Anne Devlin’s After Easter: Journeys and Vision

Anne F. O’Reilly

Any truly revolutionary art is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, ‘blind sorrow,’ and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the What if? The possible. (Adrienne Rich)

Journeys like human lives often have a circular or spiralling quality, where one returns to the place from which one started and comes to know it as if for the first time. Like the pattern of great mythic narratives in ritual contexts, the journey often requires returning to a time of origins, in order to recreate the world. Many stories from different wisdom traditions illustrate the paradoxical nature of the quest, implying that what we were in fact searching for we had all along. It seems however that the journey is necessary; the preparation, the setting out and the search, the encounter with helpful or threatening guardians, the befriending of darkness, waiting without knowing, finding what was lost and returning home transformed. Transfiguring the darkness and emerging with vision is also the pattern in the classic mystical journeys where the path is from awakening through purification to illumination or enlightenment. Many of the plays in this section represent aspects of a vision quest or mystical journey. The traditional containers for such transformative journeys have been found in community rituals and traditions. Whether these are the ancient shamanic patterns of tribal communities, great ritual celebrations where the myth is narrated, or the soul journeys of the great mystics (East and West), the human journey towards wholeness is essentially a journey of integration and vision.

What distinguishes the plays in this [book] section is their attention to the realm of the possible, their desire to make ‘hope and history rhyme’ (Heaney). Theatre as secular ritual space offers audiences sites of transformation. Theatre now becomes the temenos, the sacred space within society, and the sacred container (as in traditional alchemy) for the transformation of energies. In these plays we find more light than darkness, more attempts at reconciliation, as the protagonists move from grieving to newness, from the wound to the promise. A number of the plays deal with the reality of war, and dare to face it with an alternative possibility (After Easter, Pentecost, Carthaginians). They re-appropriate traditional Christian rituals and symbols as a language to hint at newness. The traditional Christian Holy Week and the major feasts of the liturgical year provide the backdrop for the passage of time in plays like After Easter, Carthaginians, and Pentecost, or as a reminder of the place of remembering in Una Pooka. Many of these plays are not ashamed to seek the resurrection of the dead but equally are not prepared to buy into the traditional dualisms that underpinned much traditional imagining. They seek moreover to bring together human and divine, bodies and spirits, heaven and earth, often using the more ancient symbols of fire, earth, water, and air. Most importantly they invite audiences to look again at the question of difference, and how communities have defined themselves in relation to the other, whether that is in sexual, religious or cultural terms.

The plays here are invitations to audiences and readers to befriend strangeness, and difference, in real historical time. They offer spaces to re-imagine, as they suggest different ways to deal with the past, often using the interruptive language of vision (represented through ghost (Stewart Parker’s Pentecost), angel (Sebastian Barry’s Prayers of Sherkin) and visiting spirit (Michael Harding’s Una Pooka), to question received assumptions about identity and direction. Many of the plays identify women who have had visions (Anne Devlin’s After Easter, Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians, Sherkin), or represent people who are in borderland states (Carthaginians). Equally the borderland of madness (and/or personal disintegration) allows the energy of the margins to question the centre (After Easter, Carthaginians, Pentecost). These interruptive presences include Greta, a woman who steals the communion wafers from the churches to re-distribute them in a gesture of reconciliation (After Easter), and Dido, a homosexual playwright who writes and performs the play within the play, that allows grief to be transformed (Carthaginians).

Their presences interrupt in a manner reminiscent of the holy fool. They too are outsiders whose vision demands attention and embodiment. Their language is that of the poet, their territory that of embodied particularity, their invitation to tell stories, and to dream. But their real gift is the invitation to play. To enter the world of ‘what if’ is to allow an imagining of the future that is not a mere repetition of the past. A truly liberating vision facilitates engagement with the play of possibilities, and invites audiences beyond the paralysis of imagination and the stasis that is the legacy of a patriarchal ordering of history. The possibility of acting differently, comes out of imagining differently. Vision, if one listens carefully and intuitively enough, may invite people to move in unexpected ways (Prayers of Sherkin), it may allow one to leave the places of the dead (Carthaginians), or allow a new storytelling to emerge, that is connected with bodies and the earth (After Easter), or encourage a re-imagining of the relationship between bodies and spirits (Pentecost, and Una Pooka).

