not only is the dominant stage space but becomes a collective space where the others congregate, yet Rourke, or McPherson for that matter, are not aligning the notion of the feminine with the hearth or home.17 From the off, Kirwan demonstrates a degree of tolerance and a lessening of expectation that makes her less intimidating to those around 142

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her. Later, Kirwan’s laughter becomes less polite and self-conscious: indeed, the nature of her laughter has a striking and notable evolution throughout Rourke’s production as it progresses from being cautious and cordial to become fundamentally participative, but not necessarily antagonistic or subversive. When Kirwan earlier moved between the discrete narrative and performance spaces of the other characters as they tell their stories, her mobility is choreographed to unsettle the vectors and dynamics of this space and possibly any rudimentary oppressive gender dispositions. Most surprising perhaps is the fact that Valerie’s narrative about the drowning of her daughter remains driven by the same pressured and speedy delivery mode as the previous story tellers. This approach initially feels strange, even more than a little unnerving, in that it is out of sync with what most might expect to be the narrative rhythms, beats and structures of such sorts of deeply personal revelations. The expectation might well be the visibility of distress, hesitations, silences and tears, but a strange passion, almost a fixation, emerges through Kirwan’s urgency. It becomes clear that Rourke strains the rhythms and disrupts the anticipated pace of delivery in order to skew or make strange with what might be seen as a straightforward empathetic response in the face of someone’s account of their fundamental loss of a child. Despite the pacing, Kirwan’s narrative captures the kernel of the traumatic experience at the death of her daughter and the strange phone call from her dead daughter that she experiences. Given the many overlaps and consistencies between Valerie’s story and those that came before hers, it is possible to read her narrative as a ruse, as a clever deconstructive attack on the male characters’ struggles for self-definition and the hold that they have over both the space and the storytelling format itself. I have made this argument elsewhere based on repetition of many key words, names and concepts in her story that exist in the previous three narratives, including the coincidence of there being two Niamhs. This was an idea inspired by McPherson’s general indebtedness to a trickster sensibility evident in David Mamet’s dramaturgy and approach to screen writing and by Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), where Verbal Kint constructs a story based on fragments of details that come within his sight in a police station, as he faces interrogation in the aftermath of a bloodbath on a ship. Make what you will of McPherson’s comments in the Preface to St  Nicholas and The Weir, where he talks about inventing a story about being attacked by a seagull to amuse people he meets in a pub: but there seems to be mischief not only in McPherson inventing stories, but also in 143

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his inclusion of such a narrative in a Preface to a play about storytelling and public houses. It reads as follows: ‘Christmas for most of us can be very busy. Catching up with friends in pubs for nights on end. … I decided to break the ice by telling each new person I met a big lie. … The first thing people would say after I’d said this was, “Is that true?” [because] although they didn’t believe me, we live in a world where we don’t expect complete strangers to lie to us. Not in pubs at any rate. But it’s nice in theatre.’18 Rourke’s production particularly foregrounds the humiliations and guilt that the male characters variously display in the aftermath of Valerie’s revelations. Valerie’s story also prompts Jack to tell of his own intimate story of love, desire, failure to commit and loss. First, Jack admits that the overwhelming sadness and humiliation that he felt after the marriage ceremony of his ex-girlfriend to a Dublin-based policeman was utterly contrary to what he had expected to feel. Second, the consolation and generosity offered by a barman in a Dublin pub after the ceremony stand out in his mind (and more on this later). Third, while it is a ‘real’ story of sorts, it is also predominantly a ghost story, as Jack is haunted by his own cussedness, his frailties, poor judgement, loss and ultimately his lack of courage. In Alive, Maurice recognizes the notion of an ease associated with living life in the right groove, Maurice  You only get a few goes, Tommy. At life. You don’t get endless goes. Two three goes maybe. When you hit the right groove you’ll click right in there. No drama. That’s only for fucking eejits. (83) Unlike in Alive, in Weir even second chances are not plentiful. The paucity of lifetime opportunities additionally marks the work as both uncanny and outside of time.19 Even if Jack’s narrative marks a fundamental hurt in his life, it is steered both by distancing techniques and by the framing of loss and grief in terms of a broader cosmic insignificance. Of course, the evening’s master of ceremonies is Brendan. In Rourke’s production, McDonald demonstrates a terrific comic ability to combine reticence, introverted vulnerability, self-consciousness and playfulness, and he delivers his lines often in a flippant or carefree fashion. Although Brendan has no specific story to tell, McDonald’s interactions throughout with Kirwan’s Valerie are impressively subtle, especially as the performance concludes. As Valerie sits by the stove, Brendan moves over to join her. There is a hesitant and heightened sexual tension acknowledged between 144

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both characters. The tentative bond signalled between them at this moment is neither simplistic nor a soppy futuristic signalling of a happy-ever-aftertype scenario. As Rourke stages it, it is an encounter, prompted by the courage to be open to the possibility of connection with others and not by a naive optimism. Out of the mire of a debilitating consciousnesses and inhibiting, past-orientated narratives, the play is now tentatively affirming the present and signalling a future with possibilities. Valerie is the character that is most articulate, grounded and mobile and she can participate as an equal in the ‘metaphysical debate’ as well as having equal purchase on the imaginative/supernatural spheres.20 In many respects, the pub environment takes Valerie as a notional ‘blown-in’, someone outside of a recognizable time, out of a discernible space and into a different sensibility or rival consciousness. Kirwan embraces these various contradictory states of mind and surrenders her character to the potentials and consolations of this isolated, almost abandoned space.

Relational mismatches Based on work by social psychologists Richard Shweder and Jonathan Haidt, anthropologist Alan Fiske devised a taxonomy of relationality, which Steven Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist, goes on to alter slightly. As Pinker summarizes, Fiske’s model identifies four different modes: the first is ‘Communal Sharing’ (Communality) – based on in-group loyalty, kinship, bonding and rituals of togetherness. It is a bonding based on care and protection, and the free sharing of resources, with nobody keeping tabs as to how much one gives and takes. According to Pinker, it evolved from ‘maternal care, kin selection, and mutualism, and it may be implemented in the brain, at least in part, by the oxytocin system’.21 The second mode is ‘Authority Ranking’ (Paternalism) – based on ‘linear hierarchy’, dominance, status, age, wealth, size, strength, precedents and so on. The dominant figures take what they need and demand loyalty, and in return they offer protection and assurances. Pinker proposes that this model is associated in part with ‘testosterone-sensitive circuits in the brain’.22 The third model is ‘Equality Matching’, something which Pinker identifies as embracing ‘tit-for-tat reciprocity and other schemes to divide resources’ as equitably and as fairly as possible. It is based on ‘a sense of fairness and our intuitive economics’,23 and entails ‘loose accounting’.24 Equality Matching embraces the ‘part of the brain that registers intentions, 145

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cheating, conflict, perspective-taking and calculation, which include the insula, orbital cortex, cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex and temporoparietal junction’.25 Fiske’s final relational model is ‘Market Pricing’, and this is about money and financial value, and is not nearly as universal.26 Pinker substitutes the term ‘Rational-Legal’ for ‘Market Pricing’ to serve as his final model. This is a system based on currency, prices, rents, interest and so on, plus the laws and regulations that govern societies. Pinker does not associate it with any specific region of the brain. In evolutionary terms the ‘Rational-legal’ or the capitalism model is a relatively new one.27 Pinker cautions: ‘While each of these modes of relating can have positive outcomes, they also have potentially negative ones as well’: Communal Sharing has a tendency to exclude out-groups, and to ‘legitimise tribalism and jingoism’ and only serves the needs of those close to hand and affiliated. Authority Ranking justifies ‘violent punishments for insolence, insubordination, disobedience, treason, blasphemy, heresy, and lése-majesté’. Imperialists, slave owners and despots have their own logical application of authority to themselves. Equality Matching provides a justification for ‘tit-for-tat retaliation in relationships’, and the rationale for the Rational-Legal model can be used to justify major global inequalities.28 For Pinker, ‘no society defines everyday virtue and wronging by the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative. Instead, morality consists in respecting or violating one of the relational models (or ethics or foundations)’, by causing communal disharmony, by undermining authority, by being violent without provocation, without matching another’s contribution, without paying the cost of goods or services. This taxonomy thus provides a ‘grammar for social norms’.29 (It can be seen as a different way of thinking about social, cultural and wealth capital.) To be a ‘socially competent member of a culture is to have assimilated a large set of these norms’.30 Pinker stresses the idea of ‘relational mismatch’,31 and extrapolates on Philip Tetlock’s notion of taboo violations of sacred norms of resources. I outline the above taxonomy in some detail because part of McPherson’s great achievement is to complicate modes of relating by allowing characters to violate or refuse to abide by particular norms. McPherson creates dramatic situations where different modes of relating clash, contradict or fuse and do so in ways that are antagonistic to the Rational/Legal mode and offer a strong anti-neo-liberal disposition. 146

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Your round The delivery of stories in public spaces are clearly ways of establishing and reinforcing provisional networks of communication, as well as ways of grounding the values that bind and commitments that exist between each of the characters. While the stories consistently have something to do with status and rivalries, there is a self-revelatory aspect to them that demands a complex combination that is performative, communal and egalitarian in orientation. More than that, there is also a ritualistic/communal aspect to the taking of turns to tell stories (Equality Matching), as well as something important about attending appropriately to the stories of others that can be read as the fostering of forms of participative/performative equality (Communal Sharing).32 There is no hierarchy of stories avowed. In terms of the Rational/Legal model, Finbar’s financial successes are based on clever business acumen, on having an ‘eye for the gap’ (39). His business interests are in property, hospitality and catering, and Finbar’s star is clearly on the rise. The play does coincide with the early part of the Celtic Tiger period.33 Finbar is not entirely self-made, as he inherits much of his wealth from his father. According to Jack, Finbar’s accrued capital is also based on a mean streak, something that is neither affirmed nor denied by the play’s dramaturgy.34 Jack suggests that Finbar probably overcharged Valerie for the property, but that is more about riling than telling it as it is. As I said earlier, Jack’s initial impulse to self-serve, open the till and pay are gestures that not only set out the tone of this play, but also allow the spectator to grasp instantly some of the functional dynamics of this rural micro-community. Later when Brendan temporarily leaves the space to show Valerie the location of a toilet that she might use, Jack again steps behind the bar and serves drink. The first breaching of serving space is not an anomaly. Jack’s actions are so much at odds with the nature of customer transactions in pubs in London or any town or city. Indeed, there would have been very few public houses in Ireland even in the 1990s where such a transaction could have taken place. But actions like this did and still do happen in some rural communities in their pubs and shops. For instance, when milk deliveries or newspapers are left outside a still-closed premises, sometimes these items can be taken by customers and paid for later. It would be naive to think that it is a communal sensibility based simply on collective trust, on something innately noble, or as a marker of mutual respect. It may also have as much to do with fear, the prospects of the reporting of dishonesty 147

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to others and the reputational damage that would ensue.35 Regardless, it still flags a form of trust that is made strange by its fundamental difference from neo-liberal business norms, where transactions with customers on first- or developing-world commercial streets are predominantly shaped by distrust, suspicion and surveillance. If a customer opened a cashier till they would face immediate arrest. Pilfering is of course a reality, and security tags go some way towards minimizing such actions. However, in and of itself, Jack’s serving of himself is not an isolated gesture. When Jack goes to pay for cigarettes he hands over the money, and for Brendan, the amount is ‘close enough’ to what is required (18). The exact amount is not necessary, and a looseness around the amount owned is reflective of how they interact. When Jim buys his first drink, he counts out change and pays, but Brendan pushes a coin back in his direction, stating: ‘Sure it’s hard enough to come by without giving it away’ (19). Later when it is Jim’s round, others do not order a drink and let him simply buy one for himself. The gestus of this moment, to use a Brechtian term, is vital in relation to money and values. To his credit, O’Hanlon illustrates his character’s tacit understanding of this exchange, as he demonstrates a degree of humility here, but also resentment is absent. The unspoken acknowledgement of his straightened financial circumstances does not determine his status. The free small bottle of whiskey that Brendan later hands to Jim on his way home is another extension of this aspect of relating: Brendan discreetly waves Jim away as he tries to pay him.36 As the evening draws to a close, Brendan offers a brandy on the house to Valerie, as the Bar is technically closed. Was it ever open for business in the first place? The fact is that Brendan’s attitude towards his own business seems to be based more on companionship and conversation and less about a desire to make a significant profit from the drinking habits of his regulars. Business and friendship interconnect different relational modes and outcomes. It is not so much that it is a not-for-profit business per se, but it seems that Brendan is comfortable with the income he receives from farming. Money is not a major motivator: Brendan is disgruntled rather than excited by the presence of tourists and the additional revenues on offer. He will not clear the top field for a few caravans, as he wants neither the work nor the hassle. There is also the fact that he is troubled because the field has the fairy fort. The rational/legal model sees no transgression or sacrilege in so monetizing the land, but superstition and custom win out. Additionally, a very strong sense of reciprocity comes to the fore towards the end of the play. Valerie offers to help Brendan to tidy up, and on the 148

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one hand, this can be read as a form of gender submission to domesticity, and on the other, it can be read in terms of equality matching. In Rourke’s production, there is a telling moment after Valerie locates Brendan’s missing keys, the sexual suggestiveness of the gesture was clearly foregrounded by Kirwan’s demeanour. Indeed, there is a certain overall charm to be found in Brendan’s status as the beta to Finbar’s misguided aspirations to be the alpha male of the night’s gathering. As the script suggests, Jack holds out Valerie’s jacket for her so that she can put it on. If this is seen as a traditional act of chivalry, then Jack’s careless talk about Valerie’s attractiveness to Finbar distorts that sensibility, as he sees it, Finbar will be frequently hovering around: ‘Like a fly on a big pile of shite’. (73) To Cox’s credit he made this unfortunate turn of phrase seem less like an expression of rudeness or frankness, and less again like an indication of a process of normalizing her objectivization, but more like him being less guarded and freer in her company. Although Weir is not burdened by the straightened economic circumstances that some of the other plays possess, Weir evokes and evolves a sense of community, partly by invoking a pastoral consciousness, and partly by the parity of story sharing, but also by offering models of relationality that run counter to a neo-liberal (Rational/Legal) perspective. McPherson forewords ‘reciprocal altruism’, a ‘logic of reciprocity’, even an ‘ethos of reciprocity’ to use Pinker’s evolutionary psychology terminology.37 This reciprocity is seen in Jack’s experience of kindness from the Dublin barman, just after the wedding of a former girlfriend. The barman prepares a sandwich for Jack, in response to Jack’s distress caused by the realization that he has lost out on the love of his life. The gentle act serves as a further substantiation of altruist actions, and while the gesture itself is understated, it becomes both significant and conspicuous in Jack’s telling. The barman wants nothing in return; it is simply the kindness of a stranger that fortifies Jack. In addition to Weir, of particular interest are the taboo violations and the outcomes from the mingling of different transactional modes, especially the inappropriate monetization of various exchanges, as Sandel puts it, and already cited in my introduction, ‘the expansion of markets and marketoriented reasoning into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms’.38 In Thief, Greta tips Murray off as to the narrator’s likely whereabouts when he goes on the run with Anna and Niamh; however, Greta trades that information so that that his life can be spared. Deals require complicated 149

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considerations, and even the more abhorrent ones, such as Greta’s, depend on a degree of trust between less than benign figures. In Down, French blackmails, intimidates and indebts others, all based on his power and status (Authorial Ranking). Acts of betrayal by his wife and friend serve as challenges to his rank and authority. Further complications of the transactional modes are seen when Git’s father attempts to take a video recorder from a ram-raided shop. While there is a breach of the Rational/ Legal model, Git operates from a communal sharing perspective, taking the blame for his father. It is a decision with telling outcomes, resulting in the decline of a loan application that he made with Sabrina and to the destruction of their relationship. Again, motivated by kinship and communal obligation, Git steps in to protect his friend, Anto, from a punishment beating for the non-payment of monies due, which leads to Git’s indebtedness to French. The altruistic impulse in the money Bunny hands over to Sabrina is complicated by the fact that the money is ill-gotten. In Saltwater, when McCurdie offers Frank a job that is turned down and then tries to slip him some money, the offer of money is not simply a gift and obligation-free, but is intended, not as communal sharing, but towards a form of communal indebtedness. In Carol, John refuses to engage with other characters only under a mode of relationality where he does all the taking, and little is given in return. He constantly takes from Noel, even if John does visit him in hospital. John exploits Carol for anything that she can give him, and when Mary urges him to deliver on commitments towards his family, he has real difficulty in stepping up to the mark. The inability to relate or transact appropriately predominates Carol. In Shining, Laurence is given accommodation by a family member, but steals from an occupant. Ian is supported by Neasa to leave his ministry, but then is inclined to abandon her and their child. Ian struggles with the obligation to honour patterns of reciprocation. Shining offers complex money transactions: John pays Ian for his professional counselling support (something during his vocation he was not paid directly for), while Ian pays Laurence for sexual services; the former is an acceptable mode of transaction, while the latter is a gross violation of bodily autonomy. Although John gifts Ian an antique lamp, Mari’s ghost is the unexpected and unintended bequest that piggybacks on the token gifting. In Seafarer, the winner is the inept, the indecisive, the uncertain, the lazy, the barely employable, low net worth individual Sharky, and the loser, Lockhart, is an ‘elite’ devil who seems to have the social odds and the cardgame stacked in his favour. The cost of success and the price of failure are 150

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never the one and the same thing. In Birds, Tierney wants to swap food for sex with Diane, and it is implied that Julia will trade anything for provisions, something that initially appals Diane. When Diane’s survival instinct kicks in, the social niceties of relating no longer apply. It is the survival of the fittest/cruellest: transacting based on the expectation of reciprocation and decency would be a fatal error of judgement. In Veil, the models of relating are far less about cooperation, communal or equality matching; it is more about fulfilling one’s duties to authority, and later about doing whatever it takes to survive. In Alive, Tommy is broke, apart from some small savings, and fails to honour his maintenance/legal obligations. Tommy depends on his Uncle Maurice’s communal generosity for his lodgings, but still fiddles the electrical supply metre. Tommy feels he is under no obligation to pay his way or to offer Maurice much by way of reciprocation. Tommy looks after Doc yet pays him very badly for his work. His kindness or sense of kindredness are offset by the breaching of legal obligations as an employer, paying well below the minimum wage, while also proposing that Doc, in lieu of a cash payment, take stale cigars that he can sell on the black-market. Tommy rescues Aimee from her pimp/boyfriend. He does the right thing in terms of communal obligations, but then sexually exploits her, in ways that others have done in the past, paying for sexual relief. Later, when Kenneth attempts to sell Aimee to Tommy, Aimee will have none of it. Despite the exposure of that impulse to exploit, trade and sell, the play’s fundamental emphasis remains on generosity, even when shaped by complicated systems of exchange that are not based on equality. The breach and undermining of French’s, McCurdie’s and Kenneth’s authority is important, and the unequal-leanings of their ways of relating are foregrounded and found wanting. Complex modes of transacting also occur in the Girl, where Nick arranges a marriage between his pregnant, adopted daughter, Marianne, and an elderly shoemaker, Perry. As part of the arrangement, Nick also wants Perry to pay for repairs to his boarding house. For Perry’s part, he wants companionship for his remaining years, and in return Marianne will be given sanctuary and will be compensated by inheritance and freedoms after his death. Distinctions between two modes of transacting, namely a dowry and prostitution are clearly made by Elizabeth during one of her more lucid moments. She proposes that in a whorehouse, Marianne can at least name her price rather than lie beside an aging, close-to-death male. 151

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Mrs Burke seems willing to exchange her body for drugs when she offers to visit the Doctor’s house. Across the works, Authority Ranking, Communal Sharing, and Equality Matching are variously entangled with the Rational/Legal model. Taboo violation, relational mismatch and the entanglements of different types of transactionary norms lead to peculiar complications. Sandel points to the dangers of ‘commodification of everything’,39 and as Harvey puts it ‘financialization of everything’,40 although both come from different ideological positions, liberal and neo-Marxist respectively, each is marking the ideologically licenced creep of market thinking into more and more aspects of life. McPherson does not make matters of the marketplace abject, dismiss them or accuse them of straightforward corruption or exploitation, it is more about bringing a particular scrutiny to the mechanisms of the market that thrives on its supposed transparent logic (let the market decide on value) and its purported freedoms and benign inevitabilities. But, of course, the marketplace seldom comes clean, as it has agendas to hide, beneficiaries to disguise and inequalities to occlude. Not everything and everyone has a price. What seems to be happening across the plays, especially in Weir is not some type of twee anti-materialism, and not the displacement of a conflict (win/lose) model of theatre per se and the replacing of it with a more cooperative (win/win) orientated model. Instead, it is the establishment of a sensibility that is connected more to what I call expressions or demonstrations of forms of performative or conspicuous community, which can be understated or writ-large. This is to re-constitute an idea articulated by behavioural scientist Paul Dolan; for him happiness is derived from a combination of pleasure and purpose, and altruism offers the potential for both. Accordingly, Dolan encourages gestures of ‘conspicuous caring’, previously termed ‘conspicuous altruism’ by Jan Able Olsen, visible and demonstrable acts of giving and sharing that can motivate and inspire others to do the same.41 (Of course the idea has evolved from the notion of conspicuous consumption.) For Dolan, public displays of generosity result in higher contributions than if donations are given in private. Public sharing motivates people to give more. McPherson’s representations of acts of generosity in Weir but also in other plays arouse greater awarenesses and appreciation of us as individuals as part of a collective. Collectively, listening, attending, responding, empathizing and reciprocating are all part of the sharing process. In Weir provisional connections emerge through 152

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conflict, tensions, banter, encountering difference, reciprocation and the sharing of narratives. Effectively, within the pastoral sensibility of the play, McPherson dramatizes a situation where conspicuous performances of egalitarianism that are not simply competitive happen to take place. Such enactments are a way of marking a distinctiveness beyond the Rational/ Legal model, which has become the dominant mode of exchange under neo-liberal capitalism.

Conclusion McPherson describes the end of Weir as the play escaping its downward trajectory and being steered towards something benign and optimistic. In Weir, Valerie moves from outsider to insider, initially outnumbered in terms of gender and deficient in terms of local knowledge and practices, but by the play’s end, she positions herself as an equal. In Weir, male characters are pointedly disconnected from the rank, standing and privileges generically espoused as the benefits and dividends of patriarchy. With the exception of Finbar, the general status, ‘honour, prestige’, ‘the right to command’ and the ‘material’ gains that sociologist R. W. Connell associates with the dividends of patriarchy that accrue to men are clearly not substantially realized in this play.42 Anything but a trivial alignment of the male characters in the reproduction and dissemination of patriarchy seems like a reductive response to the work. Weir confirms the marginality of such characters, without necessarily allocating to them either a non-hegemonic or subaltern status, where notions of victimization can unproblematically take hold. In fact, Rourke’s production clearly foregrounds how social and political marginalization is not just female specific, and that there is a strong class basis to it. The production does not mask the inequalities of elsewhere, rather it foregrounds them and also reveals the bias and attraction that metropolitan centres always have had for that which is marginalized. In the pub space, there are male and female characters, unafraid of their status and differences as men and women, with dissimilar experiences, backgrounds and occupations, who gain some access to the potential dividends of complex interrelating, sharing and trade-offs.43 The characters establish belonging through the intimacy of stories. The provisional community of characters is imagined as different and consolidated by their differences.44 In the fundamental need to attest a story, 153

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to share it and to witness it, the characters put themselves at the mercy of each other and at the mercy of an ensemble of relative strangers in the theatre, sitting and experiencing the potential of otherness. This gesturing is towards the ever-present potential for what Kevin Kerrane envisages as ‘grace’,45 Lojek as the ‘temporary sense of belonging, during an evening of shared fellowship’,46 and Ben Brantley in his review of Girl as ‘the blessed synchronicity of people ineffably tuned into one another’.47 If Brecht wanted the rational to be at the fore of his theatre, with McPherson it is the irrational. The unheimlich, the unhomely of the plays of Chapter 4, is countered by the heimlich, the homely in Weir. Weir’s challenges to marketplace norms, its conspicuous signalling of the warmth and merits of connection, its democratic sharing of stories, and its eventual foregrounding of grace and the euphoric go some way towards explaining its enormous popularity.