Anne Devlin’s play After Easter (Devlin, 1996) is a humorous, poignant, spiritual play about one woman’s journey to repossess her soul and voice and come home to her own heart(h) and the truth of her life. It concerns Greta, a woman in her late thirties, who has left Northern Ireland and who has been married and living in England for the past fifteen years. Devlin in the programme note for the play suggests that it is ‘a quest play’, where Greta ‘allows the ghosts to call her home’ (Quoted in Cottreau, 1999:212).

One critic of a London production of the play suggested that it was all tangents and no centre, that it was many plays in one, linked by a character who was herself inscrutable (Nightingale quoted by Cottreau, 1999). Other critics suggest that the journey itself is the plot of the play:

A voyager within, and also beyond, place and time, she seeks the ‘place of the heart’ and time to relax within this space. All her journeys occur within the paradoxically freeing constraints of theatre. The pliability of stage space and time map the possibilities available to her. (Cousin, 1996: 201)

The play uses the space of theatre to map Greta’s quest and her journey home.

In After Easter we encounter a strong female narrative voice. In the course of the play Greta will rediscover her own voice and move from a dissociated to an integrated space. Her voice will be like a Pentecostal tongue of fire integrating the different aspects of her journey allowing her to enter the inner room of her own self as she shapes the narrative of her life. The voice that emerges tells new stories, and offers hope and inspiration to her child and to the human race. The fragmentation of identity in response to repression or trauma is much in evidence along with states of denial or dissociation. However Greta manages to integrate her personal narrative with others in the community and to return to her place within it. While reclaiming the lost parts of herself she succeeds in maintaining a relationship with the present, both in familial and social terms. As a ‘primarily inner drama of quest … After Easter elaborates both the need for and the possibility of rebirth through suffering and self-confrontation, orchestrated through confrontation with the ongoing narratives of the patriarchal culture’ (Kurdi, 1996:108). Unlike the male protagonists whose personal journey requires the dissociation from family, Greta’s quest returns her to her family and her children. Greta finds a way that she can re-enter the community without ‘relinquishing the role of the prophet’ (Clutterbuck, 1999:118).

The play uses the language of vision and dream to confront the literalness of the age/context in which Greta finds herself. This use of the visionary or mystical allows the character and audience access to a realm that is metaphorical or symbolic and open to many meanings and interpretations. Ricoeur has noted how symbolic language which is polysemic and multivalent opens worlds and nurtures and inspires a passion for the possible. Symbolic and metaphorical language confronts and possibly confounds the literal-minded:

The terms in which Greta experiences her spiritual journeys are those of her Catholic past. Though she has relinquished her faith, it is this that provides the iconographic reference points that enable her to begin to map the worlds in which she finds herself. (Cousin, 1996:190)

The re-appropriation of traditional religious symbols and images (Virgin Mary, Pentecost, Eucharist) is a useful way of enabling access to a symbol system that validates a personal journey but does not confine its interpretation to traditional categories.

After Easter addresses particular binarisms and dichotomies that confront our protagonist in the shaping of her identity: male/female, personal/political, Irish/English, sacred/secular, Catholic/Protestant, literal/symbolic, sane/insane. In attempting to move beyond the limitations of such binarisms in the quest for personal integration Devlin pushes the parameters of knowledge to include the repressed, the non-said. The woman as other to the dominant discourse (she cannot use the words in the same ways men do) is doubly or multiply colonized when we focus on the question of being an Irish female (Catholic) mystic in Britain. The subsequent journey home to the self through multiple layers of silenced lives is both demanding and rewarding. To have a female protagonist who journeys shaman-like into the depths of her own personal history, using many traditional symbols to guide her, to see her return to an integrated bodily experience of her self, is life- giving both for the character and the audience/community. When the journey taps into what is most repressed culturally – namely the female voice and its journey towards embodied subjectivity – then the community is challenged to re-imagine its ways of knowing.

After Easter offers woman a subject position, a new vantage point as meaning-maker, rather than simply being the surface on which many meanings have been scribbled: ‘I’m capturing you with my story’, Greta says to her sisters (AE 13). The audience is invited to collude with the same meaning-making that Greta engages in. Even though, Greta informs us, ‘I’m not – supposed – to – use – the – words!’ (3), Greta’s story must be told.

While Greta is staying in her sister’s apartment (Scene Two) a blood-curdling wail (9) comes from the bedroom where Greta is sleeping. Greta denies that she made this sound and attributes it to a visitation from a banshee. Later in the play, on hearing of her father’s death, she will make a similar sound that she acknowledges as her own (58). Greta’s journey is towards the embodiment of voice, which she achieves through telling her story. On the one hand, Greta’s story involves coming to terms with her childhood experiences of love for her father and many beatings from her screaming, jealous, alcoholic mother that she tolerated because she believed her father loved her more. On the other hand, Greta must come to terms with a series of visions that have occurred over the previous fifteen years, and now urgently demand attention and interpretation.

Greta tells the audience that she always longed ‘to be full of light’ (20). This theme of light moves through the play and is used specifically in relation to the articulation of visionary experience. Two of Greta’s visionary experiences involve fire and both her sisters speak about mystical experiences in terms of light. When the family seeks shelter under the table in their mother’s house, Aoife remarks: ‘You know this table isn’t as solid as it looks. There’s light passing through it all the time. Only we can’t see it’ (69) and Helen later recalls an experience when numb with grief she closes the car door on her thumb and spends the night with an ice-pack on it dulling the pain. She slept badly and she recalls how around five in the morning she observed

wings and eyes of light were falling through the rooms. Swirling and falling and gathering, passing through the roof and walls. And it’s there all the time. Like Aoife said. I believe it’s there all the time. (73-74)

This play pushes beyond the literal. Greta questions: ‘Is it my fault if people are so literal? (2). It tries to speak a language of possibility. One of the ways it succeeds is in its recourse to the rich symbolic language of dream or vision. Helen speaks about her visionary experiences:

Sometimes when I’m out of my normal environment or someone takes me by surprise, or I wake up before I’ve finished dreaming, I forget for a moment what it is I’m supposed to see and that’s when I achieve it. That’s when I come closest, when I grasp the possibilities before the walls or the rooms I’m supposed to see assert themselves. (74)

This fluid shape-shifting space is the space of vision and one with which any mystic or shaman would be familiar. Contemporary work within the area of mind/body/spirit draws attention to energy fields and energy bodies that support both Greta and her sisters’ experiences of the essentially non-solid nature of reality:

Human embodiment, therefore, is not primarily a physical structure, but rather, a relational matrix, for which the physical body is a permeable container. […] Just as the human cell may be described as memory with membrane wrapped around it, so all embodied forms consist primarily of creative energy that materializes in a vast range of psychic, behavioural, and creaturely interactions. (Ó Murchú, 2002:134)

At the beginning of the play Greta recalls a near death experience which happened to her two years after her arrival in England. She and her husband had rented a cottage for a mid-term break. Greta was feeling depressed, suicidal and very homesick:

I swear to you I wasn’t dreaming when I opened my eyes – I was lying out under the stars with the night wind on my face and I was so close to the heavens, as if I were lying on top of a mountain, that I could see quite clearly the star constellation. I was in such despair that I opened my mouth and let out a huge cry until my voice filled the whole sky. And I felt it leave my body and go up into the stars. I did. And I knew I had died that night. (14)