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C Chapter 7 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

CONOR MCPHERSON IN CONVERSATION EJ  I am fascinated by the different comments you have made on acting over the years, whether you are talking about Laurence Kinlan as a young actor in Saltwater, or the actors playing actors, playing multiple roles in The Actors; the distinction made is between ideas of ‘acting’ and ‘not acting’. So, when you were directing Girl from the North Country how did you work with a huge cast of actors and how did you go about honing things down to some essence? CM  Everybody in that play is very different. That’s one of the reasons why there was such a good chemistry within the cast and between them and the stage. Nobody was like anybody else, which is often a good thing in a play. They are not competitive, and they are working together, because if you have people doing similar things, there is a little tension there sometimes. That was a great bonus. Really, over the years, I want people as actors to be as close to their own inner soul as possible. I don’t really like ‘acting’ per se. Which is not to say I don’t think there is a craft. There certainly is. You have to be able to do what you are doing every night, at the same time, clearly and effectively. But if you’ve cast it right, and gone on the right journey through rehearsals, moulding the piece around your performers, they don’t need to over embellish or inflect it particularly. They just need to be there and do it – that’s the ideal anyway. So, I’m always encouraging actors to trust themselves, trust their talent and their natural presence. People sometimes find it shocking that I would re-write the play according to how a particular actor sounds. But I do it so when they come on stage there is not as much effort. It feels real. EJ  There is a conversation that you had with Ciarán Hinds about acting in The Eclipse, where the discussion is about getting to the point of not acting.

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CM Right. EJ  That sense of presence, of being grounded in what you are doing … . CM  You can really do that on film, obviously. EJ  You talk about the best plays coming quickly as an image … . CM  For me, yes. EJ  And you just unpack that sense or intuition? CM  As I have described before, these people will come – the characters – and they are living there waiting for you to visit them up in the attic. They don’t stay there for a long time, unfortunately. So, if you are busy doing other things, they will move out. In a way they are a dream-like reflection of whatever is happening in your own psyche I suppose. But they almost feel independent of me. EJ  That sense of being independent is an interesting viewpoint. I am fascinated by revisions between script and performance. You have mentioned the notion of changing lines so that an actor might be more comfortable. About The Seafarer, you have spoken about writing a different play that you were not happy with, but that you took Sharky from that play and put him in The Seafarer. CM  That’s right. EJ  What were the indicators that this is not working for you as a play? CM  Only one person read that original play, my wife, Fionnuala. She said that she did not think it was very good. And she was right. There wasn’t a central moment somehow. Or what I sometimes call the ‘killer blow’. Stories need to reach a place where the audience are so concerned about finding out what is going to happen next, or so surprised and absorbed by what is happening, that they lose all sense of time. I don’t know what other people call that, but I refer to it as the ‘killer blow’. Without it, a play will feel too polite and the audience never fully invest in it. The original play didn’t have it. But The Seafarer felt more robust.

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EJ  In the Abbey productions of The Seafarer in 2008 and 2009 the actors playing Lockhart spoke with English accents, in contrast to the play’s premier in 2006, where the actor spoke with a Dublin one. How did that come about in both Dublin productions and was that a conscious production choice? CM  Both actors, George Costigan and Nick Dunning speak with English accents. So, we ran with that. It’s really that simple. There was no hidden meaning there. EJ  In Girl from the North Country, different Bob Dylan songs came in and out during rehearsal. CM  Right. We were free to use whatever songs we liked, so I was just playing a guitar a lot for those rehearsals. I was finally as close to doing a play in my living room as possible. I was in my element. EJ  Early drafts didn’t have anything from the Infidels album, and they were fascinating additions. CM ‘Jokerman’, ‘Licence to Kill’ and ‘Sweetheart Like You’. Dylan did incredible, energized performances of ‘Jokerman’ and ‘Licence to Kill’ on the David Letterman show in 1984. It is worth looking at. A lot of the energies I took for Girl, were where I could find Bob Dylan being intensely passionate about something. There is footage of him doing concerts in Toronto in 1980, this was at a time when he was giving religious sermons every night, preaching to the crowd. He really means it; it’s so intense. He’s got six backing singers banging tambourines. I felt ‘This is the Bob Dylan that we needed to capture.’ So, going through the process of rehearsals was very instinctive, taking my cue from Bob Dylan’s performances, you could see he was really on fire. I tried to bring that feeling into our rehearsals. I was messianic myself in that situation and was really driving at the cast to get into it, and to go to some other place. EJ  In a draft of Girl, you had a young child on stage, the ghost of Nick Laine’s sister. At what point did you decide to edit this character out? CM  When the producers said it was too expensive. We would need three kids, and it was a big hassle. But also there was part of me already that knew I probably wouldn’t do it anyway. It was a bit obvious. 157

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EJ  Sometimes it is money and not just creative decisions. CM  Sometimes the cost of things prods you to do something you should do anyway. EJ  You are very forthcoming in the Forewords and Afterwords to your published plays, it seems that you set out to defend the significance and importance of the monologue during the Celtic Tiger period. If British writers feel compelled to write about governance, politics and the state of the nation, is it always necessary to do it so directly? CM  Irish politics is far more represented by messy personal lives than English politics. Irish politicians standing up in the Dáil (Parliament) are very easy to read. We all are so close to everything that happens here because we are a small country. There is very little separation between the people and our politicians. It feels very reachable. At the same time, writing about particular political issues runs the risk of feeling transient. That is my problem with it as a subject for a play. The conversation feels disposable. A really good guitar player comes out on stage, say, David Gilmour or Mark Knopfler. The sound that they make is so undeniably real. That is what a play has to do. It must have an undeniable itselfness about it, so strong and powerful that it is not trying to be anything else, it is not trying to refer to anything else, it is not trying to tell you anything else. It is just ‘take it or leave it’. There is something about that that is genuinely powerful. Writing about the things anybody can chat about any day in the pub, some political scandal or court case or whatever, that doesn’t feel particularly original or durable to me. EJ  In so many Irish plays, the writing almost disowns the significance of money to the lives of their characters. Your plays don’t do that. Characters are grounded in the spiritual and the material. And in your films, I Went Down, The Actors and Saltwater money is central. CM  It seems to be the way most people must live. People are always aware of how much money they have. EJ  Ireland’s writing tradition hardly ever shows that level of awareness. CM  The reason why the people in Sean O’Casey’s plays are interesting is because they are poor. If the characters were all rich they would not have 158

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anything like the energy they have. They have nothing and they are just looking to get something. People lie and argue and beg and fight and cajole in order to escape the misery of not having anything. It is a massive motivator. It makes people very active. And that is what you want on stage. As a director, you always want your actors to be moving on stage. People who are uncomfortable and need something have to keep moving, like in The Night Alive or The Seafarer, characters bombing all around the place, restless, not achieving very much. It is much more interesting to watch. EJ  If you go back to The Birds it is really an apocalyptic, dog-eat-dog world: there is little food, communication channels are down, no fuel to propel cars. It is the same in Girl, where it is a world without safety nets. In The Weir, there are the comforts of community, even if most of the characters have very little. In Girl Nick tries to marry off his daughter, Marianne, and sends others on their way. CM  That’s the stuff that happens when people are desperate. I think the mental health of a lot of people is bound up with the material situation. EJ  Your status, profession … . CM  When that goes, people often kill themselves. We saw that very clearly in Ireland when the crash happened. It is frightening how quickly the mind falls apart when people don’t know where the next few quid is coming from. The shame of not being able to provide for your family. The fear. The sense of isolation. It’s unbearable for many people. EJ  In Girl’s offstage space there are tales of people starving, without shelter, committing suicide. Yet, you have parallel realities in Girl as well. You have Gene and Kate saying their goodbyes while singing a song that represents them in another dimension. Elias dies and again remerges from elsewhere. CM Well that’s pure theatre. That’s where theatre is at its purest. It is illogical, yet everybody understands it. They want it, they know what it means. The Night Alive is a production that you can see is on the way to Girl, a huge amount of music, everything that’s happening is completely illogical, the opposite to everything that should be happening, and yet theatrically, it is the correct thing to happen. The transformational function of theatre. This is really why I am not into the whole political theatre thing. It comes 159

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back to a very simple thing that Billy Roche told me one time. He was in New York one time and maybe he was having a tough day and he went into St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue; a Catholic service was starting and the priest said, ‘We gather to celebrate the mystery of the mass.’ Billy said he realized, or was reminded, that celebrating the mystery is exactly what it’s all about. You need to get into those places. The first thing the Old Vic’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus said about Girl, was that ‘this is a religious service’. He understood it as a nativity play. It comes in a secular guise, but that’s particularly satisfying because audiences are getting something they didn’t particularly know they wanted. It has all these strange oppositional transformations – essentially resurrections. Relationships are resurrected, people are resurrected, and even at the end where you see those telegraph poles, essentially, they are the three crosses of Calvary. Marianne has a baby, nobody knows who the father is. Sheila (Atim, playing Marianne) asked me about the baby, and I said to her ‘This is of no help to you, but that is God’. And I think it actually was a help to her. I suspected it wouldn’t be. But she took it on board and was able to relax into the part. EJ  You have the narrator (Dr Perry) outlining the demise of certain characters, the survival of others, but then you have a Thanksgiving-type family meal going on in silence that counters the circumstances that the doctor is describing. That offers the eternal within that bleaker reality. CM  And the beautiful thing is that becomes real for the audience. That moment is real. It’s happening before their eyes. And they take it with them. And many of them came back for it again and again; people who came and saw the play five or six times. To me that’s pure theatre, where it’s at its most powerful. EJ  The ending of The Night Alive time and space coalesce, with the play entering into an eternal moment. The use of music at this moment links to the use of music in Girl. Sound and song escort you in that direction. CM  It’s as old as the hills. It is very basic. Very ancient, very powerful, and it still has its power. EJ  Again, in terms of endings, you have said about The Weir, it was a play nose-diving towards doom and then it puts itself out of that dive and becomes something other. The Seafarer does likewise.

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CM It is the resurrection. People love that type of oppositional force happening. It is a nice feeling. EJ  I want to get a comment from you on the issue of naming in plays. There are various characters named John, Joe, Carol, Helen, Niamh and variations on the name Mary, (Maria, Marion, Mari, Maura, Marianne) in particular. How conscious a decision is that? CM  Usually I don’t think about names too much. But in Girl, it is a little more conscious. There are a lot of biblical echoes in the names. Elizabeth is Mary’s aunt in New Testament. Marianne goes away with a Joseph. Elias is the Hebrew word for lamb; and he is sacrificed in the play. EJ  In Port Authority, you have suggested in a piece in The Guardian, prior to the play’s premier, that the three male narrators are connected, as if they might be one and the same person? So there is something more complex than single modes of subjectivity going on … . CM  It could be that they are the same character, simply starting out from different time periods. EJ  In interviews over the years, you have made various comments on the gender of your characters. In the writing of Paula, you suggested that you could write women characters that could be just as messy as your male ones? CM  When I was younger I tended to idealize women as the more healing sex, men were the sicker, wounded, stupid and dangerous sex. As you get older, you realize that this is not the case, everybody is crazy, and women can be as self-destructive and as lost as men. Allowing everyone to have the freedom to be in the same mess is very important in stories. Idealizing anybody is only doing them a disservice. EJ  Denise Gough’s performance as Paula was a deeply complex one. Yet some reviewers brought a moral viewpoint to bear in relation to her casual sex activities and got hung up on promiscuity. CM  Well that’s their hang up. Paula has sex with two guys in the whole series.

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EJ  All the plays share complex modes of transacting. In Girl a father, Nick Laine, tries to marry off his daughter, Marianne, to an elderly male. She refuses that transaction. Elizabeth Laine says in a whorehouse you can name your own price. Money, price and value connect in a complicated fashion. CM  Nick is a desperate figure, he is trying to do everything he can, but there is also a real generosity to him. Although he is beats up his wife and is selling his daughter, he is constantly serving everybody too. As a playwright, I’m always conscious of Strindberg’s theory that characters need to do contradictory things to make them as real as possible. In The Night Alive, I was allowing this to happen in a big way too. EJ  In Girl, Nick insists on getting paid for everything, late night arrivals do not get a drink on the house, whereas in The Weir, it is an also notfor-profit pub. CM  It is almost an honour thing, not accepting anything. EJ  The two plays that bring you to extremes are the American ones: The Birds and Girl. CM  Maybe because I don’t know as much about those places culturally I had to get right onto the edge of experience so that it is recognizable across cultures. EJ  As I regularly teach The Weir, I read it again and again, and always discover new things. CM  Well I never realized how resonant that play would be. Of course, over time I’ve come to accept how it seems to resonate with people. When directors ask me for advice with The Weir, I can only suggest they should dig under the most inconsequential line that the characters have to say. You need to find where everything is coming from. Nothing is thrown away. It might seem like it is, but I realize now that none of it is. EJ  You have spoken about God, religion, the universe, mystery and the supernatural: all of these blend together. The work all seems to go in the direction of an eternal perspective?

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CM It just comes down to the question that Heidegger raises, and is something the Greeks proposed; why is there something rather than nothing? Everything comes from there. In The Veil, Hannah’s realization is that only nothingness is holy, because it is the most alien concept we can conceive of. Once you have experienced existence there can’t be nothingness. We can’t even conceive of it. The miracle of existence itself is beyond our understanding – and that is enough for me. That’s enough to sustain me. Just because you don’t know the meaning of something doesn’t mean it is meaningless. EJ  What are you working on now, and where is your work going? CM  The last few years were very busy. Several projects that had been in gestation for a long time all suddenly went into production at once. I found myself writing my BBC series, Paula, while preparing Girl from the North Country, while also working on a screenplay adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl for the Walt Disney Company. So I have purposely pulled back from writing this year in order to allow the field lie fallow for a while. I am currently casting the New York production of Girl from the North Country, which I will direct later this year. After that I have no idea what the future holds. That’s the scary part, but also what keeps things interesting for sure.

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CONOR MCPHERSON’S HAUNTED WOMEN: THE WEIR, THE VEIL AND PAULA Lisa Fitzpatrick

Introduction This essay looks at the representation of haunted and haunting female characters in Conor McPherson’s dramas The Weir (1997), The Veil (2011) and Paula (2017). The first two of these are written for the stage, and Paula is written for television. Each of these works presents a female protagonist that functions as the locus or the catalyst for the supernatural, uncanny or fantastic. In Weir the only woman on the stage, the newly arrived Valerie, provokes an evening of storytelling in the village pub where the male characters revisit their experiences of ghosts and of the supernatural. In Veil the young betrothed woman Hannah functions as the threshold between the natural and supernatural worlds. Her manifestation of a child-ghost reveals the guilty secret of one of the male protagonists and leads to his suicide. In Paula the eponymous central character is similarly a point of contact between the world of living and that of the dead, with fatal consequences for most of the men she encounters. These characters have all had intimate experience of death: Valerie through the death of her small child Niamh, and Paula through a childhood experience of death and resuscitation. Hannah lost her father to suicide, and is herself in a liminal state as a woman who is not yet married, but is no longer single. In the transitional state of betrothal, she becomes vulnerable to the encroachment of the supernatural world.1 This essay explores these works as examples of the literary genres of the uncanny and the fantastic. I am defining the fantastic from Tzvetan Todorov, who identifies it as a literary genre and describes it as follows: In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know … there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses … – the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. … The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose 164

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one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous.2 The uncanny results when a rational solution is provided for the fantastic event, while the marvellous is a genre that demands the reader or spectator accept a supernatural explanation. McPherson sometimes demands this of his audience, as, for example, when a ghost appears on stage at the end of his 2004 play Shining. More commonly however, he leaves the audience to decide whether the narrated or performed events have a rational explanation, or are accounts of supernatural experiences. Sigmund Freud uses the term ‘uncanny’ to translate the German word unheimlich. Unheimlich is the opposite of heimlich or heimisch, meaning homely, familiar, native, belonging to the home.3 As a psychological and aesthetic concept, the unheimlich or uncanny ‘belongs to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror’, and is a sub-genre or category of the fearful or dreadful. Freud defines it as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’.4 He traces the etymology of these two terms (heimlich and unheimlich) to argue that ‘everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light’. It therefore reflects that which was repressed, but which has re-emerged; something simultaneously frightening and unsettling, yet familiar and long-remembered. As Emilie Morin comments, ‘Ghost appearances and ghost-seeing in McPherson’s plays remain peculiarly connected to the domestic, the homely.’5 Theatre critic Julie Carpenter, in her review of McPherson’s Veil, remarks of the play that ‘what really haunts us are our own past actions and mistakes’.6 This is a recurring theme in McPherson’s writing; and from some of his earliest works the focus of a male character’s grief and regret takes the form of a girl or a woman. In Thief (1994) the unnamed narrator reflects on his life, recounting his kidnapping of a young woman and her daughter when he was part of a criminal gang. As the events unfolded, he was beaten unconscious by other gang members who then murdered the woman and the little girl. In the closing lines of the play, from his prison cell, he comments ‘sometimes when the clouds are low’ he thinks of them.7 This Lime Tree Bower (1995) shows Joe, a young teenage boy, haunted by his friend’s rape of a semi-conscious young girl. Joe is both titillated and nauseated by the scene he witnessed, which he replays over and over in his memory. The event is a coming-of-age trauma for him, as he has difficulty reconciling his friend’s brutal actions with his own happy experiences of 165

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their friendship: he is torn between horror at the crime and his loyalty to his friend. The closing line of the play is ‘I can still see the girl.’8 In Come (2001) Matthew confesses to his sexual abuse of a child, his actions having left him physically and psychologically disfigured. From Jack’s poignant monologue in the closing scenes of Weir (1997) to the regrets of John and Ian in Shining (2001), through to Veil (2011) and Paula (2017), male characters in McPherson’s plays reflect upon significant or troubling experiences with women, and encounter female characters that reawaken potent memories of guilt, grief and loss.

The Weir: Female invasion of masculine space Weir is set in a rural pub in the west of Ireland. Although the play is set in the present of 1997 and the early Celtic Tiger years, the pub has been untouched for decades. There is an old television on the wall and a radio behind the bar, the toilets are outside in the yard, old black and white photographs depict significant events in the history of the town and the furniture is basic. Although the presence of the television and radio indicate that there are channels of communication between this space and the world beyond the pub, the age of the technology suggests that this communication is limited and of little interest. The black and white photographs recording ‘a ruined abbey; people posing near a newly erected ESB (electric) weir; a town in a cove with mountains around it’,9 semiotically suggest a similar lack of engagement with the contemporary world: the town is defined by ruins and historic events and is cut off from the rest of the world by the surrounding landscape. The stage lights come up on the empty space, and then Jack enters and pours himself a drink, paying for it at the till, his actions indicating his familiarity with the pub and its proprietor. Brendan, the barman, enters second. Their conversation with its relaxed back and forth banter reinforces the impression of a local pub with its long-standing relationships between the customers and owner. Jim enters next, bringing news that Finbar – the local businessman – has been seen driving an unknown woman in his car. Finbar’s entry shortly afterwards with the woman, who is introduced as Valerie, rapidly shifts the dynamic of the conversation. The men welcome her, and the conversation turns to the photographs on the wall, the building of the weir and the beauty of the countryside. From the weir’s construction it shifts to the subject of the fairies and to a fairy fort on Brendan’s land. 166

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This leads to the first story of the night, told by Jack, about a fairy road that runs through the house Valerie is renting. It is typical of an old rural tale told by the fire in the days before electric lighting; it is inconclusive, familiar from folklore and quaintly charming. After a while, as the conversation continues, Finbar recounts his experience with a young local girl who used a Ouija board and may have summoned evil spirits. Like Jack, Finbar offers a natural explanation for what he thinks he saw. While the first story is predicated on an historical belief in fairies, the second is based on a genre of Hollywood horror films and exploits a more widespread cultural unease at the thought of disturbing the dead or invoking demons. The girl believes she saw a ghost: ‘Niamh was going hysterical saying there was something on the stairs. Like, no one else could see it. But she could. And it was a, a woman, looking at her’ (42). Then the family gets a phone call to tell them that ‘an aul one who lived next door [to their old home] who used to mind Niamh and the other sisters when they were young and all this, who was bedridden, had been found dead at the bottom of the stairs. … And all right, whatever, coincidence’ (43). Sitting alone in the room that night, Finbar is unable to move for fear that the old woman is standing on the stairs watching him. Thus, the story weaves a ‘real’ death into the familiar trope of the Ouija board, so that it remains fantastic by retaining its ambivalence, but it is given added credence by a series of coincidences. Like the horror film audience, the onstage audience enjoys the frisson of fear before all agree on a rational explanation. When the dawn came Finbar ‘was grand’, and ‘obviously there was nothing there’ (43–4). The third story is more troubling than either of the others. Jim tells of being employed to dig a grave in the churchyard of a neighbouring town, and of a man moving among the graves and asking for a different grave to be opened, one alongside a little girl. Afterwards, Jim finds out that the dead man was a paedophile and when he sees the photograph in the newspaper he believes that it was the same man who spoke to him in the churchyard. But, he reminds his audience, he was very ill that day with a high fever: ‘I was dying with the ’flu … I was boiling’ (31). Valerie asks him if he thinks it was a hallucination, and he replies that it might have been. The rhythm and pattern of the performance gently guides the audience through these stories as they progress from folklore and tradition, to the stuff of horror film, to the contemporary horror of child sexual abuse. These three stories all centre on women and girls: the old woman’s childhood experience with the fairies, the teenage girl’s conjuring with the occult and the child pursued by a malevolent ghost in the graveyard. Between each 167

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story is a gap for conversation, for a return to the everyday, to order more drinks and to use the toilets. The men are perhaps engaged in a storytelling competition as they vie for Valerie’s attention. But there is a shift in tone and in atmosphere when Valerie turns the conversation to lead into her own story: ‘Something happened to me. That just hearing you talk about it tonight. It’s important to me. That I’m not … bananas’ (37). Valerie’s story, unfolding in the silent pub, describes the death of her small daughter. The child wanted to learn to swim. She was a ‘bright, outgoing, happy girl’ with one problem: she was afraid of the dark (57). She had nightmares of children knocking in the wall, and of a man watching her from across the road (57). Valerie tells the detail of the story, so that the audience has time to anticipate the outcome. The child was taking part in a sponsored swim at her school. Valerie was delayed at work and when she got to the pool the ambulance was there, the pool was empty, and the teacher and other children were crying. Even when she is told her daughter is hurt, she doesn’t absorb the information: ‘And I didn’t believe it was happening. I thought it must have been someone else’ (58). But the child is dead, and Valerie describes her withdrawal into her own grief and the silent passage of months. Then one day, when she was alone in the house, the phone rang. It was her lost daughter, frightened, saying that ‘she was scared. And there were children knocking in the walls and the man standing across the road, and he was looking up and he was going to cross the road. And would I come and get her?’ (60). She explains, ‘I knew she was gone. But to think wherever she was … that … . And there was nothing I could do about it’ (60). The men, shocked and dismayed, offer natural explanations – she was dreaming, or it was the shock of the bereavement distorting her senses. In an effort to undo the earlier stories they also offer natural explanations for them. The play, however, retains its ambiguity, never confirming nor denying Valerie’s story or the stories of the men. As the group disperses at the end of the night only Jack, Brendan and Valerie are left on stage. Jack tells them of his dreadful loneliness in his old age and of the young woman who haunts his memories. It is a tale of regret and remorse, of his ill treatment of the girl he loved, and of her eventual marriage to another man. He concludes: Ah, you get older and look back on why you did things, and you see that a lot of the time, there wasn’t a reason. You do a lot of things out of pure cussedness. … She wrote and said that she was getting 168