Greta’s level of dissociation sounds at times as if bordering on the schizophrenic, or psychotic as she hears voices and appears to hallucinate. This may be similar to the language of the hysteric in a culture that denies woman access to her capacity as a meaning-maker (Diamond 1997). After all Greta does say ‘I had no self to give away’ (15). As Greta shares the experience (that she has denied for so long) she is gripped by a series of painful contractions as if something is trying to be born. She believes that the banshee visitation is a type of Mother Ireland figure, who is full of woe. ‘It felt as if the whole of Ireland was crying out to me’ (11). Her sisters’ initial responses suggest dreaming, anger and guilt as possible interpretations as they have no adequate frameworks for interpreting mystical experience. Whatever the nature of Greta’s experience, her sisters do not deny it. The society Greta lives in is quick to categorize her because of her experiences and the play opens with her in a mental hospital, with the question of custody of the children looming on the horizon.

Greta seeks out her cousin Elish (a Catholic nun in Belfast) for help in the interpretation of her visions (Scene Three).

If I tell a doctor I am having religious visions, he will tell me that I am ill; and that is closure. If I tell a nun I am having religious visions then we can agree we are both ill and at least begin the conversation on an equal footing’ (24-25).

So much depends on the paradigm of the interpreter and the level of power they have. Greta continues ‘You see I don’t intend being locked up for what one half of the world regards as an achievement of sanctity. My liberty is very important to me’ (25).

Greta relates three experiences of which she is somewhat ashamed as she claims that she is not a religious person (24). She relates the experiences in reverse chronological order (suggesting a kind of circular or spiralling narrative where the space is woman’s time). If we consider the experiences in the order they actually occurred, there is one birth narrative and two accounts that involve fire in some way. The first experience had occurred the previous year on Greta’s twenty-fourth birthday. At one level it communicates the crushing and stifling confines of a patriarchal religious inheritance. Lying in a sleeping-bag Greta has a sense of being in the womb. She recalls a priest-like figure trying to smother and silence her, and hearing a gentle voice in her ear saying:

Turn round. You have to turn around.’ So I did, I turned myself around and found I could breathe again and ahead of me I could see this oh most beautiful globe, a sphere lit up in space far below me, and I found myself floating falling towards it. And the same voice, the one that told me to turn around said: ‘Enjoy your fall through space and time.’ So I knew I was born that night. Or I was reliving my birth. (25)

Cousin interprets the beauty of the Earth in this vision as ‘a symbol for the inner world that Greta gradually constructs’ (Cousin, 1996:187) and interprets Greta as a time and space traveller in free fall ‘beyond the confines of established spatial and chronological dimensions. It is an image that physicalizes the spiritual and emotional journeys Greta undertakes in the play’ (Cousin, 1996:187). Many contemporary feminist spiritualities have recourse to the symbol of Gaia (Primavesi, 2002), as an earth-based Goddess, that stands in contrast to the dominant male images of the divine in patriarchal religions. Gaia as life-principle of creation, offers a horizon of possibility that enables the telling of a new story of embodiment, interrelatedness and inter-dependence, which is specifically connected with women’s ways of knowing.

Greta’s second mystical experience had occurred on 2 February, traditionally the feast of Candlemas or the Purification of the Virgin Mary:

As I moved the candle to the fireplace and reached into the fire and then transferred the lit candles to the stand – the flame leapt. It lit up my hair, which at the time was long and I suddenly found myself surrounded by a curtain of flame. (AE 24)

When her husband clapped his hands together around her hair to put out the flames a strange cry came out of Greta’s mouth. The chanting sound she makes is signalled in the stage directions. She makes a beautiful sound echoing the sound of the nuns as they sang the Office of the Dead (24). Recourse to the symbol of the Virgin – Greta has already claimed that she and others are the Virgin Mary – or to Venus as her mother (2) suggests a search for a female symbol system that will support and validate her in her becoming. (Marina Warner’s study on the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary draws attention to how Mary embodies many of the features associated with the ancient mother Goddess and how her representation shows many similarities to the depiction of other female Goddesses like Athena, Isis and Venus.) Later in the play when Greta’s behaviour (distributing communion to people in the bus queue) is misinterpreted by the local press as a protest against the Catholic Church’s failure to ordain women as priests, Greta remarks:

So that’s it. If a woman can be a priest, God can be female.