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married to a fella. … 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. (45–6) His regret for his actions is expressed in the line ‘there’s not one morning I don’t wake up with her name in the room’ (47). His story seems to be one he has not previously shared, even though it was a profound event that radically altered the rest of his life. The event haunts him but is largely repressed; there is nothing he can do now to change the outcome. As the play winds gently to a close, he tells Valerie ‘This has been a strange little evening for me. … It was lovely to meet you … I didn’t mean to go on there. … Something about your company. Inspiring, ha? And this of course. (Glass)’ (70). Valerie is constructed as a character who is haunted by the death of her child, and by her regret that she was not at the pool that day so that she might have saved her. She is also haunted by the ghost of her little girl, manifested in the unexplained phone call. But her presence in the space of the pub, and her intrusion into the usual life of the village, also acts as a catalyst for the other characters to share their experience of ghosts, of frightening events and of the griefs that haunt them. As Jack notes, her company has made for a ‘strange little evening’ (70). Weir belongs to the genre of the fantastic because the conclusion remains ambiguous. All of the supposedly supernatural experiences can be explained with reference to the rules of the natural world. No final explanation – either natural or supernatural – is confirmed; each story is potentially nothing more than the effects of alcohol, unsettling coincidences and the dark of the night or grief and trauma. Notably too, the ghosts are all manifestations of the familiar or heimlich transformed into the frightening and unsettling. Local rural tales of fairies and fairy forts are part of a rich vein of Irish folklore of fairies, banshees and other supernatural manifestations that is only recently forgotten. The building of the weir and the installation of electricity in the village had a major impact on belief in the supernatural, as Jack comments: ‘There’s no dark like a winter night in the country’ (21). Thus, the least frightening story is that of the fairy road, which in many ways is heimlich rather than unheimlich. The story of the Ouija board, however, draws the familiar spaces of the village and the interior of Finbar’s house but recasts them as the site for a sequence of events borrowed from the world of Hollywood film. The foreignness of the Ouija board is mitigated by the discovery that the phantom presence haunting the young girl, and 169

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Finbar, is a former babysitter, a familiar presence whose existence had been largely forgotten as the girl grew older and more independent. The arrival of the priest to bless the house is an element in a number of the film narratives, and also a feature of traditional Irish cultural life. It is perhaps with Jim’s story of the paedophile in the churchyard that the repressed is most explicitly materialized on the stage. The ruined Abbey in the onstage photographs can be read as a visual cue to the diminishing power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, as is Finbar’s story of the Ouija board. But Jim’s story also links the paedophile to the church that performs his funeral, though when this play was written and first performed that history had yet to be fully exposed. The image of the paedophile haunting the churchyard suggests the suppressed knowledge in Irish society of the reality of sexual abuse by members of the clergy,10 which was quite literally unspeakable for many decades. It also suggests the suppression of that same knowledge by and within the church, as part of a culture of secrecy. As this secrecy begins to break apart in the time that the play was written and first staged, the image comes to reflect reality as well as a possible supernatural event. The arrival of Valerie into the community wakens this repressed knowledge, memory and folk belief. She is a disruptive element because she comes from outside the area, and she is a woman in a homosocial group – only Finbar is married and his wife does not appear on stage. The text expresses the disruption she creates in details like the excitement among the local men at the news of a strange woman. Indeed, their first thought when they see Finbar with her in his car is that he might be having an affair or at least indulging in a flirtation that they do not approve of (9–10). Inside the pub, her request for a glass of white wine marks her as different from the rest of the customers who drink beer and spirits, and Brendan has to go and find a bottle of wine in the house. When she asks to use the restroom she must again be directed to the house because the women’s toilet is out of order. She is thus out of place in the male space of the bar, and the awkward bonhomie and unsettling stories suggest a degree of hostility from the men, faced with this departure from their familiar routine. Their dominance within the space is expressed in their control of the storytelling evening, until she tells a story that is more distressing and tragic than any of theirs. In doing so, she shifts the dynamic of the storytelling competition to focus on grief, terror and helplessness, and finally profound sadness and regret in both her story and Jack’s. It is Jack who opens and closes the play, with Valerie’s presence offering him an opportunity for meaningful reflection 170

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and communication with his friends. The quality of the dialogue shifts from the phatic communication of the opening scene, where Brendan and Jack work through a clearly familiar verbal ritual that establishes the defined parameters of their comradeship, to the communication of personal and very emotional information in the closing scenes.

The Veil: The young bride as a liminal character As in Weir, the action of Veil is motivated by a female character: seventeenyear-old Hannah Lambroke, the only daughter of a struggling Anglo-Irish estate owner, who is about to be married to a young English nobleman. The money from this match will save the family home, or at least provide some financial security for the remaining family members. The action is set in 1822 against a backdrop of revolutionary activity and minor acts of vandalism by the estate’s tenants, many of whom are no longer able or willing to pay rent. The poverty and recurring threat of famine are referenced in the characters’ dialogue about the desperation of the starving people they see in the countryside, and the dreadful conditions endured by the tenants who live in dangerously run-down housing. The characters include Hannah’s mother Madeleine and her great-grandmother Grandie; the household staff Mr Fingal, Mrs Goulding and Clare; and Madeleine’s cousin the defrocked clergyman Berkeley, and his friend Charles Audelle. These latter two are to escort Hannah to England for her wedding day. Berkeley is a spiritualist, as is Audelle, and they are using this opportunity to explore what they believe is supernatural activity in the house. This expositionary information is provided in opening scenes between Fingal, Mrs Goulding the housekeeper and Madeleine Lambroke. The dialogue also tells of Hannah’s father’s suicide in the family dining room, and that Hannah discovered his body; she was a child of nine or ten at the time. Before she arrives on stage, the audience are informed that this experience has marked her in strange ways: she hears voices, and is fascinated with a nearby fairy fort or burial mound referred to variously as Knocknashee (the hill of the fairies) or the Queen’s Grave. When the play opens, late at night, Fingal and Madeleine have been out searching for Hannah and found her at Knocknashee. As the dialogue continues Madeleine remarks that Hannah says she can ‘hear someone singing, or crying, I forget which’ when she plays the piano. Hannah comments in a later scene that she hears someone shouting at her.11 As the play unfolds following the arrival of Berkeley and 171

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Audelle, there is a séance which appears to invoke the catastrophic, offstage collapse of some of the cottages killing the families within them. A further séance results in the apparition of a small child, and a near-breakdown on Hannah’s part. She reports hearing and seeing ghostly figures and becomes convinced that she should not leave the estate. Audelle and Berkeley try to convince the other characters that some spirits are ‘somehow caught between this world and the next’ (226). The play’s title, Veil, refers to the metaphor of the veil concealing the spirit world from this natural world; though Mrs Goulding also quotes Daniel O’Connell as speaking of a ‘veil of confusion’ (245) on his recent appearance at Loughferry, and this is a possibly ironic comment on Audelle and Berkeley’s inchoate spiritualist theories. Hannah is drawn as an unusual, even unlikely, character. She is learned and independent-minded, and she has a counterpart in her senile greatgrandmother Grandie, who makes rare enigmatic pronouncements. Hannah is aware that Audelle has been accused of plagiarizing Hegel for example, suggesting that her reading material is extensive and uncensored and that she is aware of literary scandals among the London intelligentsia. How she manages this as an early-nineteenth-century teenage girl in the Irish countryside is not explained. Her capacity to engage in intellectual debate, however, functions within the drama to shape the play’s focus into rumination on Hegelian philosophy. Berkeley and Audelle believe that Hannah has heard her father’s spirit and are curious to discover more. Their official purpose of accompanying her to her wedding is in part a ruse to visit the family’s home and to further their own spiritualist investigations. As in Weir, the central female character becomes a locus for the male characters’ curiosity, then fear and grief: through her presence Audelle confronts his darkest regrets. During the play’s second séance Hannah seemingly becomes possessed by the spirit of her father. She sings a love-song in a ‘strident’ voice and then demands to see her child. Berkeley is certain she is possessed and calls her by her father’s name: ‘You can no longer see your child, Edward, because you died here’ (268). But Hannah quickly confounds his interpretation by insisting that she is Hannah and that she is looking for her child; and that she is trapped ‘in the room’ (269). As she struggles with Berkeley, a very small child appears in the open doorway and stands looking at Audelle ‘before turning and leaving in the gloom’ (270). Hannah believes that the apparition foretells her own future: that she will die in childbirth leaving a daughter without a mother. But Audelle has recognized the little ghost as 172

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his own lost daughter, whose death haunts him every day. His last words to the assembled group are: ‘Such is your gift, you saw Hell, Miss Hannah. But it was my hell. The nightmare unto which each morning delivers me and each evening awakens me to contemplate’ (299). He commits suicide shortly afterwards. While the play offers a number of ghostly stories, particularly from Hannah but also from Madeleine, it is the two men who insist that these manifestations are evidence of the spirit world. Their own hauntings are more prosaic: they are haunted by regret, by grief, and by the things they have done and failed to do. Emilie Morin argues that in McPherson’s plays there is a ‘gendered division between those who can communicate with and those who can only speak about the dead’.12 In Weir and Veil the male characters ‘initiate séances or proceedings recalling the séance, a power beyond the reach of McPherson’s women, who remain under male protection’. She argues that these ghost tales therefore reiterate conventional gender binaries of male/female, active/passive, protection/vulnerability.13 This is arguably true. However, it is repeatedly female characters who are gatekeepers of the supernatural, often with dangerous or fatal consequences for the male characters. As with Weir, the supernatural elements in Veil are left unconfirmed and ambiguous. Hannah’s early apparitions are arguably a symptom of untreated childhood trauma, whereby she is repeatedly plunged into an aural landscape of distress (someone shouting) when she is engaged in a pleasurable activity (playing the piano). The phenomenon that Berkeley immediately diagnoses as a spirit trapped and unable to progress to the next world, might equally be diagnosed as the return of the repressed: the memory of her parents’ fighting and her father’s suicide. Other supernatural manifestations are attributable to the laudanum that Audelle gives her, and to the actions of the two men as they call upon spirits to make themselves known. Madeleine insists that her own experience of a ghost was only a young girl’s bad dream. Even the appearance of the little, pale child in the dimly lit doorway is explicable as the intrusion of a child from the estate into the private house. As in Weir, the play is an example of the fantastic; and again, the uncanny is materialized in the character of the young bride, whose betrothed status makes her a liminal character. She is thus enabled to move in the shadowy gaps between the natural world, and the hints of a supernatural landscape that lies just beyond it. In Veil the danger to the male characters of contact with supernatural, and with the female character, is greater than in Weir. While in the earlier play the effect is a ‘strange 173

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evening’ as Jack remarks, and his reflection on personal sorrow, in Veil the result is Audelle’s suicide. In Paula, the danger posed by the eponymous character is even more deadly. Paula: The female protagonist and the ‘steps up from hell’ McPherson’s three-part television drama Paula was first broadcast on BBC 2 in May 2017. The reviews of the series were mixed. Although McPherson’s characterization and dialogue were praised, as was the atmospheric cinematography, the convoluted action was criticized in a number of publications. There are significant gaps and inconsistencies in the plot, and Paula’s power over the men she encounters is never given a clear explanation. The series, which is set in Dublin, opens at a school rugby match. Science teacher Paula Denny has been having an affair with her colleague, married sports teacher Philip Byrden. She has ended the relationship, but he is still in love with her and actively pursues her to continue their romance. In the first episode, Paula discovers rats in the basement of her house and employs James, a handsome young workman, to carry out repairs. James is living with two women, Crystal and Morgan, both of whom have children by him, but he tells Paula these women are his cousins. When he finishes work they share a drink and then have sex. Although he and Paula agree that it will not happen again, James becomes obsessed with her and jealous of Philip, whom he murders. He dumps Philip’s body in a lake to make it look like suicide. Mac, the detective who is assigned to the case, also quickly becomes embroiled in a sexual relationship with Paula. James continues his murderous rampage, fatally injuring Paula’s drug-addicted brother in a fire and attacking Mac and Paula in a restaurant washroom. Various sub-plots twist and turn to the conclusion, in which Paula drugs James and buries him beneath the floor of her basement, setting up an air pipe and a drip to keep him alive but interred. In the final scene of the drama she tells Mac that she is pregnant. When he asks whose it is (there are three possible fathers) she replies: ‘It’s mine’, as the camera cuts between close-ups of James alive in his coffin, Mac, and Paula, before fading to black. The screenplay leaves a number of questions unanswered, and there are sub-plots that seem to have no real function. Some of the information that Paula shares about herself offers unresolved information about her character that is not borne out by the action. Some of the action – like her suffocating her dying brother in the hospital to cut short his suffering – is simply implausible. However, the construction of the central character 174

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as closely aligned with the supernatural is an intriguing element of the work. Paula tells Mac that she died as a child in an (unintentionally erotic) choking incident with her brother, when they were camping in the family’s back garden. She claims that she entered another realm where she lived for many years with a different family, growing to adulthood in this other world. However, when she was revived she returned to the natural world as if only a few minutes had passed. This experience, she says, has left her without emotions; she is different from other people. James tells Mac that Paula can show him ‘the steps up from Hell’, an echo of Audelle’s words to Hannah in Veil: ‘Such is your gift, you saw Hell, Miss Hannah. But it was my hell’. Like Audelle, James is haunted by the ghost of a little girl, in this case his sister. A lengthy sub-plot explores the disappearance of James’s sister when they were children, and the possibility that he killed her when their violent father imprisoned them in a cupboard in the family home. The child first appears to James immediately after his first sexual encounter with Paula, as he drives home in his van: a pale-faced child with her lips sewn shut. James attributes this vision to Paula’s ability to reconnect him to the supernatural. As in the other plays, the female protagonist reawakens a traumatic and repressed memory in a central male character. Paula does so through her connection to the supernatural world, a connection gained through her experience of dying. Paula draws upon a set of vivid images that invoke silencing and repression of trauma, notably the child with the sewn-up mouth and the rat-infested basement. The closed space of the basement, lying below the house that is open to the outside world through its doors and windows, suggests what is secret and repressed. The action in the drama, which revolves around lies, deceit and secrets, returns repeatedly to that space. In the opening episode, noise from the basement interrupts Philip and Paula’s lovemaking and draws them downstairs together where the sight of rats motivates her first contact with James. James is very much associated with that space, since his work in her house is sited there, and it is where she finally traps and inters him. Even his comment that she has ‘shown him the steps up from hell’ become imaginatively intertwined with the steps up from the basement, in the horrific conclusion that leaves him buried alive (Episode 3, 55:55). The basement also becomes a physical manifestation of the lies and deceits that the various characters engage in. These include Philip’s infidelity, which is presented visibly to the audience in a scene where he responds to a blackmail call from James and leaves his wife and children to go and meet him. His furtive withdrawal from a communal family space 175

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to his bedroom to take the call, the lies that he tells to leave the house and his desperate offer of money to buy James’s silence illustrate his fear of being discovered. Paula’s scene at home with her parents, and the lies that must be told to preserve their image of her drug-addicted brother, reinforce the viewers’ sense of the characters’ loneliness and self-deceptions, and their inability to speak openly with each other. Even the atmospheric lighting in Paula’s house with its deep shadows visually hints at what is hidden and secret. The conclusion, in which James is buried alive beneath the floor of Paula’s basement, to be potentially kept alive with a breathing tube and a feeding tube, links the two characters through the juxtaposed filmic cuts, not possible in live performance. The horror of the ending, and the final shots that connect his panic in his coffin to Paula’s stare at the camera, seems to join the two characters at a psychic level, as if she can see into his experience. As the shots show the ghost of James’ small sister crawling up beside him, Paula reveals to Mac that she is pregnant. Her pregnancy, and the baby’s uncertain paternity, is linked to James by this final sequence: she stares into the camera, then turns away into night-time Dublin. The scene fades to black. In this drama’s evocation of the supernatural, Paula is perhaps an example of what Todorov calls ‘the marvellous’, because the audience are called upon to enter into a fictional world that does not operate by the rules of the natural world. Paula seems to present us with examples of ghosts and to demand that we accept their existence. Some of these phantoms are explicable according to the rules of the natural world: only James, wracked with guilt, sees the ghost of his little sister. Paula’s story of dying and of the other world is easily explicable as a hallucination or a false memory caused by her asphyxiation. She does see Philip’s ghost, however, and while this may be a manifestation of her guilt and grief she is also constructed as a character that bridges the worlds of the natural and supernatural. She is simultaneously a locus of secrets: for Philip, regarding their affair; for her family, in its refusal to see her brother’s problems; for James, with his secret guilt at his sister’s death, and in her own solitary and enigmatic personality.

Conclusions These three plays by McPherson exemplify Todorov’s genre of the fantastic in their presentation of events ‘which cannot be explained by the laws of this 176

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same familiar world’.14 The fantastic exists within the moment of ambiguity, ceding way then to either the uncanny (if there is a natural explanation) or the marvellous (if the explanation is a supernatural one). In these plays the female protagonists – Valerie, Hannah and Paula – are constructed as loci for the uncanny and as the point where repressed memories re-emerge and trouble the male characters. In each case, the female characters disrupt the ordered lives of the male protagonists, whose darkest secrets and most sorrowful regrets are reawakened through contact with them. As catalysts for this remembering process, Valerie, Hannah and Paula are closely interlinked with the uncanny or unheimlich, through their encounters with death and their shared fascination with the supernatural. The evocation in these three works of the male character’s darkest regrets and most painful, buried memories suggests that female characters function in McPherson’s work as recurring trope for the exploration of grief and regret.

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NARRATIVITY AND THE NARRATOR FIGURE IN CONOR MCPHERSON’S PORT AUTHORITY, THE VEIL AND GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY Maha Alatawi The novel has been for a long time the most investigated genre of narratological studies. Yet, recent research has indicated a growing interest in the recognition of drama as a narrative genre. By applying concepts typically associated with fiction such as focalization, point of view, narrative voice and narrative time, and by categorizing the different types of narrators for drama such as generative and monodramatic narrators, the diegetic elements in the narrative experiments of contemporary playwrights have been increasingly analysed. I will illustrate some of the narratological concepts the analyses draw on. Brian Richardson coins the term ‘generative narrator’ which he defines as the kind of heterodiegetic narrator ‘whose diegetic discourse engenders the ensuing mimetic action’.15 (S/he generates the fictional world enacted by characters on the stage.) In memory plays, Richardson identifies the homodiegetic narrator who also participates in the action he or she recounts.16 Richardson distinguishes the monodramatic narrator, from the generative narrator. While the generative narrator remains on a different ontological level to other characters (with the possibility of stepping down into the characters’ world), the monodramatic narrator is ‘a character alone on stage that expresses verbally the series of thoughts and emotions passing through his or her mind’.17 Narration in the form of on- and offstage narrators or characters telling each other’s stories, and in the form of monologists appear in most twentiethcentury drama has increasingly become a basic element of the techniques of playwrights. Here are some contrasting examples. In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945), the narrator both recounts and acts in the story he is telling. As the play begins, he identifies himself as the narrator of the play and also a character in it, which makes him a homodiegetic narrator. A good example of the generative narrator is the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938). His narration alternates with the mimetic action of the town’s inhabitants. As in Our Town, the kind of narration in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944) is heterodiegetic as the narrator points to the stage to direct actors to enact the narrative. Brecht’s storyteller is a generative narrator because he remains ontologically distinct from the story world he creates. 178

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Henry Carr in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1975) exemplifies the fraudulent narration or the unreliable narrator. Now an elderly man in 1974, he inaccurately reminisces the events of 1917 and his encounters with well-known figures in Zurich. Narration also occupies a prominent position in the plays of Samuel Beckett. The monodramatic narrator is seen in, for example, A Piece of Monologue (1980) in which a man, wearing a white nightgown and identified as Speaker, tells what appears to be his own life story. However, the interiority of a single consciousness and the reliability of the narration is problematized in the rambling utterance of Mouth in Beckett’s Not I (1972). In Harold Pinter’s Landscape (1969), two characters, a couple Beth and Duff, recount autonomously different events. Duff seems to address Beth who doesn’t look at him or hear his voice. This array of diegetic narrative strategies is to be found in Conor McPherson’s plays. In Port, characters are monodramatic narrators fulfilling the staging of the human consciousness and the unreliability of the narrative. On the other hand, Veil and Girl demonstrate the interdependence of different narrative levels.

The diegetic monologue and the (un)reliability of narration in Port Authority Because narration is not alternating with enactment or mimetic action, the performativity of the monologue and the act of storytelling is foregrounded. In Port, unlike Come and Bower, three characters, seemingly unaware of each other’s presence, tell their different stories. If there are any stage directions, it is only the author’s note that proposes that ‘the play is set in the theatre’.18 The audience are, therefore, not alienated by a fictional space. Port’s Kevin, Dermot, and Joe are monodramatic narrators (as they stand alone on the stage addressing the audience). By the emphasis on homodiegetic narration, an individual experience by means of personal admission is presented. Monica Fludernik proposes what she terms ‘Experientiality’ which, she explains, ‘correlates with the evocation of consciousness or with the representation of a speaker role’.19 She continues, ‘In my model there can therefore be narratives without plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human (anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level.’20 Each of Port’s three characters represents a different stage in the life cycle, with accompanying anxieties, which are evident in their speech. Kevin uses childish language that is 179

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characterized by poor grammar: ‘All was in my room was a bed and a chair’ (135). Dermot speaks of ‘the embarrassment of having to present his wife’ to his new business colleagues (136), and the nostalgic Joe speaks of ‘all the longing that’s in you’ (158). Different parts of age and social spectrums are drawn together through the characters who address the audience directly. Narration alternates among the characters and coincides in similar details. These details provide the audience with clues as to what can be read as the embedded narrative. Dermot, first, mentions that O’Hagan’s mother died a few months previously and asked that her photo be sent to her next-door neighbour (168). Dermot is also mentioned as the name of Joe and Liz’s son (169). Kevin, then, says that he saw his grandfather at his grandmother’s funeral holding the rosary beads that she brought from Lourdes (178). Joe, at the end, refers to a similar rosary beads from Lourdes (185). These recurring details suggest that O’Hagan can be Marion’s son, Joe could be Kevin’s grandfather, and Dermot may be Joe’s son, or not? However, once established that the three are possibly connected, another intriguing interpretation emerges. For Nunning and Sommer, the dramatic monologue, like the memory play, ‘provides ample evidence of the use of unreliable narration’.21 This type of plays ‘involve first-person speakers whose disturbed perceptions, egotistic personalities, and problematic value-systems lead the reader to question the accuracy of their accounts’.22 In response to Wallace Martins’s claim that first-person narration has a privileged ontological status unlike the third-person narration which is subject to reliability concerns, Richardson explains that this is still problematic when it comes to drama. In regard to the view of the nonnarrativity of drama, Richardson says, ‘it is also presumed that dramatic representation is invariably objective, unmediated, devoid of subjectivity and, in Bakhtin’s terms, entirely monological’.23 But, the representation of consciousness and the interiority of an isolated self was staged in Strindberg’s A Dream Play years before James Joyce and Virginia Woolf used the technique in fiction.24 Moreover, the reliability of the narrative is challenged in, for example, Beckett’s Not I in which the stream of consciousness is problematized by the use of the third person and the narrator’s rambling speech.25 For Richardson, ‘the plot of the drama then is the gradual revelation that the narrator and the narrated are the same, that the ostensible “she” is the unspoken “I”’.26 This proves inaccurate the claim that narration in drama is objective and unmediated, and also proves that point-of-view theory can be applied to narration in drama and theatre.27 180

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For Vandevelde, ‘Strategies similar to the ones presented in Not I are often found in postmodernist plays, where they highlight the dependence of the story on the narrator figure who may constantly distort and quite possibly even invent the plot.’28 The three narrators in Port appear to have no access to each other’s stories. Yet, issues of unreliability stem from the resemblances already established among the three narratives. If O’Hagan is Marion’s son, then why is his surname different from his parents Marion and Tommy Ross. When Kevin mentions the Bangers, they are a struggling band. But in Dermot’s story, they are a huge success to the extent that O’Hagan asks Dermot to join them in Los Angeles for the Banger’s concert. In comparison to Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, Friel’s play introduces four homodiegetic monologues by three characters: Frank Hardy, his manager Teddy, and his wife Grace. The three narrators are distrusted because they tell contradictory accounts of their life together. On the other hand, the narrators in Port, and in McPherson’s plays more generally, appear to be more reliable.