Helen: Who cares?

Greta: I care. It means that women might be loved. (57)

The third visionary experience occurred early one morning: ‘a flame appeared in the curtain facing my bed’ (23). But Greta turns on the light and the flame disappears. Greta later discovers that this experience occurred on Pentecost Sunday, a Christian feast day traditionally associated with tongues of fire and the outpouring of the gift of the spirit on the frightened disciples gathered in the upper room after the death of Jesus.

Cousin interprets Greta’s religious experiences and her symbolic death experience in terms of Greta becoming ‘a shamanic Christ figure. Like Christ descending into Hell prior to his resurrection, Greta traverses spirit worlds where death and birth co-exist’ (Cousin, 190). Re-birthing, which is facilitated in many contemporary therapies, is framed and interpreted in this play through the re-appropriation of traditional religious language.

Passion/death/resurrection imagery permeates the play. The actual events occur during Holy Week and the week after Easter Sunday. In the Christian liturgical year Holy Week is celebrated in the week leading up to Easter. It is a time of heightened awareness for the Christian community. It is a time for the community to journey the Way of the Cross with Jesus, to experience his Passion and Death, and to know the joy of Resurrection (to experience a kind of death and re-birth). The visionary experiences that Greta recounts to Elish have taken place as we noted at times associated with the Christian liturgical calendar, with Pentecost being the most noteworthy as it relates to speaking and voice. The spiritual or metaphorical death of the character Greta is counterpointed by the actual deaths of many people in Northern Ireland over the same period.

Elish is unable to offer the kind of interpretation that Greta wants. At one level Elish is jealous of the visions. After her whole life of prayer, self sacrifice and self-denial she has never had any such experience (27). Elish tries to offer protection to Greta, by suggesting that she become reconciled to the Church. This she believes to be a necessary move as Greta will attract evil as well as good and needs the sanctuary of the church for protection (28-29). The path that Elish offers – which incidentally needs a priest or other male mediator (29) – will involve repentance, communion, remarriage in the Catholic church, and having her children baptized. Elish offers a very bleak alternative: ‘I warn you if you decline to enter the church it is your own business. You may end up as a fortune-teller in a circus or a fairground’ (30). The church which can offer interpretation of the visions, and a certain space to contain them, is also associated with patriarchal authority and obedience. If Greta refuses the sanctuary that is offered (given the cost), Elish implies that she may end up as a freak. The culture cannot offer sanctuary or an adequate interpretation of the experiences. But the space of theatre can be a container that holds these mysterious energies within a secular culture, enabling transformation both for the characters and audiences.

As Greta attempts to come to terms with the impending death of her father and other violent deaths that are happening around her, she tells her sisters about how her visions are sometimes accompanied by religious messages. She tells of how she has been told to ‘Take the communion out of the churches and give it to the people in the bus queues’ (16). She seems to have no intention of carrying out the vision. However the following day Greta is arrested for stealing a chalice from Clonard Monastery and distributing communion to people at the bus queues. When she is released she tells her family that she felt ‘compelled’ (49), that she did it because ‘I wanted to stop the killings. I thought if I obeyed the Voice it would all stop’ (49). Her sister Aoife describes Greta as looking ‘radiant’ (50). Greta’s re-appropriation of the symbol of the Eucharist also allows her to appropriate the Christ/priest function. In distributing communion outside of the different Christian churches she also invites a radical reappraisal of the meaning of the symbol. Rather than looking on the symbol as a source of division and conflict, Greta speaks in a subsequent interview about the need for integrated schools, which might nurture respect for difference rather than foster divisiveness, intolerance and violence.