Narrational instances in The Veil and Girl from the North Country While intradiegetic narration (characters telling stories to other characters) finds its utmost expression in Veil, Girl presents the homodiegetic narrator whose story reveals other levels of narrative. In Veil, intradiegetic narration takes the form of stories about miserable occurrences, ghosts and reminiscences about the past. This kind of narrative furthers the living conditions of Ireland in 1822, the time during which the play is set, beyond the events depicted on the stage. Throughout the play, the devastation that the 1822 famine brought to rural Ireland is constantly highlighted. McPherson depicts such social realities of Ireland at that time as poverty, hunger, deaths, epidemics and emigration which became characteristic of the Irish life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Neither the poor nor the rich have ‘the means’ to pay for things. Fingal tells Madeleine that thirty-seven of the tenants are waiting for the crops in the autumn in order to be able to pay rents, she shows that she has her own financial deficits when she admits her own inability to pay, ‘Yes, well, neither do I! Think how different it would be if there was a man in charge here.’29 A contagious fever has prevailed among children, as Mrs. Goulding points out that ‘nearly every child in the parish has scarlet fever, and her baby [her niece’s] got 181

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it’ and the baby ‘won’t last the night’ (216–17). The distress of the people is clearly pictured in the narrative descriptions of the ‘poor wretches who came into the yard for soup’ (239). Feelings of hatred and resentment have grown among people towards the Lambroke family. The destitute state of the place is summed up by the fact that Madeleine is trying to convince Hannah to pursue her future in England: ‘So what, you will remain here at Mount Prospect with its endless debts, enduring the hatred of those who rent your holdings, until you too are finally turfed out? You will be alone forever – stigmatized as a bumpkin from the colonies whose only dowry is the odour of our failure!’ (236). At different points of the play, we are reminded of riots that almost destroy Jamestown and intruders being shot. The intensity of such narratives is backed by the author’s stage directions. Fludernick talks about the narrativization of stage directions as a type of narrative influence on the drama. She gives the stage directions in Bernard Shaw’s work as an example for their ‘excessive length and unstable details’.30 That the author’s remarks and stage directions can be a narrative element in drama is also the case for Veil, where McPherson resorts to outlining setting and character descriptions as well as temporal frameworks. At times, his stage directions are also instructive as to how the staging should feel like, ‘The effect should be that the house has seen better days and needs some care’ (215). In contrast to the urban setting of Shining for example, McPherson borrows from the traditional pattern of ghost storytelling by setting Veil in an old mansion in 1822 rural Ireland, in a ‘gloomily lit’ room, trees outside which are ‘unseen in the darkness’ and heavy rain is falling (215). Moreover, stage directions indicating the sound of a rattling window and moving furniture that are included to enhance the terrifying mood of the séance scene: ‘Audelle has backed away towards the hall door near Grandie. Hannah goes to the fireplace, her head on her hands on the mantel. Berkeley tries to cajole her with a glass of water. He has his back to Audelle as the door opens. Audelle turns to face the music, expecting to see Madeleine, but a very small CHILD with a pale face and dark eyes stands looking at Audelle for a moment before turning and leaving in the gloom’ (270). The diegetic narrative quality of stage directions is enhanced by the convergence of mimetic and diegetic modes of representation. This can be exemplified in the simultaneous collapse of a property in the slum area shortly after the séance. Berkeley gives a long speech about his views on the timelessness of the infinite world of spirits in which he hypothesizes, ‘As human animals with material bodies we are unfortunately trapped always 182

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in this moment and we don’t know how to escape it. … Yet a spirit, a spirit exists in God’s time where all moments are one eternal moment and all time is now’ (252). The parallel connection between the physical world and that of spirits is clear in his speech, after which he prays for the wandering spirits, when all of a sudden, a terrifying bang is heard that displaces their cups and their ‘drinks go flying’ (253). A police constable shows up at the door to inform the family that some of their houses in Jamestown have collapsed. Hannah in her second conversation with Audelle raises the question whether there is a connection between Berkeley’s prayer and the collapse that causes numerous deaths, ‘Children have died, in property we owned and we heard something like a thunderclap here while we were … we were … . Well… whatever we were doing’ (256). Berkeley afterwards confirms, as he conflicts with Madeleine, that ‘the great clap of thunder here  – in this room – the night those wretches perished. Their pain was manifest here in that moment’ (283). This connection can also be illustrated through Franz Stanzel’s ‘mediacy’, a term designated to focus on how narrative is mediated rather than the narrated story. For Jan Alber and Fludernik, ‘Narratives can be mediated by narrators who tell and comment on the story or through agents who merely think, feel, or perceive.’31 Stanzel coined the term ‘mediacy’ to describe how the story is mediated in two ways. Either, the teller mode which requires a narrator who functions as the teller of the story. Or, the reflector mode in which the story is mediated through the consciousness of a reflectorcharacter. In the reflector mode, ‘the reader perceives the action through the eyes of the reflector character, and this veiled mediacy produces what Stanzel calls “the illusion of immediacy”’.32 A story, then, can be indirectly narrated through the consciousness of a protagonist. That is, Hannah’s consciousness and perceptions of the supernatural mediate the events in the play. The séance, and one can argue the play in general, can be read as a mimetic projection of Hannah’s fantasy. It is Hannah’s subconscious which controls the world of the story on stage. Girl demonstrates how McPherson takes his experiments with diegetic narrativity to a whole new level. In the play, three narrative levels can be discerned: Dr Walker’s act of telling as the metanarrative frame, stories told by characters as an intradiegetic layer of narration and the songs of Bob Dylan and the way they are integrated in the narrative. Girl can be recognized as a memory play and Dr Walker as its homodiegetic narrator. That is, he narrates the action in which he also participates. As he sets the scene for the story, he introduces Nick and Elizabeth, and, then, identifies 183

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himself as a doctor in the play. The diegetic narrative ceases for the mimetic part to begin. The single voice allows the action to unfold. Another division of the kinds of narrators to consider is the one proclaimed by Nunning and Sommer which classifies narration into intradiegetic and extradiegetic kinds of narrative.33 The extradiegetic recalls Richardson’s generative narrator; the one who generates the fictional world, while characters who tell stories within the work can represent intradiegetic narrators. As Richardson explains the generative narrator is on a different ontological level to the other characters and ‘whose diegetic discourse engenders the ensuing mimetic action’, yet it is still possible for them to step into the story world that they are narrating.34 In narratological terms, this is called ‘metalepsis’, which John Pier defines as an ‘intrusion into the storyworld by the extradiegetic narrator or by the narratee (or into deeper embedded levels), or the reverse’.35 The narrators in, for example, Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Tom Murphy’s The Patriot Game (1991) and Marina Carr’s The Mai (1994) are homodiegetic generative narrators who are also involved in the stories they tell. The same applies to Dr Walker. He is a generative narrator who steps down and interacts with the characters in the story he is telling as he plays the part of Elizabeth’s doctor. Moreover, he still can represent the extradiegetic level of communication: he frames and guides the metanarrative to the end. Intradiegetic short narratives are delivered by characters to each other throughout the play, providing details and evidence to support the overall narrative. As a preacher, Marlowe tells two stories to Mr Burke; one about a girl who is attacked in the woods and the other about an infant dying after a strong embrace from his mother. These stories are a prelude to his real intentions of blackmailing Mr Burke.36 On the other hand, this reveals how the Burkes have created a fiction about losing their business to cover their tracks and protect their son, Elias. In a way to convince Marianne to marry Mr. Perry, Nick tells her about going to his uncle’s funeral in Bakersfield: ‘All along the road? People living in tents. In tents! In the United States of America! Kids with no clothes on. All along the whole street into the town. There ain’t no net to catch us, Marianne. You get it? You get it’? (55). In her conversation with Joe Scott, Marianne talks about some ‘coloreds’ trying to rob a store the night before, insinuating the involvement of Scott and Marlowe, two escaped convicts. At the end of the play, Elizabeth tells ‘a love story’ which appears to be her story with Nick. As Nick has decided to end both his life and Elizabeth’s, this story ends with a request for them ‘to live a little longer’, and leads to a change of mind for Nick (100). 184

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Richardson explains that ‘memory plays have regularly appeared throughout the twentieth century. In postmodern variations of this type of play, many hitherto standard dramatic conventions are challenged or contested.’37 The simple act of narration is challenged in Girl, first, by the interruption of the narrator by characters and the direct contact with the narrator during the act of narration, second, by the way Dr Walker addresses the audience during his dance with Mrs Burke, third, by characters’ awareness and response to the narrative and, finally, by the contradiction between the diegetic part and the mimetic in the end of the play. Such variations allow for lucid shifts between narration (diegesis) and action (mimesis) given also that Dr Walker doesn’t completely step out of character during his narration of the story. What is even more challenging is the integration of songs along with narration and action. The songs and musical interludes that feature in many of theatrical works of McPherson should be viewed as invaluable in view of their thematic and structural significance to the overall narrative. For example, Seafarer ends with John Martyn’s ‘Sweet Little Mystery’; music composed by Neil Young features throughout Shining; and characters in Alive dance to Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going on’, which has been described as a fleetingly transcendent moment performed by ‘four whacked-out wastrels’.38 McPherson has also used music in his theatrical adaptations; for example, the adaptation of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s The Nest, featured an original score by the singer-songwriter and poet PJ Harvey. McPherson integrates music into the action that is taking place on the stage in order to heighten the dramatic potency of the theatrical performances, as well as to aid the progression of the narrative. Conventional musical theatre is driven by the written narrative first, and songs are often added at a later stage in order to bring to light the emotional states of the characters.39 In Girl, Dylan’s songs and music serve a different and also similar purpose; in addition, the performances are used as a method of interrogating the narrative, and are, therefore, separate and discrete elements of the action taking place on the stage. As Matthew Warchus, the artistic director of the Old Vic theatre, where the play was first performed in London, has eloquently pointed out, the ‘text and the songs [are] assertively independent of each other – a deliberate collision sometimes, and sometimes an embrace – yet somehow soulmates and walking in step’.40 In his Introduction to Girl McPherson has confirmed this by pointing out that ‘many of Mr Dylan’s songs can be sung at any time, by anyone in any situation, and still make sense and resonate with that particular place and 185

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person and time’ (1). McPherson goes on to point out that Dylan’s songs are comparable to more traditional forms of literature because they contain ‘images and conceits, … creating a new inner world’ (2). Therefore, Dylan’s songs in the play are used to create an additional narrative element that is both separate to the play and an integral part of the play. In terms of the effect of the music on the narrative, songs such as ‘I Want You’ (1966), which is sung by Gene and his ex-girlfriend Kate, are intended to underpin the feelings they have for each other. Furthermore, their emotions are made increasingly poignant by the knowledge that Kate is about to leave to be with someone else. Additional parallels between Dylan’s songs and the narrative can be made throughout the play; for example, when Nick refers to his financial state: ‘I don’t find that money, the banker gonna take everything. We’ll be like dust in the wind here’ (67), his statement is reinforced by lyrics from ‘Jokerman’ (1983): ‘Freedom just around the corner for you, but with the truth so far off, what good will it do?’ Throughout the play, Dylan’s songs are used to reinforce, as well as offer an additional narrative strand, and in this respect, the songs become an integral element of the narrative progression of Girl. McPherson’s plays employ a wide range of narratorial and narrative techniques. Port, Veil and Girl are exemplary of plays that introduce narrator figures, narrativize the stage directions and incorporate conversational narrative. This points to McPherson’s unique contribution to the deployment of diegesis in drama.

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‘YOU KNOW?’41 Ben Brantley These two monosyllables are spoken frequently in Conor McPherson’s Shining City, his 2004 play set in the office of a tyro therapist in Dublin. At first, the average theatregoer may not even be aware of their being said. After all, ‘you’ and ‘know’ are among the most basic words in the English language and, in combination, one of those verbal tics that punctuate the conversations of the inarticulate so frequently that they don’t really register. They are usually as invisible as the pauses proposed by commas. That’s the way they’re used in Shining City, too, as uttered by a perturbed widower named John, who is trying to come to terms with his wife’s death. But no word is ever just a space filler in the land of Conor McPherson, where rudimentary utterances acquire an otherworldly glow. Since I first encountered McPherson’s work, two decades ago, I’ve learnt that when watching – or reading – one of his plays, it is advisable never to discount any single thing that is said, including ‘you know’. Or perhaps especially ‘you know’. This has made writing about his plays, as a critic for the New York Times, an especially joyful challenge for me, with every new work and every revival. McPherson makes me listen hard, and hear echoes and implications in every simple syllable, in a way no other contemporary dramatist does. But back to ‘you know’. That innocuous seeming phrase captures both the essence of human communication in McPherson’s work and the aspirations of his art, which are as modest as they are vast. ‘You know’, followed by a question mark or an ellipsis, is a lifeline flung to others with optimism and despair. It could even be said to be the implicit plea behind every work of art. An awareness of that plea infuses all of McPherson’s writing, and it makes him one with the bewildered, garrulous characters of works, whether in full-length masterpieces like The Weir, Shining City and the magnificent The Night Alive or the short, trenchant monologues that make up The Good Thief and Port Authority. His characters first and foremost are storytellers. And they translate the Irish tradition of yarn spinning into a universal longing for connection that attentive American theatre loves picked up on as soon as his plays were first performed in New York in the late 1990s. Even if they appear to be talking only to themselves, McPherson’s men and women are of course talking to us, an audience of listeners, real or 187

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imagined. What drives their narratives is the fragile assumption that you, the listener, understand what they’ve just said (or are about to say). At the same time, his characters acknowledge that you don’t know what they’re saying entirely. How could you; they don’t themselves? That’s especially true when what they’re reaching for (and in some sense, they’re always reaching for this) are the most imponderable subjects of human existence – life and death and what lies beyond or between. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, indeed. McPherson is the greatest teller of ghost stories that the Englishspeaking theatre has produced in recent years. By that, I am not referring only to his inclusion of classic supernatural figures: the undead revenant from an unresolved marriage in Shining City; the phantoms that haunt the tales told by the denizens of a pub during the long, dark night of The Weir; the vampire drama critic of St Nicholas and the vampire assailant of The Night Alive; or the Devil himself, who shows up to drive a soul-robbing bargain in The Seafarer. Even a relatively spectre-free piece like his early monologue The Good Thief, in which a laconic thug describes a night of mayhem, is steeped in the sense that what we see and say only scratch the surface of the mystery that is life. This, for example, is how he describes an ordinary conversation he has in a pub that haunts him for reasons he can’t explain. ‘It’s sort of funny isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Kind of sick as well. There’s something not quite right about it. Hard to put your finger on though.’ How very mundane those sentences are; and how unsettlingly resonant, too. With a simplicity of expression that blossoms into uncanniness, McPherson somehow invariably does put his finger on the ineffable. He doesn’t presume to pin it down. But more than most dramatists, he makes sure that we feel that it is there, whatever this enigmatic essence may be. You know?

Three additional New York Times reviews by Ben Brantley are available on the book’s Companion Website: https://bloomsbury.com/thetheatre-and-films-of-conor-mcpherson-9781350051218/.

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Quantum states In this publication’s Critical Perspectives section, McPherson acknowledges the tendency in his early career to write more idealistically about his women characters, as he saw women as more clear-headed, ordered, caring and far less messy than men. In the monologues masculinity is the visible, foregrounded and performative, while not operating within a mimetic frame, and femininity resides disembodied in the marginal, diegetic, and invisible realms. In Rum alone, there is the invisible Carmel, the unnamed student Ray exploits, a dead mother, and Damien’s mother, whose physical interactions with her son seem suspect. Then there are the false idealizations associated with Myfanwy in Rum, as there are later with Clare and Marion in Port and Helen in Nicholas. These idealizations are the workings of a narrator’s selfpositioning in the monologues. Shining’s Vivien and Paula’s eponymous character are constructed not only as ‘other’ by the likes of John and James, but as unwarranted fantasy figures of rescue, nurture and redemption/ salvation, which is, importantly, tied to social class in many instances. If the pattern in McPherson’s writings is for most of the male characters to let go reluctantly of their delusions, James is incapable of so doing, and that has awful consequences. Tables are turned on James by the industry and calculation of Paula; as the indomitable feminine, she can be as ruthless and as generous as any of her male counterparts. Furthermore, gender norms are complicated by other variables: Carol’s unconditional love allows John to self-indulge and exploit her in Carol, the materiality of working-class socio-economic disadvantage evident in Neasa’s brutal reality in Shining distinguishes her from Ian’s class-shaped and class-cushioned circumstances. In Carol, Mary confronts her father, not from the perspective of a victim, even if she is angry with him, but more from a position of self-knowledge that he has not the courage to find within himself. Her desperation allows a resilience rather than subjugation to shine through. In Veil, Hannah is the one who accepts the offer of marriage as the best available option and is resolute in the face of that reality.

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Additionally, Aimee’s troubled social background and the arrangement she has with her pimp/boyfriend Kenneth in Alive complicate notions of opportunity, freedom and agency. In Weir, the men have the numerical advantage, but the women figures are the more mobile; Valerie moves in search of sanctuary, as does Jack’s girlfriend who moves out of the locality for freedom and employment. (Finbar moves not too far away to make his fortune in a town nearby.) McPherson’s works intersect various forms of intimacy with a range of violations, from indifference and neglect to betrayal and sexual assault. If male sexual desire is often wayward, misplaced or misguided, and complicated by loyalty, duty and irresponsibility, female sexual desire is patterned differently. In general women characters associated with the narrators of the monologues are regarded as sensual, enthusiastic and passionate lovers like Rum’s Maria or Myfanwy and Port’s Trish; sex is liberating, intimate and initiative-driven, and not exploitative. Likewise, in Paula, Paula’s sexual hook-ups are an expression of desire that is assertive and open, devoid of the more traditional ways that Irish writing deals with sex. For Paula, casual sex has no strings attached or consequential obligations. Her affair with a married colleague is framed as neither needy nor guilt-ridden. Yet, Paula does admit sex gets her into trouble, as she uses sex, as she had asphyxiation, to get into another dimension of consciousness. Outcomes of intimacy can be good and bad. (In Come, Margaret’s relationship with pleasure and intimacy seems unhealthy, and she is the exception to the rule.) Sex can be transgressive and result in access to money for figures like Thief’s Greta. (While confused sexual orientation provides complicated challenges for characters like Ian in Shining, that is not the case for Bunny in Down. Doc’s affection for and dependency on Tommy is seen as perhaps sexual by Maurice in Alive.) In Bower, Ray has inappropriate, if nominally consensual, sex with his students. Sarah Comisky’s rape is Bower’s most significant incident, and in Come, Patience’s rape prompts her to attack Matthew. Rum’s narrator has sex with his sleeping wife. Although in Alive Tommy rescues Aimee from her pimp/boyfriend, he later trades accommodation for sex while they form some quasi-relationship. Complex, inequitable and unethical tradeoffs are commonplace, outside normative rules of consent, obligation and commitments. Under patriarchy, Elinor Fuchs argues, women ‘are invisible as autonomous individuals, but flourish as ideas, force, symbol, embodiment of desire’.1 In McPherson’s early work woman as a force or symbol is operative, 190

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but not in ways that simply reinforce patriarchy, and while women characters may serve as an embodiment of desire, there is also enough variety in their expressions of desire to suggest that desire is anything but normative. It is almost as difficult for men and women characters to be autonomous. (Autonomy is not entirely a desirable objective as Weir demonstrates.) However much female characters are observed, scrutinized, discounted or framed, it only communicates the attitudes and perceptions of the male character doing such appraisals. The intersections of gender, class and broader economic realities are paramount to McPherson’s dramaturgy. McPherson’s work is never neutral on wealth or class differences; there are complex inter- and intra-class dynamics throughout. The working classes are not romanticized, indulged, seen as vulgar, patronized, pitied, rough or indecent, and the middle classes are not championed for their industry or integrity nor are they vilified for their privileges, idiosyncrasies, pragmatism, hypocrisies, hostility to difference, soft centre justice dispositions or opportunistic political correctness. While the elite class to which Seafarer’s Lockhart, Nicholas’s narrator or Veil’s Madeleine belong, there is correlation neither between wealth and exploitation nor poverty and indecency: that applies across genders as well. For each French there is a Barreller, for every Doc and Aimee or Paula’s Morgan and Crystal, there is a figure like Kenneth, James or Thief’s henchman narrator. There is a signalling of class rivalries, polarities, differences in tastes and opportunities, there is neither wholesale aspiration of social mobility nor indicators of financial rewards accruing to those who work hard. Poverty is often associated with uncleanliness and dank smells, arising from poor sanitary and refuse services; tellingly, sometimes McPherson reverses the association of unpleasant odours with social deprivation. Rum’s narrator associates Myfanwy’s home with a ‘musty smell’ (33). In Bower, Joe disapprovingly associates Damien’s home with an unusual, ‘spicy smell’ (84). On a different level of sensibility, Ray believes that if souls had smells, his would stink (98). This stench is associated with his deceptions, exploitation and duplicity. Lockhart is also associated with a dank smell, but it is complicated by the fact that its equal is to be found in Richard’s unwashed state and the glee he takes in his own uncleanliness. (Audiences are never going to be off-put by the staging of such a smell.) However, in Port Dermot takes offence at the smell emanating from the full spectrum of social elites (comprising politicians, media and entertainment figures, celebrities and business professionals) with whom he travels by plane to Los Angeles. Despite the appearance of an identitarian 191

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bond between the flyers, and despite how they laugh at each other’s ‘stupid comments’ (165), for Dermot, ‘nothing could hide that there was a bit of a smell of shit on the plane, like one of the jacks was broken or something’ (165). However, he is not blameless, this is a smell to which Dermot admits to having made his own contribution. Dermot is struck by a similar smell when he snorts cocaine in a Portaloo at the concert. The insights about money and capital that Dermot has at the LA rock concert are hugely pertinent; the event’s speakers and the banners were like a castle and a little village of people all milling around. All hoping that some rubbish is going to be thrown out of the castle one day, and by mistake there’ll be something good in it, like a diamond, and if you’re the one that finds it you’re never going to have to work again or ever be hungry anymore. (166) The dependent poor remained outside a castle, searching through the waste, hoping to find diamonds. The tale is less about the dependency of the poor, more the positioning of the poor, residual rewards from a system that serves elite insiders. With McPherson’s writing, there is recognition of financial and civic crises vehemently repeating themselves, striking almost all, but hitting the marginalized most. The mass starvation of Veil’s 1820s prior to Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s, the devastations associated with America’s Great Depression of the 1930s in Girl, the apocalyptic environment of Birds’s chaotic near-future, and the impacts of the most recent global recession post-2008 on Alive. Finbar’s ‘eye for the gap’ mantra in Weir chimes with the neo-liberal ethos, the notion of the freedom to choose, but poverty is seldom a choice, merely the by-product of market-led societal formations. Poverty is never anything other than permanent. The effort/reward models of neoliberalism are constantly disputed by McPherson. The plays do nothing to substantiate the notion that the marketplace distributes resources in any way fairly, as the final section of Chapter 6 suggests. Neo-liberalism is reliant on simple causality; effort brings results, as you reap what you sow. Not only is the meritocratic model deemed suspect in McPherson’s writing, but he complicates rewards, outcomes and consequentiality: for instance, incompetence triumphs over the enterprise, persistence and diligence of Lockhart, virtuous to a fault in his pursuit of Sharky. Paraphrasing Harvey from Chapter 1, the marketplace cannot provide the basis for an ethical understanding of living. 192

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Neo-liberalism is deemed responsible for the exploitation of scarce resources, climate change, international wars, global poverty, zero-hour contracts, employment precarity, austerity, growing income and wealth disparities, de-unionization, the devaluing of civic good, the declining protection of the less able and less fortunate. It would be incorrect to suggest that the only agenda of the work is to be anti-neo-liberalism. What McPherson’s work articulates is the creep of the marketplace thinking into more and more aspects of the everyday, yet the writing does not deny, indeed seems to respect the many benefits of a Rational/Legal perspective, and for communities to thrive, there is a need to trade and exchange. More importantly, it is the cross-connecting, overlaying and misappropriating of rival modes of relating that facilitate a complex textual and performance dramaturgy. Poverty, dispossession, eviction, dereliction and immobility serve as baseline starting points, but as McPherson notes in the Critical Perspectives section, the presence of poverty gives energy to theatrical writing. Justice outcomes are an additional complicator of a neo-liberal (Law and Order) mindset; Frank gets away with robbery in Saltwater, and, in Actors, Tony and Tom not only survive relatively unscathed by their encounters with criminality but go unpunished for their crimes. Aimee’s slaying of Kenneth does not go before the courts, whereas Damien stands accused in Rum. In Down, French and Grogan get their comeuppances, while Git and Bunny succeed, their forward impetus is based on ill-gotten gains. The rules of commerce and of the law are purposefully misaligned. Again, in Paula, justice, victory and reward are differently determined, as it is not only about facing up to demons and countering them, but about bringing self-defence into a troubling dimension. Paula’s ‘self-help justice’,2 Steven Pinker’s term, results not only in her taking the law into her own hands, partially based on the belief that the law is incompetent and inept, but she also exacts a form of restorative justice that is excessive, disproportionate and sadistic. Paula’s dark secret remains hidden.

Convergences In most of McPherson’s plays time is not linear, and spaces contain multiple, cross-penetrating realities. Contemporary 1990s and 2000s Dublin interconnects with 1820s and 1990s Jamestown, 1930s Duluth, Minnesota, and New England of the near future. Invariably, time is an 193

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element that prompts the altering of a play’s register, whether it is the renewal associated with seasonal time and the consistency of natural order, the sense of time slowing down or moving outside time in Alive or where different worlds exist in parallel times in Girl. In Port, the narrators share one space, but probably exist in different temporal dimensions. Time infringements and multiplicities complicate issues of space. The west of Ireland, liminal location of Weir, establishes circumstances, moods and modes of interconnection and interdependency that set out McPherson’s ambitions about meshing, synchronicity, mutuality and mutability that are more apparent in the later works. Sound and music are just as significant as space and time. In Shining, it is the sound of an ice-cream truck that is associated with the appearances of Mari’s ghost. Carol, Port and Birds rely on the sound of church bells to signal an alternative sensibility. However, on the one hand it is church music, as in Fionnuala Ní  Chiosá in’s score for Eclipse and the frequent use of hymns in Seafarer, and, on the other, it is the use of popular cultural music by the likes of Father John Misty, Marvin Gaye, John Martyn or Bob Dylan that springboards awareness beyond the quotient. Naming is a further complicator of the confluences of space/time. Across the plays, why might certain character names recur again and again? There are characters called John in Carol and Shining, and Ian (Shining) and Ivan (Seafarer) serve as variations on that name as does Jack (Weir), the diminutive form of John. There is the teenage Joe in Rum and widower Joe in Authority, Doctor Joe Dillon in Weir, also a Joseph in Girl. In Seafarer there is Nicky Giblin, the writer; Nicholas, in Eclipse; Nick Lane in Girl; and the various associations with St Nicholas are seen in the play that bears the saint’s name. Sarah is an unseen character in Rum and Michael’s daughter in Eclipse is also Sarah, as is Nat’s ex-partner in Birds. There is a Laurence, the occasional male sex-worker in Shining, and a female detective Laurence in Paula; Laurence Joyce is the person Sharky kills in Seafarer. There is a Diane in Birds, and Philip’s wife is also a Diane in Paula. Then there are numerous Carols, Clares, Carmels, Declans, Elizabeths (including Liz), Helens (the actress in Nicholas and Mary’s mother in Carol), Marks (as in the character in Carol, and Mark Whelan, a work acquaintance with whom Neasa has an affair in Shining) and Niamhs (most peculiarly, as I have signalled, in relation to the two Niamhs in Weir). Mary or variations thereof recur across almost all of the plays: Carol has a Mary, as do Actors and Paula, while Port has two Marys. Mary is a 194

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character in Lena’s novel, The Eclipsed. Additionally, there is a Maura in Weir and Alive, Marion in Port, Mari in Shining, Jeff ’s wife in Thief is Marie, and there is Maria in Rum. The dead mother in Saltwater is Maria Benventi, Grandie in Veil is another Maria, Miriam (a Hebrew version of Mary) is the woman who sends Sharky the CDs in Seafarer, and finally there is a Marianne in Girl. The links between Eleanor/Lena in Eclipse, John/Ian in Shining have been processed, as has the one between Sister Pat/Trish in Port. The repetition is purposeful. It is not that these are necessarily the same characters re-imagined in different contexts. More it is about the interconnections between the plays, establishing a network of overlaps and intersections. Such a repetitive pattern of naming is but one of many indicators as to why the plays should not be seen as simply distinctive works, but as part of a continuum. Plays run on from each other, overlap, interdigitate and dialogue between themselves. Most obviously Girl is dramaturgically reliant on its predecessor Veil, while Weir’s narratives evolve from and incorporate the dispositions and sensibilities of the earlier monologues. The co- or multi-presence of the otherworldly and the supernatural point the plays towards other dimensions of awareness and existences, determining alternative ways of seeing and of being. The otherworldly or supernatural is a commanding presence in the plays, and it appears in different forms. The supernatural is hardly ever refuted with the ‘old cod’ phrase used seven times in Weir. The supernatural links with traumas associated with illness, murder or violation, particularly the accidents that happen to children, like Niamh in Weir and Leonora in Girl. The supernatural is also associated with guilt, failure, past traumas, anxieties, uncertainty, fear, who a character was and is, and who they might become under particular circumstances. False dreams, pipe dreams and delusions are infiltrated by the supernatural. Ghostly figures that appear are less likely to want revenge; appeasement even less, and in most instances are seen as consoling figures, and again more as projections of what is internal rather than external manifestations of the unmollified dead, with the exception of Mari’s ghost in Shining or Malachy’s in Eclipse. In Veil there is a collective seeing of the ghost of the young girl; Audelle and Hannah interpret the apparition from individual perspectives. The supernatural is less connected to preying strangers and evil energies, with some exceptions. James in Paula is especially evil; Kenneth in Alive and Lockhart in Seafarer are unfiltered evil figures, even if Lockhart is the bearer of an unintended gift. Damien in Rum takes his name from the evil 195

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figure in The Omen, and Reverend Marlowe is both God and the Devil as McPherson envisions it, good and evil unified in a single figure. Whether internally or externally rendered, the supernatural can manifest and be interpreted in many ways such as being connected to Irish folklore and a pagan tradition, from a psychoanalytical or from a gender point of view, as Lisa Fitzpatrick does in her essay in the Critical Perspectives section. In Weir, a drugged and sedated Valerie could imagine or hallucinate anything, including phone calls from her dead daughter. Jim explains the supernatural by way of a bout of fever and a haze of alcohol. In this play, a membrane between the personal experiences narrated and the supernatural barely exists, and perhaps does not exist at all. Unapologetically, the frequency with which the supernatural and the natural interdigitate affirms mystery and the need for a sense of that which is beyond consciousness. In an interview with Patrick Healy, McPherson notes: ‘To me, all of my plays are about the mystery of God, about reaching a point of transcendence where unsayable emotions can emanate, and about asking, “What’s going on?” – like Marvin Gaye sings in one scene [in Alive].’3 Thus, for McPherson, mystery is linked to an originary force. For more secular-oriented spectators, mystery is not necessarily linked to a God-like source, and more connected to cosmic presence, the big bang, the unseen, and worlds beyond vision, perception and understanding, or dreamlike, fantasy or hallucinogenic states. Mystery ensures that McPherson’s work is as much about change as it is about being, as much about the here and now as it is about the cyclicality of material realities, and as much about individual survival in a dog-eat-dog world as it is about awareness of the supernatural, the dream, the liminal, parallel realities outside space and time. In the early works there is a tentativeness in the disputing and overcoming of the funerary disposition, in Carol and Nicholas in particular, whereas in the later works the funerary consciousness is countered with far greater purpose, in some ways purposefully but not quite ricocheting between a funerary to nativity sensibility. That funerary/nativity dialectic is most evident in the plays’ endings, when the intimate and the infinite, decline and renewal interlock. The nativity sensibility invariably wins out, however temporary its signalling. Additionally, social need, communal instincts and the spectre of loss trump materiality; the loss of a child or a relationship that cannot be valued, financialized or measured. If the loss of a daughter and sister are paramount to Weir and Girl, Paula and Girl use pregnancy to express hope and optimism, to signal the birth and renewal associated with 196

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Christmas and winter solstice periods. In addition, Shining’s Mari becomes rather than the wretched feminine, the eternal feminine, that which cannot be jettisoned or erased. The male unconscious in the form of Seafarer’s Lockhart, Kenneth, and James has to be banished, murdered or entombed. James’s funerary sensibility is displaced, making room for growth, birth and resurrection. The Harkin brothers and their entourage survive an encounter with Satan in Seafarer. Survival is neither simply determined by heroic courage and good choices nor prompted by cunning, improvisation or quick-wittedness. Seafarer’s end is an unlikely triumph over the fatalistic dramatic sensibility in which it was initially situated. Sharky’s victory is linked to Newgrange and the annual appearance of the solstice light. In Alive, Tommy and Aimee are collectively rewarded and transformed based on very little, simply a flipping of anticipated dramaturgical progression that a parallel reality affords; optimism trumps despair, the eternal outdoes the immediate. Chance and good fortune are signalled as being incisive factors in Girl, Marianne has a chance encounter or is fated to be with Joe for instance. Girl ends with an awareness of concurrent and eternal dimensions of consciousness supplementing or parallel to the material reality. In Girl, optimism is on the basis of soul, of connection, of calm and ease, with the music of Dylan freeing that ambition towards the eternal. It is the eternal, outside and inside of time, that serves as the reward in Girl. Such dramaturgical inclinations are prompted by McPherson’s belief, that ‘We all share a basic consciousness. …  People are looking for love, security. We’re all looking for a feeling of meaning in our lives.’4 Talking to Cassandra Csenscitz, McPherson states: It’s all about the audience. I’m always looking for ways to go beyond the material world. I want to go somewhere totally new in the theatre, to really transport the audience, to take them inside themselves and back out. You have to concentrate on things in yourself that are essentially human. You have to go inside yourself. What is the actual feeling of being alive, beyond language?5 If postmodernism signals the wholesale displacement, disassociation and the de-substantiation of self, McPherson’s theatre serves as a form of selflocation and re-substantiation. If postmodernism’s focus is on provisionality, the relative and the indefinite, McPherson’s theatre crystalizes around mystery, the collective and the infinite. Without irony or mystification, 197

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McPherson gives emphasis to the metaphysical, credulity, permanence and the perpetual rather than to incredulity, impermanence and uncertainty. There is a strong rejection of fatalism and futility, an affirmation of essence without essentialism. The moorings to immediate worlds are slackened, as quotient, conventional reality seems vague, less real than we might like it to be and somewhat remote. Thus, McPherson’s dramas manipulate patterns, cycles and seasonalities to suggest the possibility of other sorts of counterlife rhythms, alternative consciousnesses and registers of singular and mutual aliveness. During a live performance all the variables of performance, especially its rhythms and energies require a complex vectorization. Audience engagement with and contribution to the event are so important. One cannot easily speak about an audience’s collective unconscious, but one can signal issues of focus, synchronicity, of gasping and laughing collectively in some sort of unison, and in that sense the spectator are co-convenors, co-collaborators and co-creators. Audiences tether and untether plays from their immediate performance contexts. At its very best, the spectator has embraced McPherson’s worlds on stage, and has responded to the invitation and encouragement to catalyse the theatrical event into being whatever they want the mysteries and joys, the darkness and the light, that are within and without, to be.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Peter Crawley acknowledges: ‘At UCD he also devoted himself to Dramsoc, where he wrote and directed his first play, Taking Stock, a one-act about Irish businessmen so achingly Mametian that he once joked it could have been called “Glengaire Glen Ross”.’ See ‘Reaching the next stage’, Irish Times, 5 January 2008, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/reaching-the-nextstage-1.926116 (Accessed 14 January 2018). 2. Curtis Brown’s Nick Marston has been instrumental in fostering McPherson’s relationships with various theatres and companies. 3. The first production went on to transfer to the Royal Court’s temporary main house space at the Duke of York’s on the West End. This production ran for over two years, with successive cast changes. In April 1999, Weir had its first American production in the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway. 4. I will not deal at all with the early unpublished work, Talking Stock, Michelle Pfeiffer, Scenes Federal, Radio Play, The Stars Lose their Glory, Inventing Fortune’s Wheel and A Little Light in the Window of Industry. For insight into the importance of the Fly by Night Theatre Company, see McPherson’s ‘We are masters of illusion’, Irish Times, 23 May 2000, https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/we-are-masters-of-illusion-1.274036 (Accessed 5 April 2018). 5. The Bush Theatre staged This Lime Tree Bower in 1995 and St Nicholas in 1997 and the Royal Court premiered The Weir in 1997 and Dublin Carol in 1999. The National Theatre staged The Seafarer in 2006 and The Veil in 2011, and the Donmar Warehouse first staged his adaption of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death in 2012 in their Trafalgar Studio, then premiered The Night Alive in 2013 in their main space. In 2016, the Young Vic, London, and the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, premiered his adaptation of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play The Nest. The Old Vic premiered Girl from the North Country in 2017. 6. Steppenwolf staged Weir in 2000, the concurrent playing of Carol and Seafarer in 2008 and Alive in 2014. 7. While McPherson is inclined to direct the first productions of his work, and to stay on directing when that work transfers to New York for instance, he is less inclined to be involved in subsequent productions. Exceptions include his direction of the Atlantic Theatre’s production of Carol in 2003, the Abbey Theatre’s 2009 production of Seafarer, after Jimmy Fay had directed it in 2008 for the same venue. In 2015, he directed Alive in a Dublin Theatre Festival/ Lyric Theatre Belfast co-production.

Notes 8. Sometimes cast changes happen because of other acting commitments and sometimes because of equity regulations. 9. This body of writing is not only produced in English-speaking cultures, but the work is adapted/translated into many different languages, currently making McPherson one of the most frequently performed playwrights in the world. 10. A similar trajectory could be outlined for Seafarer, transferring from the National Theatre in 2006 to New York in 2007, followed by other stagings in 2008 in Chicago by Steppenwolf and, as previously mentioned, and at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. 11. In 2002 McPherson directed Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as part of Beckett on Film series, which was a Gate Theatre/Channel 4 project. The Irish television channel TG4 broadcasted The Running Mate, which is based on an idea from McPherson. In 2014 McPherson adapted Elegy for April, based on novel by Benjamin Black (John Banville), and directed by Jim O’Hanlon for BBC Northern Ireland and Radio Telefís Éireann. A script titled Strangers is in development, based on Taichi Yamada novel and to be directed by James Marsh, and he is also working on a screenplay called Double Cross for Paul Greengrass. Harry Potter producer, David Heyman, is working on a television series based on the novella, The Birds, set in Cornwall, with screenplay by McPherson. 12. W. B. Worthen, ‘Drama, performativity, and performance’, PMLA, 113.5 (October 1998), 1101. 13. Worthen, ‘Drama, performativity, and performance’, 1101. 14. Ibid., 1102. 15. Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 28. 16. August 1811, a short scene written for the Making Light charity event at the Bedales Olivier Theatre in July 2014, performed by Dervla Kirwan and Rupert Penry-Jones, is something I have not included for analysis. 17. And in response to Cassandra Csenscitz’s question about working with Rae Smith, McPherson suggests: ‘We met when she did The Weir. I like her designs because there’s very little there – I don’t like sets with walls. I don’t like to have a room. I like there to be a lot of darkness around the image, the idea of the infinite spreading out from the story. It’s more mysterious.’ See ‘Conor McPherson lifts the Veil’, American Theatre, 24.10 (December 2007), 39. 18. Noelia Ruiz, ‘Interview with Conor McPherson’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 284. 19. Liz Hoggard, ‘Conor McPherson knows what women want’, London Evening Standard, 13 September 2011, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/-theatre/article23986309-conor-mcpherson-knows-what-women-want.do (Accessed 3 November 2011). 200

Notes 20. The notion of the ‘suspension of disbelief ’, is a term coined by the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and McPherson notes: ‘It’s a phrase we take for granted now, but Coleridge uses a double negative where a simple positive (“belief ”) might have done, but somehow this doesn’t quite capture the strange trance we are willing to enter when we watch a play.’ See ‘A journey into the unknown’, Daily Telegraph, 27 September 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/theatre/theatre-features/8792604/The-Veil-at-the-National-TheatreA-journey-into-the-unknown.html (Accessed 21 November 2016). 21. When McPherson directs his own plays, he seems to be able to infuse the work with a great deal of physical/gestural comedy, much of which the playscripts do not necessarily notate. 22. McPherson makes the following remark to Sara Keating: ‘The plays you write are the plays that you write’, adding, ‘Well, those are the good plays, anyway’. He continues, ‘If you think too much about it, think you have a good idea, something clever to say that no one has ever said before you, it’s probably not going to be a great play. Plays are quite stupid really. You are supposed to feel them in your bones. It’s truthfulness, not cleverness, that matters.’ See ‘Plays are stupid. You are supposed to feel them in your bones’, Irish Times, 22 September 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/ conor-mcpherson-plays-are-stupid-you-are-supposed-to-feel-them-in-yourbones-1.2360295 (Accessed 7 December 2015). 23. Conor McPherson, ‘Foreword’, Plays: Three (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013), vii. 24. McConachie explains how either in real life or through experiencing a performance on stage, our neurological responses or mirror neurons can be triggered as we engage with genres, sounds, rhythms, moods, movements and emotions, visual and aural clues. Indeed, such mirroring can be contagious for spectators. He identifies the significant impact of movement and sound on ‘spectatorial empathy’. See Engaging Audiences, 67–72. 25. In a newspaper article, McPherson argues that Irish writing is ‘mostly a bit scared’ and if there’s a message it is a simple one: ‘I know you’re afraid of dying alone in a ditch. I am too. Let’s be together.’ To this comment he adds: ‘We all die alone. And we’ve been told that since we were babies. And it was beaten into us.’ See ‘Original sin’, The Guardian, 7 February 2001, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2001/feb/07/artsfeatures.stage (Accessed 5 February 2018). 26. In the UCD Connections interview with Dave Fanning, McPherson makes the following point: ‘My theory about the Irish psyche, is that Ireland, being the most Western point of Europe beside the Atlantic ocean – for thousands and thousands of years, nobody knew, in Europe, perhaps, that there was anything else beyond that … so we were the place that was “right beside the beyond”, and I think that somehow we internalized that in quite an anxious way. I think that our pagan neo-lithic ancestors who built Newgrange and that kind of think were somehow struggling with reaching the beyond, to commune 201

Notes with it.’ See Dave Fanning in an interview with Conor McPherson, UCD Connections, November 2009, Part 6 (Parts 1–7), http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=HwzUHtwgcbA (Accessed 4 June 2018). 27. See Anthony Roche, ‘Interview with Conor McPherson: Ghosts and the uncanny in Irish drama’, in The Irish Dramatic Revival: 1899–1939 (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 182–3. 28. McPherson, ‘Original sin’. 29. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Can Irish dramatists tackle the big questions again?’, Irish Times, 7 June 2011, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/can-irishdramatists-tackle-the-big-questions-again-1.589992 (Accessed 11 January 2018). 30. Conor McPherson, ‘Foreword’, Plays: One (London: Nick Hern Books, 2011), 3. 31. As Patrick Lonergan has proposed, Irishness is an utterly porous, unstable concept, suitably adopted and invariably localized. Lonergan suggests that ‘branding’, ‘reflexivity’, and ‘an audience’s enjoyment of a theatrical production is determined by that audience’s capacity to relate the action to their own preoccupations and interests, as those preoccupations and interests are determined locally. … Irishness acts as a deterritorialized space in which audiences may explore local preoccupations.’ See Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 92. 32. Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working-Class: Dublin After O’Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 4. 33. Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition, 2009), 11. 34. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition, 2005), 2. 35. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 5. 36. Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (Penguin Books, Kindle Edition, 2008), 263. 37. Sandel marks the infiltration of market principles into everything from fasttrack queuing in theme parks to concierge doctor services, and from express security in airports to car-pool lanes where single occupant vehicles can enter for a fee. He finds moral complications when individuals can pay for prison cell upgrades, for the right to immigrate, shoot endangered species, get paid for blood donation payments, adoption, surrogacy, or when crack-addicted women are paid to undergo sterilization. To emphasize the creep of marketorientated thinking he discusses school report cards carrying the logos of large corporations, emergency service vehicles carrying fast-food advertising, and universities favouring applicants whose parents offer endowments. See What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Penguin Books, Kindle Edition, 2012), 8–9. 38. What Money Can’t Buy, 9.

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Notes 39. Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 1. 40. Susan Cannon Harris proposes that ‘it was largely through his manipulation of dramatic conventions that link the female body with both the domestic interior and the supernatural that McPherson invented and sustained the dramatic mode that made him famous’ – a mode to which she refers to as ‘supernaturalism’. See ‘Supernaturalism: Femininity and form in Conor McPherson’s paranormal plays’, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, 10 July 2014, https://breac.nd.edu/articles/48939-supernaturalism-femininity-andform-in-conor-mcphersons-paranormal-plays/ (Accessed 18 November 2016). 41. Geraldine Cousin, Playing for Time: Stories of Lost Children, Ghosts and the Endangered Present in Contemporary Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), xii. 42. Cousin, Playing for Time, xi–xii. 43. Liz Hoggard, ‘Conor McPherson knows what women want’. 44. Damon Smith, ‘Interview with Conor McPherson: “The Eclipse”, 24 March 2010, http://filmmakermagazine.com/6213-conor-mcpherson-the-eclipse/ (Accessed 14 April 2015). 45. B. Alan Orange, ‘Ciaran Hinds and Conor McPherson join forces for The Eclipse’, http://www.movieweb.com/news/exclusive-ciaran-hinds-and-conormcpherson-join-forces-for-the-eclipse (Accessed 10 January 2017) 46. Anthony Roche, ‘Interview with Conor McPherson’, 188. 47. In addition, so many of McPherson’s characters have names are associated with Christmas, namely Carol, Elizabeth, Mary, Mari, Marion, Marianne, Noel, Nick, Nicky and Nicholas. 48. See Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran, Talking to the Dead: A Study of the Irish Funerary Traditions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). 49. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 756.

Chapter 1 1. Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), 3. 2. Kearney, On Stories, 4. 3. Ibid., 6–7. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Patrick Lonergan tellingly associates small-scale productions with increasing portability of work in a globalized world. See Theatre and Globalization, 181. 6. Conor McPherson, ‘Afterword’, in Plays: One (London: Nick Hern Books, 2011), 182. 203

Notes 7. Tom Maguire outlines how critics argued that the acting is so un-expressive in Rum and Thief at London’s Soho Theatre that the works might well be seen as spoken short stories or radio plays. See ‘Speaking violence in Conor McPherson’s Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief’, in Lisa Fitzpatrick (ed.), Performing Violence in Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2010), 105. 8. Brian Singleton, ‘Am I talking to myself?’ The Irish Times, 19 April 2001, http:// www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/2001/0419/pfarchive.01041900070.html (Accessed 18 November 2016). 9. Lisa Fitzpatrick, ‘Representing sexual violence in the early plays of Conor McPherson’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 67. 10. Fitzpatrick, ‘Representing sexual violence in the early plays of Conor McPherson’, 69. 11. Clare Wallace, Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity and Citation in 1990s New Drama (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), 58–9. 12. Clare Wallace, ‘The art of disclosure, the ethics of monologue in Conor McPherson’s drama: St. Nicholas, This Lime Tree Bower and Port Authority’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 46. 13. Nicholas Grene, ‘Stories in shallow space: Port Authority’, Irish Review, 29 (2002), 75, 80. 14. Grene, ‘Stories in shallow space’, 82. 15. My response to this play is informed by the performance directed by Kevin Hely for the Fly by Night Theatre Company seen in Dublin at Project at the Mint in September 1998. This production featured Andrew Lovern as Joe, Karl Shiels as Frank and Chris McHallem as Ray. Each actor delivered their stories with confidence, with the awareness of the other characters and they remained standing, attentive to the stories of each other. The energy of each was very different; Lovern’s character was especially naive, Shiel’s Frank was abrupt and not as gormless as McDonald’s Frank in Saltwater and McHallem’s British accent re-orientated the character of Ray towards elsewhere, outside Ireland, and cannot but be evocative of Ireland’s colonial history. Conor Mullen had played Ray with a Dublin accent in the play’s original production, as he does in Saltwater. The set was a bare stage. Then the moment the characters broke the convention of direct audience address was telling, a clever breach of expectation and convention. See also David Nowlan’s review: ‘Honest, coarse and gripping This Lime Tree Bower’, Irish Times, 10 September 1998, https://search.proquest.com/docview/310407805?pqorigsite=summon&accountid=14507 (Accessed 6 March 2018). 16. Conor McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower in Plays: One (London: Nick Hern Books, 2011), 86. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be in parentheses within the body of the text.) 204

Notes 17. McPherson, ‘Foreword’, in Plays: One, 3. 18. Ibid., 3. 19. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 33. 20. Ibid., 165. 21. See Eamonn Jordan, ‘Multiple class consciousnesses in writings for theatre during the Celtic Tiger Era’, in Michael Pierse (ed.), The Cambridge History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 378–96. 22. This play is one of only three works by McPherson that I have not seen in performance, the other being Thief and Nicholas. The absence of quality recordings of all three ensures that I can only address them based on my attentive reading, from a speculative sense of their theatricality and performance demands and potentials in the script, from reviewer responses and from my own knowledge and experiences of reading and seeing other monologues. 23. Conor McPherson, Rum and Vodka in Plays: One (London: Nick Hern Books, 2011), 14. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 24. McPherson’s response to Hilary Fannin’s question about his own alcohol issues: ‘“Why did that young man, already a great success with audiences enraptured by his work, drink himself into intensive care?” “A really deep terror of being alive”, he answers. “An existential fear, a fear of responsibility”.’ McPherson found himself in intensive care with pancreatitis, just after Port opened in London. See ‘The perfect work is always in the future, like a beautiful dream’, Irish Times, 13 March 2010, https://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/stage/the-perfect-work-is-always-in-the-future-like-a-beautifuldream-1.637413 (Accessed 6 March 2018). 25. From the interplay of economic, social and cultural capital, Mike Savage determines seven different social classes, three different categories of working classes, three middle classes and a single elite class. See Social Class in the 21st Century (Penguin Books, Kindle Edition, 2015.) 26. Savage, Social Class, 4. 27. Raheny would have a mix of affluence and less wealthy estates, in contrast to Clontarf housing that would be more consistently occupied by middle and upper classes. 28. Paul Murphy, ‘Class and performance in the age of global capital’, Theatre Research International, 37.1 (2012), 49–62. 29. Evolutionary biologist and socio-biologist Robert Trivers identifies different categories of self-deception: self-inflation, derogation of others, in-group-outgroup associations, moral superiority-moral hypocrisy, the illusion of control, the construction of biased social theories ‘regarding our immediate social realities’, false personal narratives ‘that hide true intention and causality’ and

205

Notes unconscious modules devoted to deception. See Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 15–27. 30. David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Canongate: Edinburgh, 2011), 197. 31. Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, 171. 32. Ibid., 142–4. 33. Ibid., 4. 34. Trivers puts it for people generally, the ‘conscious mind seems more like a post-hoc evaluator and commentator upon – including rationalising – our behaviour, rather than the initiator of the behaviour’. See Deceit and SelfDeception, 56. 35. The play was initially called The Light of Jesus and had been first performed in April 1994 with Kevin Hely performing and McPherson directing at City Arts Centre. McPherson explains how Garreth Keogh persuaded him to the change of title to something with a bit more box-office appeal, See ‘Afterword’, in Plays: One, 182. 36. Conor McPherson, The Good Thief in Plays: One (London: Nick Hern Books, 2011), 51. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 37. McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower in Plays: One, 92. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be in parentheses within the body of the text.) 38. Clare Wallace, ‘The art of disclosure, the ethics of monologue in Conor McPherson’s drama’, 52. 39. Sarah’s family lives ‘up near the Grange where all the knackers lived’, according to Joe (117). In contrast, Damien’s home is out by ‘the Old Strand Road where all the Protestants lived. The house had a long front garden with high trees’ (91). The social rank suggested by the location is diminished by the house’s filthy carpet and the fact that the boat in the driveway is not working. 40. My performance analysis is based on seeing a recording of the Gate Theatre production of Port Authority held in the NUIG Gate Theatre archive in August 2017. I have also listened to the Naxos audio recording of the play, which uses the actors from this original production. I have used this production simply because there are multiple reviews of this production available online. This work has been restaged numerous times since then, including Andrew Flynn’s acclaimed 2012 production for Decadent Theatre company. When I saw this Decadent Theatre production in the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, on 3 November 2012, Carl Kennedy played Kevin, Phelim Drew played Dermot and Garrett Keogh played Joe. Mike O’Halloran lit the show, Petra Breathnach designed costumes and Flynn directed and designed this production. In this production, four wooden benches were shaped into a square pattern, placed over wooden floor beams. The actors narrated from the bench stage centre, but they rotated positions throughout the piece, occupying

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Notes three of the four spaces at all times, changing location in unison, but also creating triangular shapes with their bodies. 41. Conor McPherson, Port Authority in Plays Two (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), 132. (Hereafter page references will be given in parentheses within the body of text.) 42. Tim Adams, ‘So there’s these three Irishmen …’, The Observer, 4 February 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2001/feb/4/features.review27 (Accessed 29 January 2018). 43. Adams, ‘So there’s these three Irishmen …,’. 44. On a slightly different issue, Joe and Liz’s children are called Stephen and Tania (151 and 159), and later Dermot and Tania (169). When I pointed this out to McPherson, he did not want to be drawn on it, but said that it was not a typo and not something that he never considered correcting, when it had been drawn to his attention previously. In the Gate Theatre production recording of 2001, it is corrected by the performers. 45. Matt Wolf, ‘Review: Port Authority’, Variety, 18 March 2001, http://variety. com/2001/legit/reviews/port-authority-1200467264/ (Accessed 25 November 2017). 46. Wolf, ‘Review: Port Authority’. 47. For another review of the performance, see Michael Billington, ‘Review: Port Authority: Conor McPherson’s cocaine and cardigans’, The Guardian, 24 February 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2001/feb/24/theatre. artsfeatures1 (Accessed 25 November 2017). 48. Nicholas De Jongh, ‘Review: Port Authority’, Evening Standard, 23 February 2001. 49. My response to this play is based on seeing its premiere at the Gate Theatre in 2001. 50. Conor McPherson, Come on Over in Plays Two (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), 191. (Hereafter page references will be in parentheses within the body of text.) 51. St Monica’s is the name of the parish church in the play, whereas, the name of the parish church in the Jamestown itself is the Sacred Heart. 52. In an interview with Gerald C. Wood in Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003), 130. 53. In Port, Joe’s residential home is managed by Sister Pat and carers, who are noted for their generosity and professionalism. The generosity of those who run the local monastery is also evident in Seafarer. 54. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (The Ryan Report), http:// childabusecommission.ie/ (Accessed 3 February 2018). 55. The connection between monologues, as a quasi-confessional format, and the Catholic sacrament of confession is an important one, but associating one with the other is not the appropriate thing to do. 207

Notes 56. Karen Fricker, ‘Three Short Plays’, The Guardian, 11 October 2001, https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2001/oct/11/theatre.artsfeatures4 Guardian (Accessed 14 January 2018). Also, Clare Wallace suggests that the nonnaturalistic devices ‘seem gratuitous than effective’. See ‘Conor McPherson’, in Martin Middeke and Peter Paul Schnierer (eds), The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights (London: Methuen, 2010), 281. 57. Charles Spencer, ‘Theatre Review of 3 Plays’, Telegraph, 8 October 2001, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/4179770/Theatre-Review-3-Plays-GATEDUBLIN.html (Accessed 14 January 2018). Nick McGinley also critiques the inclusion of a troupe of children playing recorders at the end: ‘By far the most off-putting device is the screaming chorus of ineptly-played recorders provided by a troupe of Betty-Ann Norton kids also masked in sack-cloth that book-end the stories of the aged lovers.’ See ‘Review: Three short plays’, RTE. ie, 11 November 2001, https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2001/1011/4499993shortplays/ (Accessed 14 January 2018). 58. See Cormac O’Brien’s theorization of masculinity in ‘The afterlife of the anti-hero: Fantasies of manhood and the hierarchy of masculine agency in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer’, in Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullen (eds), Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), 162–74.

Chapter 2 1. This chapter is an extensively expanded version of my essay ‘Playwrights, screenplays, criminality, gangland and the tragicomic imperatives in I Went Down and Intermission’, in Eric Weitz (ed.), ‘For the Sake of Sanity’: Doing Things with Humour in Irish Performance (Dublin: Carysfort, 2014), 173–92. 2. Gerry Stembridge’s About Adam (2001) and Liz Gill’s Goldfish Memory (2003) deliver what Martin McLoone calls ‘hip hedonism’. See Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland (Dublin and Portland: Irish Academic Press, 2008), 46. 3. McLoone, Film, Media and Popular, 138. 4. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2009), 1. 5. Žižek, Violence, 1. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. See Conor McPherson, I Went Down: The Shooting Script (London: Nick Hern Books, 1997), 110–11. 8. See Conor McPherson, ‘Appendix 1’, in I Went Down, 109–11. 9. My focus is specifically genre related, which is informed by both the screenplay’s sensibility and its realization on the screen in terms of directorial 208

Notes approach, cinematography, editing and acting idiom. While the tendency in film is to associate a film with its director, my focus on McPherson’s contribution is not to downplay or side-line Breathnach’s centrality to the project. 10. See ‘Peat Fiction? Greg King Talks to Irish director Paddy Breathnach about I Went Down, the quirky new crime thriller from Ireland’, The Reel Ring, December 1997, http://www.filmreviews.net.au/1997/12/i-went-down/ (Accessed 1 August 2013). 11. King, ‘Peat Fiction?’ 12. Sean Crosson, ‘Vanishing point: An examination of some consequences of globalization for contemporary Irish film’, e-Keltoi, A Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies, 2 (2013), 8, http://vmserver14.nuigalway. ie/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10379/591/Vanishing%20Point%20article. pdf?sequence=1 (Accessed 1 August 2013). 13. Dervila Layden, ‘Discovering and uncovering genre in Irish cinema’, in Brian McIlroy (ed.), Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 38. 14. Christine Gledhill, ‘Genre and nation’, in Brian McIlroy (ed.), Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 11. 15. Barry Monahan, ‘Playing cops and robbers: Recent Irish cinema and genre performance’, in Brian McIlroy (ed.), Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 50. 16. Debbie Ging, Men and Masculinities (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2013), 163. 17. Ging, Men and Masculinities, 157–9. 18. Ibid., 181. 19. Ibid., 4–5. 20. Ibid., 163. 21. Ibid., 159. 22. Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran identify the ‘querulous dyads’ that ‘are part of a community of hatred which observes a ‘“taboo on tenderness”’, a phrase coined by Ian D. Suttie. See Talking to the Dead: A Study of the Irish Funerary Traditions (Amsterdam–Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), 157–8. 23. See Appendix 2, ‘Conor McPherson, Paddy Breathnach and Rob Walpole in conversation’, in Conor McPherson, I Went Down, 117. 24. See Emilie Pine’s reflections on gender in ‘This is what I need you to do to make it right: Conor McPherson’s I Went Down’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 105.

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Notes 25. For an outline of Saltwater’s difficult production prehistory, including the script being put under receivership, see Gerald C. Wood’s Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003), 68. 26. Kevin Kerrane, ‘The buoyancy of Conor McPherson’s Saltwater’, in The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 113. 27. McPherson, I Went Down, 130. 28. Kerrane, ‘The buoyancy of Conor McPherson’s Saltwater’, 119. 29. A deleted scene has McCurdie take over a peat briquette business, which suggests that this is not the only time he had turned a debt into a partnership and thus assumed ownership. A peat briquette business features in Seafarer. In Thief, the corrupt politician, Burke, also has a peat briquette delivery business. 30. David Stratton, ‘Review of Saltwater’, Variety, 5 March 2000, http://variety. com/2000/film/reviews/saltwater-1200461355/ (Accessed 21 January 2018). 31. Again, in the deleted scenes Frank pushes on two occasions to visit her graveside. 32. McPherson quoted by Gerald C. Wood, Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief, 142–3. 33. Harvey O’Brien, ‘Review of Saltwater’, http://homepage.eircom.net/~obrienh/ saltw.htm (Accessed 21 January 2018). 34. Act One is titled The Proposition, Act Two is The Actor Prepares, Act Three is Curtain Up, Act Four is Method Acting and Act Five is titled Grand Finale. 35. Adams, ‘So there’s these three Irishmen …’. 36. Ibid. 37. Carmen Szabo notes how this production of Richard III ‘parodies in its style the famous 1995 film of the play, directed by Richard Loncraine and starring Ian McKellen’. See ‘Issues of narrative, storytelling and performance in Conor McPherson’s The Actors’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 133. 38. Conor McPherson, The Actors: The Shooting Script (London: Nick Hern Books, 2003), DVD Extras. Production Notes (slides with no pages listed). 39. In McPherson’s Preface to The Actors: The Shooting Script he illustrates the difficulties he had in framing the work. The scenes that included Mary in the Shooting Script caused most trouble and these were re-written after the film was shown at test screenings, where audiences ‘hated her’. McPherson admits that, as written, Mary was ‘telling them how to think’. Neil Jordan proposes a solution, suggesting that she tells ‘her story from a classroom’. 40. Jason Caro, ‘Review: The Actors’, Radio Times, http://www.radiotimes.com/ film/k6j8j/the-actors/ (Accessed 21 January 2018).

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Notes 41. Peter Bradshaw, ‘Review: The Actors’, The Guardian, 16 May 2003, https:// www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/may/16/artsfeatures8 (Accessed 21 January 2018). 42. Nev Pierce, ‘Review: The Actors’, BBC Film Reviews, 14 May 2003 http://www. bbc.co.uk/films/2003/05/05/the_actors_2003_review.shtml (Accessed 20 January 2018). 43. Pierce, ‘Review: The Actors’. 44. In contrast, the opposite of pretence is found in McPherson’s comments on the acting of the then sixteen-year-old Kinlan: ‘He had a beautiful quality. He was sixteen and he never questioned anything we were doing. It was better never to direct him. He was pure instinct and if you fooled around with what he was doing he suddenly looked like he was acting. I was amazed by his natural ability and often all I could do was shake my head and say, “He has no idea what he’s doing and neither do I”’ (Saltwater, The Shooting Script, 128). McPherson’s advice to actors is: ‘Don’t act’, ‘Stop acting’, summarizing it as he ‘often like them just to be sort of truthful’. See The Actors: The Shooting Script, DVD Extras. 45. Lance Pettitt, ‘“We’re no fucking Eye-talians”: The gangster genre and Irish cinema’, in Ruth Barton and Harvey O’Brien (eds), Keeping it Real: Irish Film and Television (London and New York: Wallflower, 2004), 32. 46. Diane Negra, ‘Irishness, anger and masculinity in recent film and television’, in Ruth Barton (ed.), Screening Irish-America: Representing Irish-America in Film and Television (Dublin and Portland: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 280, citing Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet and Peter Stanfield (eds), Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 9.

Chapter 3 1. In some scholarship, dominant neo-liberal ideology is invariably viewed as the source of such visual and textual circulations of the supernatural, a form of indoctrination and inhibition through fear. 2. Cousin, Playing for Time, 38. 3. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 157. 4. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 157–61. 5. Ibid., 195. 6. Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, 2. 7. Apart from the writers I have already mentioned, Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin name the following modern and contemporary writers Judith Thompson, Sam Shepard, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Michael Fryan, 211

Notes Arthur Miller, Suzan-Lori Parks and Amiri Baraka as other writers who have used ghosts. See ‘Introduction’, in Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, 2–15. 8. Christopher Murray, ‘The supernatural in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer and The Birds’, in Marianna Gula, Mária Kurdi and István D. Rácz (eds), The Binding Strength of Irish Studies: Festschrift in Honour of Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse (Debrecen: Debrecen University Press, 2011), 69. 9. McPherson, Rum and Vodka in Plays: One, 66. 10. Ruiz, ‘Interview with Conor McPherson’, 278. 11. Roche, ‘Interview with Conor McPherson’, 187. 12. Damon Smith, Interview with Conor McPherson, ‘The Eclipse’, 24 March 2010, http://filmmakermagazine.com/6213-conor-mcpherson-the-eclipse/ (Accessed 14 April 2015). 13. Cox would go on to take a lead role in Carol, have a major part in Saltwater and he also played Jack in Josie Rourke’s acclaimed Donmar Warehouse revival of The Weir in 2013. 14. Brian Cox notes: ‘Until I performed Conor McPherson’s St Nicholas … I had always viewed the monologue with suspicion. The one-person show – show being the operative word – was an excuse for monomaniacal actors, intolerant of their fellow thespians, to perform in a bubble of their own emotional self-aggrandizement. A harsh view, I admit, bitterly based on endless hours witnessing such displays of masturbatory zeal. For me, acting has always been a social occupation, full of camaraderie and the joy of working with fellow actors’. See ‘The loneliness, elation and doubts of the monologuist’, New York Times, 16 May 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/16/theater/theaterthe-loneliness-elation-and-doubts-of-the-monologuist.html (Accessed 5 April 2018). 15. Conor McPherson, St Nicholas in Plays: One (London: Nick Hern Books, 2011), 141. (Hereafter all other references will be given in parenthesis within the body of the text.) 16. Paul Taylor, ‘Don’t make a drama out of a critic’, Independent, 24 February 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/dont-make-a-dramaout-of-a-critic-1280430.html (Accessed 1 March 2018). 17. Charles Spencer, ‘All booze and brilliant, bubbling bile’, The Telegraph, 1 March 1997, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4707786/All-booze-and-brilliantbubbling-bile.html (Accessed 1 March 2018). 18. Charles Hunter, ‘St Nicholas The Bush, London’, Irish Times, 12 March 1997, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/st-nicholas-the-bush-london-1.51447 (Accessed 1 March 2018). 19. Hunter, ‘St Nicholas The Bush, London’. 20. Taylor, ‘Don’t make a drama out of a critic’. 21. Spencer, ‘All booze and brilliant, bubbling bile’. 212

Notes 22. Ben Brantley, ‘A most dramatic drama critic’, New York Times, 18 March 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/18/theater/theater-review-a-most-dramaticdrama-critic.html (Accessed 1 March 2108). 23. Brantley, ‘A most dramatic drama critic’. 24. Gerald C. Wood, Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003), 33. 25. Conor McPherson, Shining City in Plays: Three (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013), 5. (Hereafter all other references will be given in parenthesis within the body of the text.) 26. Cousin, Playing for Time, 36. 27. Kevin Wallace, ‘“Shame shame shame”: Masculinity, intimacy and narrative in Conor McPherson’s Shining City’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 93. 28. My response to this work is partially based on seeing a production of this play at the Gate Theatre Dublin in September 2004. 29. Ariel Watson discusses Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000) and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000) and Shining City in terms of ‘theatricality of the psychotherapeutic encounter’. See ‘Cries of fire: Psychotherapy in contemporary British and Irish drama’, Modern Drama, 50.2 (Summer 2008), 210. 30. Cousin found it ‘spine-chilling’, see Playing for Time. In contrast, Fintan O’Toole states, ‘If Conor McPherson’s new play were directed by someone other than the author it would be easy to guess what had happened. A flawed but sensitive, intelligent and often beautifully written play had been vandalised by a fool who had lost his nerve and tacked on an ending of incredible crassness.’ See ‘Lost in the myths of time’ Irish Times, 30 September 2004, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/lost-in-the-myths-of-time-1.1159789 (Accessed 28 February 2018). 31. The Eclipse is loosely based on a Billy Roche original short story, ‘Table Manners’ from the collection Tales From Rainwater Pond (2006). 32. Discussing the transposition from short story to film, McPherson notes: ‘When my wife (Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin) read an early draft, she said, “If you have a guy who’s married with kids and he’s lusting after this other woman, women won’t really like him.” It’s different in the story because you can get inside his head and go on his journey. So she said, “If you can get rid of his wife from the story, he might be more sympathetic”.’ See Damon Smith, ‘Interview with Conor McPherson’. 33. Orange, ‘Ciaran Hinds and Conor McPherson join forces for The Eclipse’. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ashley Taggart, ‘“Stumbling around in the light”: Conor McPherson’s partial eclipse’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor 213

Notes McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 183–96. 37. Maddy Costa, ‘Human beings are animals’, The Guardian, 13 September 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/sep/13/theatre4 (Accessed 28 February 2018). 38. This television drama was shot on location in Belfast, so the combination of predominantly Belfast locations with a few choice Dublin ones adds a surreal quality to the work. Some critics felt uneasy about that fact. See, in particular, Peter Crawley, ‘Paula review’, Irish Times, 25 May 2017, http://www.irishtimes. com/culture/tv-radio-web/paula-review-set-in-dublin-filmed-in-belfasteverything-seems-slightly-uncanny-1.3095985 (Accessed 29 May 2017). 39. Liam Fay, ‘A Tale of two cities’, Sunday Times, Culture Section, Irish Edition, 28 May 2017, 16. 40. Sarah Hughes, ‘Conor McPherson hits the mainstream with haunting drama and Dylan’s songbook’, The Observer, 14 May 2017, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2017/may/13/conor-mcpherson-paula-bob-dylan-girl-from-thenorth-country--old-vic (Accessed 15 October 2017). 41. Kirsty Blake Knox, ‘Conor McPherson set to push boundaries with new BBC thriller series Paula’, Irish Independent, 21 May 2017, http://www.independent. ie/entertainment/television/conor-mcpherson-set-to-push-boundaries-withnew-bbc-thriller-series-paula-35731818.html (Accessed 15 October 2017). 42. Knox, ‘Conor McPherson set to push boundaries with new BBC thriller series Paula’. 43. Peter Crawley, ‘Paula Review’, 25 May 2017. 44. Peter Crawley, ‘Paula Review: A TV show as promiscuous as its protagonist’ Irish Times, 7 June 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/ paula-review-a-tv-show-as-promiscuous-as-its-protagonist-1.3110580 (Accessed 8 June 2017). 45. Crawley, ‘Like her, the show is distracted and curiously promiscuous, diving between grim realism and a spooky dream, logic and impossibility, Belfast and Dublin’. See ‘Paula review: A TV show as promiscuous as its protagonist’. 46. Hughes, ‘Conor McPherson hits the mainstream with haunting drama and Dylan’s songbook’. 47. Ibid. 48. Fay, ‘A Tale of two cities’. 49. Recent dramas on the BBC like River (2016) and Clique (2016) persist with flashbacks and ghostly appearances, suggesting a type of convention normalization. 50. Ana Kinsella, ‘Hanging tough’, Sunday Times, Culture Section, 28 May 2017, 5. 51. See Anthony Roche’s comprehensive analysis of ghosts in the work of Synge, Yeats and Parker in Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2013), 135–60. 214

Notes

Chapter 4 1. Early and far lengthier reflections on Veil and Alive were first published in ‘Para-normal views/para-gothic activities in Conor McPherson’s The Veil’ in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 252–74 and in ‘Black hole experiences: Moochers, smoochers, dig outs and the parables and spasms of time in Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive’, in Donald E. Morse (ed.), Irish Theatre in Transition (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2015), 33–53. 2. Analysis of this play faces a number of complications. I saw the play’s premiere at the Gate Theatre. I also have read the script that went into rehearsal. The script was revised when Henry Wishcamper directed it for the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, in 2012. The published script is a significantly revised version of the Gate one. As I did not see the American production, my response to the play will be predominantly textual analysis. I don’t want to spend time tracking differences and revisions between both, other than to say that there is no interval in the revised version, and there is no body to be disposed of from the play’s start. Most importantly, no flock of birds flood the stage as they did at the end of the Gate production. As a coup de théâtre it was original, indeed a potential talking point for reviewers, and a way of getting in audiences, but the birds fell ill at one point, and it did cost a lot of money. But more importantly when they did appear they looked docile and dove-like, and had nothing of the scariness that you get in the novella and film, even if the Hitchcock movie is melodramatic. That may well have been the intention so that the birds could be seen less in terms of engulfment and extinction, as more an appeal to Christian symbolism of peace and love. Fintan Walsh explains the cute rather than terrifying impact it had on him. See ‘Review: The Birds’, Irish Theatre Magazine, 30 September 2009, http://itmarchive.ie/web/Reviews/Dublin-Theatre/The-Birds.html (Accessed 28 February 2018). 3. Conor McPherson, The Birds in Plays: Three (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013), 191. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 4. Outliner national economic growth meant that Ireland’s economy was stoked even further by the low interest rates set by the European Central Bank, and with the cost of credit so low, people tended to be in a position to borrow more. 5. Senior managements in pillar banks focused less on risk and prudence and more on expanding shareholder wealth through lending strategies that were backed by their boards, the shareholders, and, in effect, approved by wholesale money markets and bond holders who lent money to the banks in the first instance. In providing such investment loans, banks were often lax in carrying out stress tests or in checking for inappropriate risk, particularly in the buy-tolet property market.

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Notes 6. The multiple factors to be accounted for in this economic demise include an international banking crisis, poor indigenous bank lending practices, unenforced financial regulation, a loss of wage competitiveness, poor planning, spiralling house prices and too many investors in the market. See Morgan Kelly, ‘What happened to Ireland?’ (The 2011 Hubert Butler Annual Lecture), Irish Pages, Ireland in Crisis Special Issue, 6.1 (2009), 7–19, and Patrick Honohan, ‘What went wrong in Ireland?’ Working paper prepared for the World Bank, 2009, https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/staff/phonohan/ What%20went%20wrong.pdf (Accessed 2 March 2108). 7. A financial bailout – Economic Adjustment Programme for Ireland (2010) – from a Troika comprised of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC), led effectively to the temporary loss of Ireland’s economic sovereignty. 8. However, as Karl Whelan notes, while many focus on the economic devastation brought by the bust, ‘this would underestimate the true progress made by the Irish economy during the two decades prior to 2007’. See ‘Ireland’s economic crisis: The good, the bad and the ugly’, Journal of Macroeconomics (2013), 2, http://www.karlwhelan.com/Papers/WhelanIrelandPaper-June2013.pdf (Accessed 1 March 2018). 9. Reflections on this play are informed by me seeing the play’s premiere in 2013 on two occasions and that experience is integrated into my analysis. 10. Few of the main reviews, even the blogs about the play’s premier, with the exception of Sarah Hemming in FT.com and Philip Fisher in the British Theatre Guide relate the play to Ireland’s economic crisis. See Philip Fisher, ‘Review: The Night Alive’, British Theatre Guide, http://www. britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/the-night-alive-donmar-warehous-8955 (Accessed 5 November 2013), and Sarah Hemming, ‘Review: The Night Alive’, FT.com, 21 June 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/a75d67a4-d995-11e2-bab100144feab7de (Accessed 5 November 2013). 11. McPherson confirmed in an email to me (15 January 2014) that what he had in mind was a ‘mobile stage/lights/amplification system on the back of a truck for bands or DJs to play on at street festivals’. 12. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2. 13. Ibid., 65–6. 14. C. Austin Hill reads Kenneth as a demonic figure. See ‘Of angels and demons: Staging the demise of Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” through supernatural allegory’, in Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan (eds), The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (Maryland: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 11–12. 15. Conor McPherson, The Night Alive (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013), 63. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be in parentheses within the body of the text.)

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Notes 16. Charles Spencer suggests that McPherson ‘tacks on an entirely unpersuasive happy ending’. See ‘Review: The Night Alive’, The Telegraph, 20 June 2013, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10131865/ The-Night-Alive-Donmar-Warehouse.html (Accessed 2 March 2018). 17. Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Penguin Books Ltd., Kindle Edition) (Kindle Locations 2410-2412). 18. Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems, (Kindle Locations 2129-2133). 19. Ibid., (Kindle Locations 2138-2139). 20. Father John Misty’s ‘Funtimes in Babylon’, see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2bvCnyMpXUI (Accessed 1 March 2018). 21. Ben Brantley, ‘The Night Alive: Among the Debris, Something Divine’, New York Times, 12 December 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/theater/ reviews/conor-mcphersons-the-night-alive-with-ciaran-hinds.html (Accessed 6 April 2018). 22. Veil premiered at London’s National Theatre’s Lyttleton auditorium on 4 October 2011. Reflections on performance will be informed by my seeing the play’s premier and on my viewing in July 2017 of a recording of the work held at the National Theatre’s archive. 23. Maddy Costa, ‘Conor McPherson: Drawing on supernatural resources’, The Guardian, 28 September 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/ sep/28/conor-mcpherson-interview (Accessed 2 March 2018). 24. Liz Hoggard, ‘Conor McPherson knows what women want’, London Evening Standard, 13 September 2011, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/-theatre/article23986309-conor-mcpherson-knows-what-women-want.do (Accessed 18 November 2016). 25. Caroline McGinn, ‘Interview’, an interview with Conor McPherson, Time Out, 26 September 2011, http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/article/2782/ interview-conor-mcpherson (Accessed 3 November 2011). 26. Michael Billington was one of the exceptions, see ‘Review: Veil’, The Guardian, 5 October 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/05/the-veil-review (Accessed 3 March 2018). 27. Rae Smith, ‘Conor McPherson: Collaborations with’, http://www.raesmith. co.uk/2016/01/20/conor-mcpherson/ (Accessed 22 August 2017). 28. Conor McPherson, The Veil in Plays: Three (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013), 222. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be in parentheses within the body of the text.) 29. Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2. 30. Hogle (ed.), ‘Introduction’, 3. 31. Ibid., 3.

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Notes 32. The poster for The Veil is inspired by the late-nineteenth-century Danish painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi called Interior, photo by Dean Rogers and designed by Charlotte Wilkinson. Indeed, both the production’s mysterious sensibility and colour palette, takes inspiration from Hammershøi’s muted use of colour. 33. In performance the complexity of The Veil is apparent, the intricate connections are so well established by the staging and by the play’s rhythm that owe much to the dramaturgical sensibility of Chekhov, where so many of the characters are interconnected or bonded in complex ways. But for that complexity to shine through more thoroughly, the performance tempo needed not to be so relentless. That was my only real quibble with this outstanding National Theatre production. 34. In America, according to Larry Elliott, after the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, came the Great Depression: ‘Banks that weren’t failing were foreclosing on debtors. There was no welfare state to cushion the fall. … One estimate suggests 34 million Americans had no income at all.’ See Larry Elliott, ‘Crash course: What the great depression reveals about our future’, The Guardian, 4 March 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/04/crash-1929wall-street-what-the-great-depression-reveals-about-our-future (Accessed 21 December 2017). 35. Reflections on performance will be informed by my seeing the play’s premiere in late July 2017 on two occasions. 36. Conor McPherson in conversation with Nick Curtis, ‘A strange enquiry’, ‘Programme note’, Girl from the North Country, Old Vic Theatre, 25 July 2017. 37. The play features songs from the 1960s albums, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966); 1970s albums, New Morning (1970), Planet Waves (1974), The Basement Tapes (1975), Blood On The Tracks (1975), Desire (1976), Street-Legal (1978), Slow Train Coming (1979); 1980s work, Infidels (1983) and Empire Burlesque (1985); and from a 1990s album, Time Out Of Mind (1997) and one from Tempest (2012).The only non-Dylan music to feature is Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair De Lune’. Saved is a 1970s album that McPherson signals as important in the CD sleeve, but it does not feature. See Conor McPherson, ‘Sleeve Note’, Original London Cast Recording of Girl from the North Country (Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited). 38. Cook had played Mr Lockhart in Seafarer when it premiered at the National Theatre. 39. Conor McPherson, Girl from the North Country (London: Nick Hern Books, 2017), 46. (Hereafter, all other references to this play will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 40. Paul Taylor points out that ‘the last occasion that Dylan’s music was used for a project, [was] in The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘a show conceived by choreographer Twyla Tharp’ which ‘folded on Broadway after three weeks

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Notes in 2006’. See ‘Review: Girl’, The Independent, 2 August 2017, http://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/girl-from-thenorth-country-old-vic-review-a7863891.html (Accessed 21 December 2017). 41. See Stephen Dalton, ‘Review: Girl’, Hollywoodreporter, 27 July 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/girl-from-north-countrytheater-1024700 (Accessed 15 October 2017). 42. McPherson in conversation with Curtis. 43. Sarah Hughes, ‘Conor McPherson hits the mainstream with haunting drama and Dylan’s songbook’. 44. McPherson in conversation with Curtis. 45. Matthew Warchus, ‘Programme note’, Girl from the North Country, Old Vic Theatre, 25 July 2017. 46. Dominic Maxwell, ‘Girl from the North Country: Why Conor McPherson is banking on Bob Dylan, the musical’, The Times, 4 July 2017, https://www. thetimes.co.uk/article/girl-from-the-north-country-why-conor-mcpherson-isbanking-on-bob-dylan-the-musical-0hj8q6q3p (Accessed 21 December 2017). 47. Matt Trueman, ‘Review: Girl’, Variety, http://variety.com/2017/legit/reviews/ bob-dylan-musical-review-girl-from-the-north-country-1202508546/ (Accessed 21 December 2017). 48. Trueman, ‘Review: Girl’. 49. Ian Shuttleworth, ‘Review: Girl’, Financial Times, 27 July 2017, https:// www.ft.com/content/b7829d0c-72bb-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9 (Accessed 21 December 2017). 50. Michael Billington, ‘Dylan’s songs are depression-era dynamite’, The Guardian, 26 July 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/jul/27/girl-from-thenorth-country-review-bob-dylan-conor-mcpherson (Accessed 21 December 2017). 51. Taylor, ‘Review: Girl’, The Independent. 52. Ben Brantley, ‘Review: In Girl From the North Country rolling stones gather regrets’, New York Times, 26 July 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/ theater/girl-from-north-country-review-bob-dylan.html (Accessed 21 December 2017). 53. Brantley, ‘Review: In Girl From the North Country rolling stones gather regrets’. 54. Breffni Cummiskey, ‘Conor McPherson on his new Bob Dylan-inspired play’, RTÉ Culture, 22 May 2017, https://www.rte.ie/culture/2017/0221/854275conor/ (Accessed 21 December 2017). 55. Cummiskey, ‘Conor McPherson on his new Bob Dylan-inspired play’. 56. Ibid. 57. Brian Appleyard, ‘Yes, yes, yes, it is him babe’, Sunday Times, 23 June 2017, Culture Section, 10–11.

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Notes 58. Appleyard, ‘Yes, yes, yes, it is him babe’. 59. Ibid. 60. ‘McPherson in conversation with Curtis’. 61. David Browne, ‘How a Bob Dylan musical finally got off the ground’, Rolling Stone, 3 September 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/insidebob-dylan-musical-girl-from-the-north-country-w502632 (Accessed 21 December 2017).

Chapter 5 1. Conor McPherson, ‘The pagan landscape’, Programme Note, Abbey Theatre production of The Seafarer, 2008 and 2009, 4. 2. McPherson, ‘The pagan landscape’, 4. 3. Csencsitz, ‘Conor McPherson lifts the veil’, 81. 4. This chapter is an expansion of a perspective originally published in ‘Lapsed, augmented and eternal Christmases in the theatre of Conor McPherson’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 23.1 (2017), 51–72, by kind permission of the HJEAS and its editor, Donald E. Morse. 5. McPherson, Rum and Vodka in Plays: One, 12. (Hereafter all page references will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 6. McPherson, St Nicholas in Plays One, 140. (Hereafter all page references will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 7. John Patrick Shanley, ‘The supernaturalism of the everyday’, American Theatre, 30.10 (December 2013), 69, http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/02/23/ conor-mcpherson-searches-for-god-in-the-night-alive/ (Accessed 12 March 2018). 8. Peter Crawley, ‘Paula review: A TV show as promiscuous as its protagonist’ Irish Times, 7 June 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/ paula-review-a-tv-show-as-promiscuous-as-its-protagonist-1.3110580 (Accessed 29 May 2017). 9. My response to this play is informed by my experience of seeing Robin Lefevre’s production of the play at the Gate Theatre in 2000, as well as having viewed in May 2017 a recording of this production held in the Gate Theatre archive at NUI Galway. Liz Ashcroft designed set and costumes and Mick Hughes was responsible for the lighting. 10. Conor McPherson, Dublin Carol in Plays: Two (London: Nick Hern, 2004), 79. (Hereafter all page references will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 11. See Conor McPherson’s discussion about new Ireland meeting old Ireland in Carol, rather than the perception of an old Ireland meeting new Ireland 220

Notes as was proposed by an unnamed scholar about Weir, ‘Old Ireland bad, new Ireland good’, Irish Times, 30 December 1999, 12, https://ucd.idm.oclc.org/ login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ucd.idm.oclc.org/docview/526437924? accountid=14507 (Accessed 24 April 2018). 12. David Nowlan contrasts Gate and Royal Court Productions; ‘The gentle melancholy which suffused the play in the Royal Court is replaced here with a sense of combat, as if there might be something to fight about.’ See ‘Review: Dublin Carol’, Irish Times, 5 October 2000, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ dublin-carol-1.1105891 (Accessed 19 July 2017). 13. Emer O’Kelly suggests that ‘John Kavanagh plays the shambling John in a performance of emotionally-charged depth reined in by technique, although the technique does edge into the mannered at times. Donna Dent’s stifled, enduring Mary leaves blood on the stage, and Sean McDonagh brings a touching balance of innocence and defeat to the role of Sean’. See ‘Review: Dublin Carol’, Sunday Independent, 8 October 2000, http://www.independent. ie/entertainment/books/a-barbaric-edge-to-comedy-26256700.html (Accessed 19 July 2017). 14. Witoszek and Sheeran, Talking to the Dead, 13. 15. See Murray’s cogent analysis of the folkloric aspects, based on the work of Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Eilís Ní Anluain in ‘The supernatural in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer and The Birds’, 68. 16. Conor McPherson, The Seafarer in Plays: Three (London: Nick Hern, 2013), 3. (Hereafter all page references will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 17. My response to this play is based on seeing the 2009 Abbey Theatre production which was directed by McPherson, after Jimmy Fay had directed the same play in 2008 at this venue. Paul O’Mahony designed the set, and Niamh Lunny was responsible for costumes. The only cast change from Fay’s 2008 production at the Abbey was that Nick Dunning replaced George Costigan. I viewed a recording of the 2009 production held in the Abbey Archive in the Abbey Theatre in May 2017. No specific recording date is listed in the Abbey Theatre Archive. (I also viewed a recording of the play’s premiere at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre in July 2017.) 18. Murray, ‘The supernatural in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer and The Birds’, 69. 19. Ron Cook as Lockhart in the National Theatre production dresses well but his accent does not socially differentiate him from the others the way that Dunning’s accent does. Cook has a lower middle-class Dublin accent. (See McPherson’s response to my question about the connection between accent and nationality. Lockhart is not necessarily British, but with two different British actors playing Lockhart in both Abbey Theatre productions, it was easier to have actors use their own accents rather than middle-class Dublin ones. So, casting inflects the performance rather than seeing associations between Lockhart and Britain, and indicative of Ireland’s colonial history, etc.) 221

Notes 20. Laurence is the name of the rent boy that visits Ian’s office in Shining. 21. Indeed, the Abbey staging was more flamboyant during this moment, whereas in the Cottesloe production there were not the same theatrical effects, the transition was more low-key, signalled by sound, and a darkening of the room, but not by such lighting excesses. 22. Csencsitz, ‘Conor McPherson lifts the veil’, 80. 23. Lockhart associates the game of cards with time distorting and slowing down, accordingly linking the play back to Alive’s black holes. 24. The story of Maurice Macken surviving an electrocution, only to die in a house fire that same night, raises the issue of destiny, and the fact that Macken’s ghost has been seen in the pub is also important. 25. Patrick Lonergan, ‘“I do repent and yet I do despair”: Beckettian and Faustian Allusions in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer and Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 25.1 (2012) 29. 26. Ondřej Pilný, ‘Mercy on the misfit: Continuity and transformation in the plays of Conor McPherson’, in Marianna Gula, Mária Kurdi and István D. Rácz (eds), The Binding Strength of Irish Studies. Festschrift in Honour of Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse (Debrecen: Debrecen University Press, 2011), 92. 27. Eric Weitz, ‘Sleight of frame: Exploitations of comic feeling by two Irish playwrights’, in Rhona Trench (ed.), Staging Thought: Essays on Irish Theatre, Scholarship and Practice (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 150. 28. McPherson pushes things further while noting: ‘And an element of nature itself, with its non-negotiable relentless cycle of change, became Satan, the son of the morning.’ See ‘The pagan landscape’, 7. 29. Murray, ‘The supernatural in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer and The Birds’, 67. 30. In ‘In the Paths of Exile: Guilt and Isolation in The Seafarer’, Joy Meads argues that the Newgrange burial mounds had a decisive effect on McPherson’s writing the play: ‘An eighty-foot long passageway leads to the burial chamber at the heart of Newgrange, a five-thousand-year old tomb on the banks of the Boyne River sixty miles north of Dublin. The tunnel usually lies shrouded in darkness, but on one day each year (at the dawn of the winter solstice) the beams of the rising sun pierce the blackness and flood the tomb with light.’ See ‘In the paths of exile: Guilt and isolation in The Seafarer’, Watch and Listen, 2008–2009, vol 2 (npd.), https://www.steppenwolf.org/articles/in-the-paths-ofexile-guilt-and-isolation-in-the-seafarer/ (Accessed 13 June 2016). 31. See Judith Flanders, Christmas: A Biography (Pan Macmillan, Kindle Edition), 232. 32. Flanders, Christmas, 241. 33. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 8. 34. McPherson, ‘The pagan landscape’, 4. 222

Notes

Chapter 6 1. Scott T. Cummings argues that The Weir is effectively a ‘characteristically cheeky response to the call for him to write characters who talk to each other instead of the audience. He has them tell stories’. See ‘Homo fabulator: The narrative imperative in Conor McPherson’s plays’, in Eamonn Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff: Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), 308. 2. Andrew Hazucha notes that the Jamestown weir is not a hydroelectric dam that the play proposes it to be, rather, a dam to make the Shannon river ‘more navigable in the early to mid-nineteenth century’ under the auspices of the Shannon Commissioners. See ‘The Shannon scheme, rural electrification, and veiled history in Conor McPherson’s The Weir’, New Hibernia Review, 17.1 (Earrach/Spring 2013), 78. 3. Cummings, ‘Homo fabulator’, 308. 4. Conor McPherson notes: ‘The Royal Court was undergoing renovations, so we were to play on the cordoned-off stage area of the Ambassadors Theatre. The set was extraordinary. The seating was arranged so that the audience was pretty much in the bar with the characters. It had a rare intimacy, which must be a joy for any actor to work with.’ See ‘Late nights and proclamations’, American Theatre, 16.4 (April 1999), 45. 5. In this chapter, Rourke’s production will significantly inform my reflections. Josie Rourke directed this Donmar Warehouse production, with Tom Scutt responsible for set design, Neil Austin for the lighting and sound was by Ian Dickinson. With the exception of Scottish Brian Cox, the other four actors cast are Irish. 6. This chapter is a substantial revision of the singular focus on Weir in ‘Respond or else: Conor McPherson’s The Weir at the Donmar Warehouse’, Irish Theatre International, 3.1 (2014), 57–74. 7. Conor McPherson, The Weir in Plays: Two (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), 12. (Hereafter all page references will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 8. Weir has little by way of the In Yer-Face sensibility that Aleks Sierz has articulated as a mid- to late 1990s phenomena and the play has none of the post-dramatic style evident in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life, which also appeared in 1997. See In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 1–9. 9. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212. 10. Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, 211–14. 11. Terry Gifford’s analysis of Roger Sales’s claims that the pastoral represents ‘refuge, reflection, rescue, requiem, and reconstruction’. For Gifford, Sales’s

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Notes view is that the pastoral ‘is essentially escapist in seeking refuge in the country and often also in the past: that it is a selective “reflection” on past country life in which old settled values are “rescued” by the text; and that all this functions as a simplified “reconstruction” of what is, in fact, a more complex reality’. See Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), 7–8. 12. See Eamonn Jordan, ‘Pastoral exhibits: Narrating authenticities in Conor McPherson’s The Weir’, Irish University Review, 34.2 (Autumn–Winter 2004), 351–68. 13. Rae Smith, who designed the stage for the first production, notes: ‘We visited pubs around Sligo and Leitrim: I drew the plan of the pub as we sat there and idiosyncratic moments around the bar itself. The evidence of this type of research trip can therefore directly be seen in the atmosphere and detail of the set. It had an installation feel and purposefully rough around the edges with a great deal of darkness overhead reflecting the pitch-black skies above a rural Ireland without streetlights, which contrasts with the intimate warmth of human contact.’ ‘Conor McPherson: Collaborations with’. 14. This detail was deemed particularly important. The stage designer, Tom Scutt, explains that the floor is tiled so ‘that the guys in the pub sense that the sound of Dervla [Kirwan’s Valerie] is very different to the shuffle’ of Brian Cox’s Jack. See ‘Designing the weir’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciUfiTwzC60 (Access 5 April 2018). 15. Cousin, Playing for Time, 33. 16. In contrast, when Jim Norton performed the role of Jack for the play’s premiere, he takes considerable glee in the invitation to deliver his first story. It is a declarative, sumptuous and expressive delivery of the tale, and he shows considerable delight in his own familiarity with and mastery of the environment through local knowledge. 17. Apart from Kirwan, I have seen very fine performances in this role, Hilary Reynolds in Rickson’s production that toured to the Gate Theatre Dublin in 1998, Genevieve O’Reilly in Garry Hynes’s 2008 production also at the Gate Theatre and Janet Moran in Decadent Theatre’s 2016 production, directed by Andrew Flynn. Without an actor equipped to perform and acknowledge the emotional complexities of Valerie, this play can struggle in performance. 18. See Jordan, ‘Pastoral exhibits’, 364–6, and Conor McPherson’s ‘Preface’, St. Nicholas and The Weir (Dublin and London: New Island Books and Nick Hern Books, 1997), 32. This Preface is not re-produced in Plays: Two. 19. Jack’s story is delivered with great poignancy by Cox, but also with a little more aggression than Jim Norton brings to his performance in the Gate Theatre performance of 1998. With Norton’s performance, I felt as if he is attempting to identify with Valerie’s loss, whereas with Cox there appears to be both that empathy, but a tentative plea for Valerie to recognize him as an aging, but sexually functional male. The details Jack offers about sleeping with his ex-girlfriend invite readings like this. Yet, if it seems as if Cox’s Jack is veering towards self-pity, it was quickly abandoned thanks to levity and self-awareness. 224

Notes As Anthony Roche notes, in Ian Rickson’s original production, Jim Norton’s Jack ‘was actively steering Valerie and Brendan towards each other, whereas in Garry Hynes’s 2008 Gate Theatre production, Sean McGinley’s Jack (closer to the mid-fifties age the text indicates of the character) more actively challenged Denis Conway’s grandstanding as Finbar, going face to face with him over Valerie (Genevieve O’Reilly) at one point’. See Contemporary Irish Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009, 2nd edition), 231. 20. Lynda Henderson had proposed that in Tom Murphy’s work, women characters were generally excluded from the ‘metaphysical debate’. See ‘Men, women and the life of the spirit in Tom Murphy’s plays’, in Jacqueline Genet and Wynne Hellegoarc’h (eds), Irish Writers and Their Creative Process (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), 87–99, 88–90. 21. Pinker, The Better Angels, 756. 22. Ibid., 766. 23. Ibid., 758. 24. Ibid., 760. 25. Ibid., 758. 26. Ibid., 756–8. 27. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2002), 234. 28. Pinker, The Better Angels, 767. 29. Ibid., 759. 30. Ibid., 760. 31. Ibid., 761. 32. ‘Blow-ins’ is how the Walsh family members are regarded (40). The Danes or Norwegians, who are seasonal visitors, are lazily labelled ‘Germans’, who are accused of sitting around ‘playing all old sixties songs on their guitars. And they don’t even know the words’ (73). As Nicholas Grene sees it ‘Comic complicity with this mild xenophobia is encouraged in the audience as part of the play’s underlying resistance to modernity.’ See ‘Ireland in two minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 35 (2005), 306. 33. More broadly, based on textual evidence, critics are divided on this matter as to whether the play offers a significant consideration of the emergence of the Celtic Tiger (1993–2007). Helen Heusner Lojek notes: ‘McPherson’s bar is not simply a synecdoche for Ireland – certainly not the Celtic Tiger so powerful in the early twenty-first century thinking about the island’. See The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in Contemporary Plays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 154. However, both Rhona Trench in ‘The measure of a pub spirit in Conor McPherson’s The Weir’, in Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (eds), The Theatre of Conor McPherson: Right Beside the Beyond (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012), 165–82, and P. J. Mathews in ‘The “sweet smell” of the Celtic Tiger: Elegy and critique in Conor McPherson’s The Weir’, 225

Notes in The Theatre of Conor McPherson, 151–64, associate the play with this Celtic Tiger period. 34. Although Cooper brought an endearing quality to his role as Finbar in Rourke’s production, in part Finbar is played more often to be laughed at, and this thus enticed less a laughter of self or collective recognition on behalf of the spectator and more one of condescension towards this character. 35. Traditionally in rural communities, neighbourly support was called upon not only for harvesting or the bartering of skills, but also for medical and emergency responses. Power, authority, trust, exploitation and codependencies are complicated, where issues of kinship, community and extended family provide additional consideration. 36. In Girl, Nick Laine cannot afford to be so generous with his alcohol, and there is a wonderful moment when he offers his new guests, Joe Scott and the Reverend Marlowe, a drink and they think it is on the house and are surprised when Nick demands payment. 37. Pinker, The Better Angels, 755. 38. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, 263. 39. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 8. 40. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 33. 41. Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life (London: Allen Lane 2014), 186. 42. R. W. Connell, ‘The social organisation of masculinity’, in Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 40–3. 43. Helen Heusner Lojek notes of the dramatic space in this play that the pub is ‘a place where drinkers meet with a degree of equality that may not be found outside the bar’. See The Spaces of Irish Drama, 59–60. 44. Playwright and novelist Declan Hughes has voiced the most trenchant opinions about plays set in rural Ireland. See ‘Reflections on Irish theatre and identity’, in Eamonn Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), 11–13. 45. Kevin Kerrane, ‘The structural elegance of Conor McPherson’s The Weir’, New Hibernia Review, 10.4 (2006), 121. 46. Lojek, The Spaces of Irish Drama, 61. 47. Brantley, ‘Review: In Girl From the North Country’.

Chapter 7 1. Victor Turner, ‘Liminal to limonid, in play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology’, Rice Institute Pamphlet-Rice University Studies, 60.3 (1974), 53–92. 226

Notes 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 25. 3. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock and Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 2. 4. Freud, The Uncanny, 1. 5. Emilie Morin, ‘The Celtic Tiger, its phantoms, and Conor McPherson’s haunted rooms’, Textual Practice, 28.6 (2014), 1105. 6. Julie Carpenter, ‘Review: The Veil – national theatre’, The Express, 6 October 2011, http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/theatre/275922/Review-TheVeil-National-Theatre-London (Accessed 10 March 2018). 7. McPherson, The Good Thief in Plays: One, 83. 8. McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower in Plays: One, 133. 9. McPherson, The Weir in Plays: Two, 13. 10. Of course, this crime was widespread and appears to have been historically commonplace – see Diarmuid Ferriter’s reports on prosecutions for child abuse in the early decades of the state in Occasions of Sin (London: Profile Books, 2009). But in this particular instance, the location of the abuser within the churchyard – though he is not a member of the clergy – suggests more particularly the suppression of knowledge about clerical sexual abuse of children. Accusing a priest would have been a particularly difficult action until very recently. 11. McPherson, The Veil in Plays: Three, 222. (All further other references will be given in parentheses within the body of the text.) 12. Morin, ‘The Celtic Tiger, its phantoms’, 1110. 13. Ibid., 1110. 14. Todorov, The Fantastic, 25. 15. John Pier, ‘Point of view in drama: Diegetic monologue, unreliable narrators, and the author’s voice on stage’, Comparative Drama, 22 (1988), 197. 16. Brian Richardson, ‘Voice and narration in postmodern drama’, New Literary History, 32 (2001), 682. 17. Pier, ‘Point of view’, 202. 18. McPherson, Port Authority in Plays: Two, 132. (All further references will be given in parenthesis within the body of the text.) 19. Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 13. 20. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. 21. Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer, ‘Diegetic and mimetic narrativity: Some further steps towards a narratology of drama’, in John Pier and José Ángel Garcia Landa (eds), Theorizing Narrativity (Berlin: Walter deGruyter GmbH & Co, 2008), 342. 22. Nünning and Sommer, ‘Diegetic and mimetic narrativity’. 227

Notes 23. Pier, ‘Point of view’, 204. 24. Tom Vandevelde, ‘“I open”: Narration in Samuel Beckett’s Cascando’, Samuel Beckett Today/aujourd’hui, 25 (2013), 259. 25. Vandevelde, ‘I open’. 26. Pier, ‘Point of view in drama’, 203. 27. Vandevelde, ‘I open’, 259 and Richardson, ‘Voice and narration’, 198. 28. Vandevelde, ‘I open’, 259. 29. McPherson, The Veil in Plays: Three, 219. (All further references will be given in parenthesis within the body of the text.) 30. Monika Fludernik, ‘Narrative and drama’, in John Pier and José Angel García Landa (eds), Theorizing Narrativity (Berlin: Walter deGruyter GmbH & Co, 2008), 371. 31. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, ‘Mediacy and narrative mediation’, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds), The Living Handbook of Narratology (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2013), http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/mediacy-andnarrative-mediation (Accessed 9 January 2018). 32. Alber and Fludernik, ‘Mediacy and narrative mediation’. 33. Nünning and Sommer, ‘Diegetic and mimetic narrativity’, 339. 34. Richardson, ‘Voice and narration’, 197 and Vandevelde, ‘I open’, 258. 35. John Pier, ‘Metalepsis’, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 303. 36. McPherson, Girl from the North Country, 49–50. (All further references will be given in parenthesis within the body of the text.) 37. Richardson, ‘Voice and narration’, 683. 38. Ben Brantley, ‘Review: Girl from the North Country: Rolling Stones Gather Regrets’, New York Times, 26 July 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/ theater/girl-from-north-country-review-bob-dylan.html (Accessed 10 January 2018). 39. Curtis, ‘A strange enquiry’. 40. Warchus, ‘Programme note’. 41. A selection of three Ben Brantley’s reviews from the New York Times are included on this book’s webpage, as are links to his other reviews of McPherson’s work.

Conclusion 1. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 53. 228

Notes 2. Pinker, The Better Angels, 99. 3. Patrick Healy, ‘Hope doesn’t come out of a bottle’, New York Times, 30 November 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/theater/conormcpherson-prepares-the-night-alive.html (Accessed 6 March 2018). 4. Curtis, ‘A strange enquiry’. 5. Csencsitz, ‘Conor McPherson lifts the veil’, 39.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Maha Alatawi is a lecturer in English at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. She was awarded an MA in English Literature from Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University with a thesis examining two plays by Arthur Miller and Marsha Norman. She is currently a PhD student and works as a tutor for the School of English, Drama, and Film at UCD. The focus of her research is Contemporary Irish Theatre, particularly the work of Conor McPherson. Ben Brantley has been the chief theatre critic of the New York Times since 1996, filing reviews regularly from London as well as New York. Before joining the Times in 1993, he was a staff writer for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the editor of two books of New York Times theatre reviews and a recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for theatre criticism. His two books are The New York Times Book of Broadway: On the Aisle for the Unforgettable Plays of the Last Century and Broadway Musicals: From the Pages of the New York Times. Lisa Fitzpatrick is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Ulster University. She studied in Trinity College and University College Dublin prior to completing her PhD at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. She has published on performance and violence, post-conflict theatre, and gender, and has been funded by the British Academy and the Canadian High Commission. She has been an invited speaker at a number of events, most recently at the ‘Performance of the Real’ research event at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is a founding member of the Irish Society for Theatre Research, where she convenes the Gender and Performance Working Group. Her latest book, Rape on the Contemporary Stage, was published in 2018. Conor McPherson’s works have won many major awards and have been seen extensively around the world. Successes include Girl from the North Country, I Went Down, Paula, Port Authority, Shining City, The Seafarer, The Night Alive and The Weir.

INDEX

Abbey Theatre  70, 117, 126, 157 Adams, Tim  36, 58 alcohol  28, 30, 36, 87, 97, 102, 106, 120, 127–9, 131, 140, 169, 196, 205 n.24 Appleyard, Brian  114 Arditti, Paul  6, 104, 114 Atim, Sheila  106–15 Atlantic Theatre  2, 199 n.7 audience (s)  3, 7, 11, 15, 21–4, 34, 41, 45, 51, 54, 62, 68–9, 71, 73, 87, 96, 112, 120, 125, 127, 133–4, 138, 140, 156, 160, 165, 167–8, 171, 175–6, 179–80, 185, 187, 191, 197–8. See also spectator Austin, Neil  6, 104, 139 Baker, Simon  6, 114 Banking Collapse  215 n.5 Beckett, Samuel  200 n.11, 47, 52, 67, 93, 180, 197 Billington, Michael  112 Birthistle, Eva  53–8 Boyle, Consolata  6 Brantley, Ben  73, 100, 112–13, 124, 154, 187–8 Breathnach, Paddy  2, 49–53 Brennan, Bríd  101–5 Brennan, Stephen  35–41 Bush Theatre  1 Byrne, Antoine  49–53 Caffrey, Peter  49–53 Caine, Michael  58–61 Carney, Liam  127–34 Carr, Marina  67, 184 Catholic Church  13, 26, 42–3, 67, 74, 102, 117, 124–5, 160, 170 causality  15, 21, 38, 39, 75, 100, 192 Celtic Tiger  10, 14, 25–6, 48, 81, 94, 100–101, 147, 158, 166 Christmas  13, 15–16, 80, 115, 117–35, 114, 197

Clarke, Kathy Kiera  73–81 class (social)  10, 11, 27, 28–30, 35–7, 43, 44, 52, 54–5, 63, 65, 76–8, 87–8, 93, 96, 130, 153, 189, 191 clerical abuse  41–4 Colgan, Michael  1 Constable, Paule  6 Cook, Ron  6, 106–15 Cooper, Risteárd  137–53 corruption  32–3, 35, 42, 44, 64, 152 Costa, Maddy  101, 214 n.37 Cousin, Geraldine  13, 67, 74, 141 Cox, Brian  1, 6, 53–8, 69, 69 n.14, 72, 73, 137–53 Crawley, Peter  86, 120, 199 n.1 criminality (Criminal)  11, 31–3, 43, 46–64, 165, 193 Csenscitz, Cassandra  117, 131, 197, 200 n.17 Cuba Pictures  85 Cullen Siobhán  85–90 Cummings, Scott T.  137 Curtis, Nick  115 de Buitléar, Cian  50 Decadent Theatre Company  206 n.40 De Jongh, Nicholas  41 Dent, Donna  120–6 Dickinson, Ian  139 Diss, Eileen  6, 40 Dolan, Jill  22, 134 Dolan, Paul  152 Donmar Warehouse  1, 2, 96, 137 Doyle, Tony  49–53 Drew, Phelim  126–34, 206 n.40 Dublin  1, 2, 8, 11, 14, 28, 33–4, 36, 39, 47–9, 55, 64, 70, 72–4, 84, 95, 98, 100, 120, 126, 130, 140, 144, 149, 157, 174, 176, 187, 193 Du Maurier, Daphne  1, 92–4 Dunne, Caoilfhionn  6, 101–5, 126–34

Index Dunning, Nick  126–34 Dylan, Bob  1, 15, 106–15, 157, 183, 185–6, 194, 197 Eagleman, David  31, 40 Egan, Avian  81–5 fantastic (the)  15, 164–5, 167, 169, 173, 176–7 fantasy  10, 29, 33, 77, 114, 183, 189, 196 Fay, Jimmy  199 n.7, 221 n.17 Fay, Liam  85–7 fear  14, 16, 19, 21, 29, 32, 37, 44, 65, 67, 69–71, 76–7, 89, 90, 92, 94, 97, 102, 103, 105, 114, 117, 122, 131, 147, 159, 165, 167, 172, 176, 195 femininity  11, 44, 189 financial bailout  216 n.7 Fitzpatrick, Lisa  32, 57, 196, 204 n.7 Flanders, Judith  134 Fludernik, Monika  179, 183 Fly by Night Theatre Company  1, 199 n.1, 204 n.15 Flynn, Andrew  206 n.40, 224 n.17 Freud, Sigmund  12, 165 Fricker, Karen  43 Friel, Brian  9, 67, 181, 184 Fuchs, Elinor  190 funerary (cultures)  12, 16, 42, 53, 84, 117, 119–20, 124–5, 133–5, 196–7 Gallagher, Bronagh  6, 106–15 Gambon, Michael  58–63 Gate Theatre  1, 5, 42, 92, 200 n.11 gender  10–11, 13, 22, 44, 7, 60–2, 65, 143, 149, 153, 161, 173, 189, 191, 196 ghosts  8, 12–14, 18, 33, 65, 65–90, 94, 99, 103, 105, 108–9, 126–7, 134–5, 139, 141, 142, 144, 150, 157, 164–5, 167, 169, 172–3, 175–6, 181–2, 188, 194–5 Gifford, Terry  223 n.11 Gilmour, Soutra  96 Ging, Debbie  52 Gleeson, Brendan  49–58 Gleeson, Brian  94–101 Gough, Denise  3, 6, 85–90, 161 Great Depression  15, 91, 106–7, 112–13, 115, 192 Greenblatt, Stephen  67

232

Grene, Nicholas  22, 138, 225 n.32 Guthrie Theatre  215 n.2 Hale, Simon  106–15 Harris, Susan Cannon  203 n.40 Harvey, David  12, 26, 96, 152, 192 Harvey, PJ  185 Headey, Lena  58–63 Healy, Patrick  196 Hely, Kevin  6, 204 n.15, 206 n.35 Henderson, Mark  115 Henderson, Shirley  106–15 Hill, C. Austin  216 n.14 Hinds, Ciarán  6, 81–5, 94–101, 106–15, 155 Hjejle, Iben  81–5 Hoggard, Liz  101 Hogle, Jerrold E.  103 Holden, Johnny  85–90 Holmes, Alex  85–90 home  9, 10, 12, 14–15, 26, 28–30, 32, 36–7, 41, 54, 58, 68, 74–5, 80, 82, 88, 91–2, 94–5, 115–16, 124, 126, 128, 134, 138, 141, 142, 154, 165, 167, 171–2, 175–6, 191 homelessness  14–15, 78, 92 Hughes, Declan  226 n.44 Hughes, Mick  6, 41 Hughes, Tom  85–90 Hynes, Garry  224 n.17 ideology  10, 12, 17, 20, 211 n.1 intimacy  23, 29, 42, 86, 108, 118, 153, 190 Jamestown  15, 42, 91, 101, 137, 182–3, 193 Jolly, Claudia  106–15 Jones, Ursula  101–5 Jordan, Neil  58, 210 n.39 Jordan Murphy, Tom  73–81 Kavanagh, John  120–6 Kelly, Morgan  216 n.6 Kene, Arinzé  105–15 Keogh, Garrett  6, 206 nn.35, 40 Kerrane, Kevin  54–5, 154 Kinlan, Laurence  6, 53–8, 155, 211 n.44 Kirwan, Dervla  137–53, 200 n.16 Kroetz, Franz Xaver  185, 199 n.5 Kurup, Debbie  106–15

Index Layden, Dervila  51 Leonard, Hugh  67 Lojek, Helen  154, 225 n.33, 226 n.43 Lonergan, Patrick  132, 202 n.31, 203 n.5 Luckhurst, Mary  12, 67 Lyric Theatre  1, 2 McCullough, Ivan  81 McDonagh, Sean  120–6 McDonald, Peter  6, 49–53, 101–5, 137–53 McDonnell, Owen  85–90 McElhatton, Michael  6, 49, 73–81, 94–101 McGinn, Caroline  101 McGinnity, Aoibhin  85–90 MacLiam, Edward  85–90 MacLiam, Ennna  35–41 McLoone, Martin  48 McPherson, Conor The Actors  2, 7, 11, 58–63, 155, 158, 193–4 The Birds  1, 2, 5, 14, 68, 90–1, 92–4, 116, 151, 159, 162, 192, 194 Come on Over  2, 25–6, 41–4, 166, 190 Dublin Carol  1–2, 6, 12, 16, 38, 120–6, 135, 150, 189, 194, 196 Eclipse  13, 59, 65, 68, 69, 81–5, 155, 194–5 Girl from the North Country  1, 2, 13, 15–17, 65, 67, 68, 90, 106–15, 120, 151, 154–5, 157, 159–61, 163, 165, 181–5, 192, 194–7 The Good Thief  5, 25, 27, 31–3, 44, 62, 68, 149, 165, 187, 188, 190, 191, 195 I Went Down  2, 11, 49–53, 56, 58, 150, 158, 190, 193 The Nest  6, 185 The Night Alive  1, 2, 14–17, 65, 78, 92, 94–101, 106, 115–16, 118–19, 144, 151, 159, 160, 162, 185, 187–8, 190, 192, 194–7 Paula  3, 13, 16, 48, 57, 65, 67, 85–90, 97, 118–20, 161, 163–4, 166, 174–7, 189–91, 193–5 Port Authority  1, 2, 25, 35–41, 44, 117, 120, 122, 128, 161, 179–81, 186–7, 189–92, 194–5 Rum and Vodka  5, 10, 25, 27, 28–31, 34–5, 44, 68, 71, 117, 122, 128, 189–91, 193–5

St Nicholas  1, 2, 5, 6, 10–12, 16, 23, 25, 67, 69–73, 118, 125, 130, 143, 188–90, 194, 196 Saltwater  2, 33–4, 53–8, 150, 155, 158, 193, 195 The Seafarer  1, 13, 16, 67, 81, 90, 98, 117, 126–34, 150, 156, 159–60, 185, 188, 191, 194–5, 197 Shining City  1, 13–14, 65, 67, 73–81, 83, 98, 99, 117, 120, 126, 150, 165–6, 182, 185, 187–90, 194–5, 197 The Veil  13–15, 13–15? 42, 57, 65, 76, 83–4, 90–1, 101–5, 108–9, 116, 118, 128, 151, 163–6, 171–4, 179, 181, 186, 188, 191–2, 195 The Weir  1, 2, 5, 6, 12, 1–7, 39, 42, 59, 65, 67, 90, 91, 117, 137–53, 159–60, 162, 164, 166–73, 187–92, 194–6 This Lime Tree Bower  1, 2, 10–11, 23, 25, 27, 33–5, 36, 40–1, 44–5, 55, 71, 165, 179, 190, 191 Maguire, Tom  204 n.7 Mamet, David  143, 199 n.1 Marston, Nick  199 n.2 masculinity  11, 44, 52–3, 189, 208 n.58 Mathews, P. J.  255 n.33 Maxwell, Dominic  112 Molloy, Derbhla  41–4 Monahan, Barry  51–2 monologue  6, 10–11, 19–46, 48, 53–4, 56–9, 72–3, 137, 158, 166, 179–81, 187–90, 195 Moran, Dylan  58–63 Morin, Emilie  12, 67, 165, 173 Moxley, Gina  53–8 Mullen, Connor  53–8, 204 n.15 Murphy, Paul  30 Murphy, Tom  67, 132, 184, 225 n.20 Murray, Christopher  68, 129, 133 mystery  7, 8, 13–14, 68, 114, 133, 160, 162, 185, 188, 196–7 names and naming  18, 36–7, 39–40, 72, 81, 84, 121, 123–4, 127, 143, 161, 180, 194–5 National Theatre (London)  1, 103, 127 neo-liberalism  10–12, 16–17, 26, 48–9, 53, 63–4, 95–6, 146, 148–9, 153, 192–3 Newgrange Neolithic monuments  117, 131, 134–5, 197, 201 n.26, 222 n.30

233

Index Ní Chiosáin, Fionnuala  81, 156, 194, 213 n.33 Northern Ireland  26, 35, 48 Norton, Jim  35–41, 41–4, 81–4, 94–101, 102–5, 106–15 O’Brien, Cormac  208 n.58 O’Brien, Harvey  57–8 O’Casey, Sean  52, 158 O’Hanlon, Ardal  137–53 O’Kane, Deidre  57 Old Vic  1, 112, 160, 185 O’Mahony, Paul  126 O’Toole, Fintan  9, 203 n.30 paramilitary  32, 34, 56 pastoral  137–8, 140, 149, 153 Pettitt, Lance  62 Pier, John  184 Pierse, Michael  11, 205 n.21 Pilný, Ondřej  133 Pine, Emilie  209 n.24 Pinker, Steven  17, 145–6, 149, 193 pleasure  7, 16, 19, 42, 62, 70, 86, 108, 127–8, 152, 190 popular culture and fear  66 poverty  15, 62, 171, 181, 191–3 Quinn, Aidan  82 racism  106, 111 rape  29, 34–5, 42, 53, 165, 190 recession  14–15, 92, 94–5, 105, 192, 205 n.4 Reid, Sam  106–15 Richardson, Brian  178, 180, 184–5 Rickson, Ian  1, 2, 6, 224 nn.17, 19 Roche, Anthony  68–9, 90 n.51, 144 n.19 Roche, Billy  3, 81–5, 160 Rourke, Josie  137–53 Rovelli, Carlo  99 Royal Court  1, 137 Ruiz, Noelia  7, 68–9 Sandel, Michael  12, 202 n.37, 149, 152 Savage, Mike  29 Schiller, Adrian  101–5 Scutt, Tom  139, 139 n.14 sex  17, 29–30, 32, 36–7, 42, 49, 53, 55–7, 62, 71, 76, 78, 80, 85–6, 88–9, 93, 97, 100, 105, 107–8, 130, 142, 144, 149–51, 161–2, 174–5, 190

234

Shalloo, Jack  106–15 Shanley, John Patrick  119 Shuttleworth, Ian  112 Sierz, Aleks  223 n.8 Smith, Rae  6, 101, 103–4, 114, 200 n.17, 202 n.28, 217 n.27, 224 n.13 space  15, 20, 23–4, 39–40, 49–50, 67–9, 79, 81, 89–91, 96–101, 103, 109, 114, 116, 120, 123, 126, 138–9, 141–3, 145, 149, 159–60, 166, 169–70, 175, 179, 193–4, 196 spectator  4, 7, 8, 10–11, 15, 20, 23–5, 27, 31, 40, 42, 45, 50–1, 53–4, 58, 63, 67, 71, 75–6, 81, 98, 101, 111, 120, 127, 131, 138, 147, 165, 196, 198. See also audience Spelman, Valerie  6, 53 Spencer, Charles  43, 72–3, 217 n.16 Stafford, Maeloisa  126–34 Steppenwolf Theatre Company  2, 199 n.6, 200 n.10 Strindberg, August  66, 162, 180 supernatural  6, 12–15, 33, 65–90, 103, 109, 114–16, 131, 145, 162, 164–5, 169–71, 173, 175–7, 183, 188, 195–6 Synge, J. M.  67, 93 Taaffe, Emily  85–90, 101–5 Taggart, Ashley  84 Taylor, Paul  72–3, 112 time  13, 15, 25, 34, 36, 38–41, 67–8, 81, 83, 92–3, 99–100, 109, 112–13, 119, 126, 130, 138, 145, 156, 160, 161, 182–3, 193–4, 196–7 Todorov, Tzvetan  164, 176 Townsend, Stanley  6, 73–81, 106–15 Trench, Rhona  222 n.27, 225 n.33 Trivers, Robert  205 n.29, 210 n.34 Truman, Matt  112 Turner, Victor  226 n.1 uncanny  12, 14, 33, 41, 67, 132, 135, 141, 144, 164–5, 171, 173, 177 unheimlich  91, 154, 165, 169, 177 violence  26, 33, 48–50, 55, 60, 62–4, 78, 97, 103, 122

Index Wallace, Clare  22, 35, 208 n.56 Wallace, Kevin  74 Walpole, Robert  2, 49, 209 n.23 Walsh, Fintan  215 n.2 Warchus, Matthew  112, 160, 185 Weitz, Eric  133 Wilmot, David  49–53 Winter Solstice  16, 117, 119, 134, 197 Wishcamper, Henry  2, 215 n.2

Witoszek, Nina and Pat Sheeran  53, 124 Wolf, Matt  40 Wood, Gerald C.  73, 207 n.52, 210 n.25 Woolgar, Fenella  101–5 Wycherley, Don  126–34 Young Vic  1 Žižek, Slavoj  48, 63

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