Memory is important in the play. Coming home in the literal and metaphorical sense is part of the journey of the play. Home is an ambiguous symbol when the past contains traumatic memories and the present offers no real sense of sanctuary or protection. The journey home demands facing and integrating the shadow. As family members, Greta, Helen and Manus each have to let go of the hold of their father over their lives. Manus and Greta have also to move towards forgiving their mother for the beatings. Their father was a Communist, who reared his children without the contamination of money or the bigotry of religion and nationalism. Each reacted differently. Helen became a capitalist, Greta a mystic and Manus searched out his roots in Irish music. All three have to let go of the hold of the past on their lives and also to let go of their hold on it. Helen and Greta, like two dinosaurs who don’t get on (‘Triceratops and diplodocus don’t get on, did you know that?’ (71)) must each allow the other to be, must give each other the ‘power to create and free’ (73). As Helen persuades Greta not to jump from Westminster Bridge where they have come to scatter some of their father’s ashes, Greta imagines she hears the sound of a baby laughing.

The magical place of both Helen’s and Greta’s is one of the soul, the centre of inner peace and freedom, indicating the real homecoming to the self, which does not depend on specific location because it is not determined by outside sources. (Kurdi 1996:105)

Greta’s final scene (75) presents her as storyteller, with her child and the traditional empty chair. Her beautiful tale is like the beginning of a new mythology, a re-mything that re-establishes the centrality of the mother-daughter connection. The young woman (the daughter) must tame the hungry frozen stag, by feeding it berries from her hand, until it thaws and assumes human features, and everything begins to flow again. Jung and others often describe access to the unconscious as initially encountering a frozen landscape. Where vital parts of the psyche are unreachable they are often represented as covered in ice. The befriending of these parts and often the taming of a wild animal symbolize the journey to wholeness which is so important for the healthy personality.

McMullan notes that as Greta refuses the ‘dominant narratives of place and identity’ (2001:86) and as she undergoes her symbolic deaths and rebirths, she ‘finds her home, not in walls and a room, but in her own story’ (86). This journey takes Greta beyond the limiting confines of realism. Greta’s marginality gives her a perspective from which she can critique and re-imagine. The embodied space of Greta’s re-imagining allows her to narrate a new story of origins, a new mythology, which focuses on the mother-daughter relationship, and the human relationship with the earth itself.

Works Cited

Clutterbuck, C., ‘Lughnasa after Easter: Treatments of Narrative Imperialism in Friel and Devlin.’ Irish University Review, 29:1 (1999), pp. 101-118.

Cottreau, D., ‘Matriarchy Ascending: The Feminist Mytho-Poetics of Anne Devlin’s After Easter.’ Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 5: 1 (1999), pp.199-223.

Cousin, G., Women in Dramatic Place and Time (London: Routledge, 1996).

Diamond, E., ‘Mimesis, Mimicry, and the “True-Real”.’ Modern Drama 32, (1989), pp.58-72.

--- Unmaking Mimesis (London: Routledge, 1997).

Devlin, A., After Easter (London: Faber & Faber, 1996).

Kearney, R., ‘Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds: Interview with Paul Ricoeur.’ Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies 1977-1981, eds M.P. Hender-son and R. Kearney (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982), pp.260-66.

--- On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002).

Kurdi, M., ‘Female Self Cure Through Revisioning and Refashioning Male/Master Narratives in Anne Devlin’s After Easter.’ Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2: 2 (1996), pp.97-110.

--- Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish Plays in an Intercultural Context (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000).

McMullan, A., ‘“In touch with some otherness”’: Gender, Authority and the Body in Dancing at Lughnasa.’ Irish University Review, 29: 1 (1999), pp.90-100.

Ó Murchú, D., Evolutionary Faith (New York: Orbis Books, 2002).

--- Religion in Exile: A Spiritual Vision for the Homeward Bound (Dublin: Gateway, 2000).

Extract From: Sacred Play: Soul – Journeys In Contemporary Irish Theatre, by Anne F. O’Reilly (Kelly) (2004)

Cross Reference: Part Two essays on gender and sexualities

See Also: Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi and Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick.