Purchasing Power: Material Culture and the Function of America in Marie Jones’s post Charabanc plays

Deirdre O’Leary

Introduction

A consideration of Marie Jones’s plays written after her departure from Charabanc Theatre Company in 1990 reveals a consistent interrogation of the material culture and unprecedented consumerism that was a defining characteristic of the Irish and Northern Irish economies of the 1990s and early 2000s. Specifically, she considers how the forces of global capitalism, largely realized onstage by either American character(s) or references to American popular culture, both shape the representational apparatus of Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as the Irish complicity in such a representation. Jones’s post-Charabanc plays not only acknowledge this consumerism, but also interrogate how global capitalism both liberates and reifies notions of the Irish and Northern Irish identities. As Jones uses economic class as the primary distinguishing feature of Northern Irish characters rather than religion or politics, this conspicuous consumption serves to interrogate and dismantle notions of identity, religion and nationalism seen formerly as static. At the same time, Jones warns that this consumption is an artificial construct, re-inscribing a postmodern sensibility onto urban sectarianism that does little to alter economic disparity. America, in Jones’s plays, is both a neocolonial force as well as a postmodern space where sectarian differences collapse in favor of a generically imagined “Irish” brand.

The context

The extraordinary socio-economic events of the 1990s in Ireland: divorce legalized, homosexuality decriminalized, and the explosive growth of what has been termed the Celtic Tiger Economy, paired with economic surge and a sustainable peace agreement in Northern Ireland allowed for the unprecedented international visibility of “Irish” popular culture, a means to engage the Irish and diasporic consumer with material goods and culture from home more forcefully than ever (for more see Lonergan, Theatre and Globalisation). As emigration in the Republic and Northern Ireland exceeded immigration totals until the 1990s, the diaspora that exists worldwide allows, through multiple generations removed from the land, a participation in a quasi-invented communitas, a mixture of family history, blended cultures, memory and cultural materialism. The journeying home of expats back to the Republic and North in record numbers during the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, along with the influx of refugees, workers and asylum seekers from outside the European Union, forced, in Mark Phelan’s words, a “theatrical revolution … as the foundational grand narratives of nationalism, history and modernity have fragmented under the pressure of a superheated ‘Tiger economy’” (Fantasy of post-nationalism 89).

Marie Jones has acknowledged how technology and material culture have provided a new way for generations of diaspora to participate in an imagined Ulster and Ireland. As Eberhard Bort points out in “Come on You Boys in Green: Irish Football, Irish Theatre, and the ‘Irish Diaspora’”, Jones’s post-Charabanc career coincided with the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 as the first woman President of Ireland, and echoes her public extension of Irishness beyond the boundaries of the island. In her 1995 address, “Cherishing the Diaspora: Address to the Houses of Oireachtas,” Robinson urged people to think of Irishness as “not simply territorial,” and urged a national embracing of the diaspora as a fundamental part of the Irish culture and identity. She remarked, “I have become more convinced each year that this great narrative of dispossession and belonging, which so often had its origins in sorrow and leave-taking, has become—with a certain amount of historical irony—one of the treasures of our society”. Her words serve the needs of a nation identifying itself as increasingly international, but also signal a canny acknowledgment of the economic benefits to be reaped from the diasporic marketplace.

The economic effects of the Celtic Tiger in the Republic were belatedly felt in Northern Ireland, and were more stimulated by political developments, including the visit to Belfast by then President of the United States, Bill Clinton, in 1995; the IRA ceasefires of 1994 and 1997; and the first meetings of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley. These culminated in the 1998 Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement that articulated an explicit willingness by republican and unionist politicians to work towards within a devolved legislature in which power would be shared between parties. This agreement was brokered in large part through the involvement of the United States government, through the efforts of a team led by Senator George Mitchell. Yet as Mark Phelan notes, cultural and theatrical developments that were the result of the economic boom have been largely confined to the south of Ireland and have not been enjoyed, in the same scale, north of the border. He writes, “Belfast has not experienced anything like the same extraordinary efflorescence of young independent theatre companies that sprang up in Dublin from the early 1990s onwards, and which may one day be regarded as something of a second dramatic Renaissance” (Fantasy of post-nationalism 90).

Phelan identifies what he sees as mitigating factors preventing Belfast and other Northern cities from developing and sustaining the kind of varied, flourishing theatre scenes like those in many cities in the Republic. Such conditions include, “paltry levels of funding (vis-à-vis comparative levels in the UK and in the Republic) and perforce dependence on lottery funding; the chronic lack of theatre spaces in Belfast; the absence of any kind of consistent Arts Council policy or Arts Plan; combined with the inherent instability of local government and a culture resistant to theatre—all provide deep-seated political and practical difficulties that profoundly affect theatrical practice” (Fantasy of post-nationalism 90-91).³²¹ Of course such constraints, while limiting, haven’t stopped the development and success of such innovative Northern theatre companies as Tinderbox (founded in 1988), and Kabosh (founded in 1994) or the publication and production of works by Northern writers including Gary Mitchell, Darragh Carville, Martin Lynch and Marie Jones, among others. All of the writers and companies listed have received critical attention from scholars focused on contemporary theatre in Northern Ireland, however the unique challenge for those discussing Marie Jones’s works emerges when one considers her identity as a Northern playwright, and by extension, how her plays comment or do not comment on the Troubles. While there is no binding assumption that a Northern playwright must address the socio-political conflict, it is with no small amount of irony that practitioners and scholars of Northern Irish theatre concede that the most commercially successful play by a Northern Irish writer to date is not set in the North but in the Republic of Ireland, and is concerned not with the socio-political Troubles, but with the comic goings on of disenfranchised Irish extras on an American financed movie set along the Mayo coast. The long shadow cast by Stones in his Pockets has thus eclipsed most discussions of Jones’s post Charabanc playwriting career, which has been dismissed by many as apolitical at best, and at worst only superficially engaged with the politics of Northern Ireland. The burden of representation, to document and respond theatrically to life in Northern Ireland is perhaps best articulated by Frank McGuinness’s admission, “The North is the North is the North, anyone who tells you they have left it is lying” (qtd. in Foley 108).

Yet this criticism does not acknowledge how Jones’s interrogation of material culture could be read as a democratic means to imagine a new type of identity politics, one that has particular potency for working class audiences. For those inhabitants of east and west Belfast who feel that they have little political agency and even less voice in their representation across a range of media outlets, the idea of material culture as a means to achieve agency is particularly vital and immediate.

America, placelessness and consumerism

Tony Kushner writes in Angels in America that “You do not live in America, no such place exists” (10), and Una Chaudhuri notes that the splitting of the modern unified subject position is made thematically relevant in the very placelessness of America in the modern theatre: “[America] … is a principal of dispersal, of dissolution, the site where the erasure of spatial particularity is possible” (32). Brian Singleton applies Chaudhuri’s notes to a specifically Irish theatrical context to observe that the American has replaced the Englishman as the dominant Other in contemporary Irish drama. The figure of America then, according to Chaudhuri and Singleton, serves the drama by its very placelessness: both “a betrayal of place” and “a muted celebration of placelessness” (Chaudhuri 15).

According to Timothy Brennan, Chaudhuri’s American “placelessness” also conveys the consequential fracturing of native culture against the threat of the imperialist forces of globalization. This privileged hybridity of identity, thanks to globalization, in fact occludes cultural difference into the construction of a single social space: “Rather than the hybridity that is widely acclaimed as being on the rise, we are instead seeing the violent incorporation of global difference into a single national project that is, importantly, even vitally, not perceived as such” (Development to Globalization 127). The economic and cultural distinctions are, according to Brennan, dismissed in favor of a broadly drawn class, linked by manufactured images of place and nationalism than by race, religion or birthright.

While Stones in His Pockets (1996) is perhaps the most obvious example of Jones’s dramaturgical preoccupation with unchecked consumerism and American representation/misrepresentation of Ireland, the topic has long resonated in her work. Carter, the pompous, overweening conflict resolution specialist in Now You’re Talking (1985) is an obvious example of the stereotypical American whose understanding of sectarianism is superficial at best. Guided by misplaced enthusiasm for drama therapy and temporary reconciliation rather than any sophisticated understanding of the demographics, history or geopolitical rhetoric of Northern Ireland, he attempts to engage a disparate group of republican and unionist women in an array of “team building” exercises and sing-a-longs, all of which fail. His sole success in guiding the women to any measure of understanding is met when they temporarily unite and throw him out of the room. Her 1989 production for Replay youth theatre company, It’s a Waste of Time, Tracy uses an American fast food magnet as the opposition against which a nascent Irish eco-consciousness emerges. Terrified by a vision of Belfast as an environmental disaster in the future, young adult Tracy galvanizes disparate communities in Belfast to save the local youth center from the clutches of the Tasty Texan Maxi Bap.

Of course arrogance and comic self-interest are not character traits solely reserved for Americans in Jones’s plays. Christmas Eve Can Kill You (1994) charts the chaotic and humorous night shift of taxicab driver Mackers, as he shuttles assorted passengers around Belfast on Christmas Eve. Among the many customers he meets is English actor Daniel Demonte, who is about to start filming a network movie set in the Maze Prison. His level of ignorance of Belfast’s history and geography is comically displayed when he expresses his wish to have Mackers drive him around the Falls Road, so that he can view “authentic working class loyalists.”³²² When Mackers questions whether Daniel’s posh BBC accent will pass muster when he plays the head of a loyalist paramilitary group, Daniel answers that the need for authenticity is in direct proportion to the size of the potential audience market: “Well, if you take the whole of the UK and then perhaps an American release and probably a lot of European sales then here is only a mere drop in the ocean… the problem is if you get Belfast actors no one can understand them” (Christmas Eve 9).

This idea that people in Belfast are not in charge of its representation is made explicit later in the play when a letter is sent to a young British army officer stationed in Belfast from his girlfriend, Debbie, living in England. The officer shares the letter with Mackers. While Debbie explains in the letter that she is breaking up with the officer, the post script reads as follows: “P.S. I have just watched Derby [sic] O’Gill and the Little People and somehow I felt closer to you as I wrote this letter and even a little jealous of you being there” (Christmas Eve 44). The line gets a huge laugh from the audience, though the story of the actual film’s development even more clearly demonstrates Jones’s point about limited cinematic representation. The film’s development began with Walt Disney visiting Ireland in the hopes of financing a picture with the cooperation of the Irish Folklore Commission in 1947. The Disney Company continued to communicate with the Commission over the next decade and expressed their desire to use Irish folklore as the basis of a film. However, Disney eventually decided to make an adaptation of American writer Hermione Templeton Kavanagh’s 1903 collection of stories Darbie O’Gill and the Good People. So, in Jones’s joke, a young English woman watches a 1959 American-financed film based on an American collection of stories about leprechauns and Irish villagers and assumes that there is nothing to distinguish that mise-en-scéne from contemporary urban Belfast.

Jones’s next play, Eddie Bottom’s Dream (1996) is a comic fable warning against rampant commercialism, but problematically posits that Ireland really is the land where enchanted fairies roam. Eddie Bottom, a foreman on a new Donegal golf course currently under construction, uncovers a fairy thorn bush while overseeing the development of a new fairway and must decide if the bush should be preserved or destroyed in the name of commercial progress. Eddie’s co-worker Charlie shares his concern over the rush towards development at the expense of a problematically narrow definition of “Irish authenticity”: “this used to be a part of us… you know, the sheep, the hills and the bogs and soon it will look like something you would see anywhere, you know all them golf courses luk [sic] the same” (Eddie Bottom’s Dream 2). The field, like Ireland as a whole, is in danger of becoming what Augé terms a “non-place” where local people, “don’t recognise themselves in it, or cease to recognise themselves in it, or have not yet recognised themselves in it” (Augé 9). Eddie opines that the rush to consume material goods, a trait he largely associates with his wife Helen, is symptomatic of an emerging Irish commodifying instinct that sacrifices local culture in the rush for the new:

nothing is special unless it costs money. Nothing has any meaning, if it’s done throw it out, she takes pleasure out of showing what she has to people who have nothing, that is the only thing that gives us pleasure, makes us somebody, doing somebody else down, lifts us up, we only see value in things, not in people, not in land, not in anything” (37).

Jones’s play cautions against rampant commercialization, but ultimately works to preserve a problematic, essentialist fiction, that Ireland is a land defined entirely as rural and enchanted. O’Brien, the fairy king, offers a more pragmatic assessment of the delicate balance between preserving an idealized past and embracing a commercial future: “So, we save the land and what do we suggest these people do to earn a living, eh? There is nothing else… this damned golf course will bring tourists… that will bring these people a living… all we are doing is playing for time … that’s all and time naturally progresses, moves on” (51)

The concern with the lived experience of Northern Ireland as an actual place, distinct from its commodification was taken up by Jones again in her contribution to Convictions, a site-specific collaborative theatre project produced as part of the 2000 Belfast theatre festival.³²³ The production, composed of eight short plays and one artistic exhibit, was written by eight playwrights and set in various locations in the Crumlin Road Courthouse. In Jones’s piece, Court Number Two, marketing executives Karen Daly, Claire Cathcart and musician Fabian Morrissey are discussing plans to turn the now disused building into a contemporary reconciliation centre/educational facility for children. They quickly disagree over their different visions, which rely more on cinematic clichés than any nuanced study of the economic or cultural complexities surrounding the judicial process at the Crumlin Road. Karen imagines an unrepentant Catholic republican on trial, whose appearance and demeanor will frighten children, while Fabian envisions a sympathetic republican who “look[s] like George Clooney” (11). The marketability of the violent history of the site is made explicit in Karen’s suggestion that a gift shop be installed in the Crumlin Road Courthouse, where children and tourists can purchase mugs and pencils with pictures of gallows on them.

Material Culture and Global Capital

Convictions and Christmas Eve Can Kill You were significant for their interrogation of mediatized representation of Northern Ireland, but it is A Night in November (1995) and Stones in His Pockets (1996) that most forcefully interrogate the intersections of material culture and global capitalism. While material culture allows for participation in a liminal fictive Ireland, the forces of global capitalism so limit the scope of representation that what emerges is, as Timothy Brennan writes, “a single social space” (123). In A Night in November, Kenneth decides to journey to New York City to watch the Republic of Ireland football team play in the World Cup. At Dublin airport he is given an Irish football t-shirt and he changes onstage.

The change in his physical appearance, where he is visibly marked by the trappings of a materialist consumer culture, occurs at the same time that he admits to “finding” his Irishness. The enormous success of the play, particularly in the United States, can be specifically interrogated as to the effectiveness of a “commodity Irishness”.³²⁴ Fintan O’Toole, in his review of the original production, called it “the most successful Irish play of 1994 and 1995” and suggested the play is “another type of Irish Revival, with dissatisfied Protestants inventing a Catholic Other to fill in the gaps in their own desires” (Critical Moments 70). O’Toole’s point is well made, but doesn’t consider the means by which such a transformation can occur. While the character articulates a growing dissatisfaction with his life, his onstage “conversion,” is made possible by consumerism. Kenneth does not wear the shirt because he is Irish, he wears the shirt so that he can become Irish. According to Bourdieu, “the possession of cultural capital is accumulated through a long process of acquisition or inculcation which includes the pedagogical action of the family or group members (family education), educated members of the social formation (diffuse education) and social institutions (institutionalized education)” (7). Here, however, Kenneth acquires a kind of material capital which subverts or renders irrelevant any necessary cultural knowledge for his transformation. While this may represent an expansion of Irish identity beyond a narrow ethnicity, for Kenneth participation in the Irish communitas at Dublin airport is made possible only by enthusiastic consumerism. This suggests a more fluid yet superficial understanding of cultural transformation, a forerunner of a sociocultural trend this century that John Seabrook identifies as “nobrow culture” where the old distinctions between elite culture and commercial culture are torn down and the new arbiters’ value of what is “good” is defined in terms of what is “popular.” Nobrow culture is not without hierarchy, but status is achieved and identity is informed by the consumption or acquisition of material goods, not by birthright or education. Perhaps not surprisingly, Seabrook identifies the pre-eminent land of materialist nobrow culture as America, but its global dominance of mass culture spreads far beyond its boundaries.

Brian Singleton and Eamonn Jordan have suggested that the success of A Night in November is largely due to the play’s conceit that one actor plays every role. The monological drama, according to Singleton, offers a stirring critique of the static narrative of Ulster identity through actor Dan Gordon’s seamless transitioning between characters. Jordan notes the degree of theatrical agency the solo performance allows, arguing that the very markers of identity are demonstrated in the play as performative. He cites Kenneth’s noticing a scared, thinly disguised Republican supporter at the game and whispers the words to “The Sash My Father Wore” so that he might better pass as unionist spectator (Kicking with both feet 52). This suggests an expansive if temporary definition of Irishness or Ulsterism to include any person who can literally and metaphorically sing the songs or wear the requisite jerseys.³²⁵ Ireland’s changing demographics in the 1990s supported an increasingly international brand identity, demonstrated by the members of the Republic’s football team, drawn from across the Irish diaspora and managed by Jack Charlton, a member of England’s World Cup winning team in 1966. Yet Jones’s Northern Ireland is represented as so homogenous that at the match Ernie is shocked at the sight of three black players on the field for the Republic, and though he doesn’t name him specifically, he calls out to the “big Gorilla” on the field—almost certainly Paul McGrath—Ireland’s most popular player in the early 1990s. It’s hard to believe that a football fan like Ernie wouldn’t know who Paul McGrath is. He was born in England and famously played in the top flight of English football for Manchester United and Aston Villa, but what is more interesting is Ernie’s comical inability to incorporate race into his dialogue on Irish identity: Paul McGrath’s father was Nigerian, his mother Irish. Driving to the game Ernie yells at a car with a Republic of Ireland license plate, but reserves more disdain for foreign players who claim Irish citizenship and play under the Republic’s flag. Ernie is obviously unaware that one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, and the first Prime Minister of Ireland, was Eamon DeValera, born in New York to a Spanish father and Irish mother.

Kenneth’s post-match transformation in a quest to know and understand Catholic Republicans is one of the biggest challenges in the play. As Mark Phelan notes, the danger in this reductionist dramaturgy is that as easily as a jersey can be put on, it can be removed and the cultural traditions that inform Ulster Protestantism run the risk of disappearing in Kenneth’s enthusiastic shopping spree for the Irish brand. While it can be noted that Kenneth’s disavowal of sectarian violence at the play’s end is life-affirming, it is sustained and inspired by common stereotype: a boozy camaraderie where everyone’s a mate or a relative. In fact, Kenneth stays in New York City by exploiting the same diaspora that had enabled Ernie’s hated “pseudo Irish” footballers to wear the jersey. While Kenneth’s declaration that he is “an Irish man” is as much about the inclusiveness of that identity to him as it is redefined through sport (and performance), it is also a sign of the commodification of identity politics. If Kenneth’s Ireland is informed primarily by the spectatorship of a football match and the opportunity to be something other an unhappily married man, then audiences must question how lasting this transformation will be.

The last line of the play provides little indication of what Kenneth will do next. The play fails to suggest how this temporary Ireland-of-the imagination, a kind of Erin Disneyland, can provide Kenneth with anything more than a good time away from his marriage and a football match. Ultimately the transformation he undergoes must be intensely personal, but can it be sustained outside the temporary holiday surrounding a soccer match? The play does not say. Mark Phelan argues that the apparent inclusivity of his new position is undermined by the fact that it is based on a politics of absorption rather than inclusion, of negation rather than negotiation (Fantasy of post-nationalism 103).

Jones’s Stones in His Pockets revisits these issues to suggest the means by which Irishmen revise the trope of representation, and warn of the dire consequences of a nation’s people buying too heavily into material simulacra knowingly packaged as authentic national culture. Rather than a football match, the playing field in Stones is an American film production shooting on location in the west of Ireland. The backdrop is merely a strip of celluloid, with a light blue sky and clouds. The cinematic image is juxtaposed with thirty off pairs of worn shoes, presumably belonging to the characters Jake and Charlie routinely inhabit. The actors metaphorically step into these shoes, and the play deals with the contrast between the reality of the local Irish and the dream world of Hollywood, and by extension, America. The production only serves to complicate the two worlds by having two actors play all of the roles in the play, changing moment to moment. In their multiple and seamlessly changing roles, accomplished only with changes in voice, posture and gesture, the two actors provide commentary on the misunderstandings and disruptions that occur. In one intricate piece of stage performance an Irish male actor plays a female American trying (and failing) to play an Irish landowner. As in A Night in November, the performance gymnastics of actors playing roles across gender and ethnic identities reveals them as performative, but also points out the superficial nature of culturally mining a community to represent it commercially.

Piped in before the show and during intermission is the orchestrated score from The Quiet Man, intertextually referencing John Ford’s 1952 film shot in Ireland, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. The Quiet Man is arguably the most famous film shot in Ireland and with knowing irony, the film being shot in Jones’s play is titled The Quiet Valley, suggesting, according to Jacqueline E. Bixler, a move “from individual to mass passivity” (433) in terms of Ireland’s allowing and participating in the breaking down of national, cultural and economic borders, mapping the local to more broadly reflect the global. The action of the play spans a few days spent on the film set. Jake and Charlie’s primary interest in being film extras is financial. Charlie has recently lost all of his money in a failed video store venture that ultimately could not compete with the larger video chain conglomerate, aptly named Extra Vision. Jake, having recently returned to Ireland from a prolonged stay in the United States, is on unemployment and living with his mother. They are the locals; Jake is from the town where the film takes place and Charlie is from Northern Ireland, yet are both rendered alien and Other to their own surroundings as they easily concede authority and spatial jurisdiction to the American film crew and star. The proprietors of the local bed and breakfast, the audience learns, have rented out their own living quarters to film crew members and are sleeping in a caravan parked in their driveway. They have willingly given up their personal space for the sake of economic advancement, but metaphorically their actions speak to the town’s and, by extension, the country’s willingness to allow the cultural apparatus of the globalized Hollywood film industry inhabit their land and determine the most effective, and thus most narrowly defined, representational strategy.

Representations of the Irish in the film are comically juxtaposed with the presentation of the Irish extras on set, who inhabit a thoroughly late twentieth century Western consumerist lifestyle, yet routinely perform, for money, the familiar role of disenfranchised nineteenth-century Irish peasants in the film. Hilariously unable to maintain a sufficiently “dispossessed” look of a turf digging peasant, the extras routinely puncture the liminal realm of representation, questioning the passivity of the peasant characters, laughing at the superficiality of the production set up, and challenging the hackneyed strategy of the stereotypical representation. Not that most members of the film crew are particularly concerned about the authenticity of the film. The lead actress Caroline Giovanni’s Irish accent, bad as it is, is hardly a concern, and in a line reminiscent of Daniel Delmonte in Christmas Eve Can Kill You, the accent coach explains, “Ireland is only 1% of the market” (Stones 13). Yet the presentation of a quasi-familiar Irish product to the global market is of the utmost importance, as new cows must be brought in because the native Kerry cows, “Don’t look Irish enough” (Stones 28).

The play takes aim at not just Ireland’s tourist industry, that sustains quaintly bucolic homogeneity despite Ireland’s growing multicultural population, and is complicit with the Hollywood producers’ neatly packaged marketing scheme little changed since The Quiet Man. Of course, the film company’s presence in the town greatly enhances the town’s potential as a tourist destination and increase the cultural capital of the pub and restaurants. Just as with O’Brien in Eddie Bottom’s Dream, the town inhabitants are more than willing to comply with any cinematic packaging of Ireland, so long as it financially benefits them. Restaurant proprietors clamor after Caroline, trying to get her to take a bite of an offered sandwich so as to be able to advertise: Caroline Giovanni was served here. Perhaps then it is not so unreasonable that Caroline, a vain, seemingly untalented yet internationally famous movie star falls in love with what she perceives to be Ireland: “Look around this place… God it’s just heaven on earth… I love this place… I’m third generation you know, on my mother’s side… I do get a real feeling of belonging here, you know that. You people are so simple, uncomplicated, contented” (15).

Irish and Irish American audiences can laugh at this display of enthusiasm, built on nothing but idealized projection. Nonetheless, Caroline’s idealization of the Irish and Ireland is really not very different from Kenneth McCallister’s Irish football frenzy, and Jones posits his “transformation” complete whereas Caroline’s is comic fodder. Granted, Kenneth has the benefit of living on the island, while Caroline is an American celebrity in Ireland temporarily; yet, each displays little knowledge of Ireland’s geography, history or culture beyond enthusiastic first impressions and tourist-projected wish fulfillment. Their engagement with other Irish people is equally limited: Kenneth’s first and only trip across the border into the Republic of Ireland is to Dublin airport, yet he declares himself “an Irish man,” at the play’s end, based on his experiences in New York City. Caroline’s assertion that her being “third generation [Irish] on her mother’s side,” allows, in her mind, some measure of emotional ownership of the landscape and culture. Yet when it comes to engaging with other Irish people, her relationship is marked by getting town native Sean Harkin thrown out of his local pub.

Turned away physically and emotionally from the Hollywood dream world that was to be his salvation, Sean Harkin commits suicide by drowning. Sean Harkin’s death and film company’s refusal to halt production for the funeral mobilizes the extras to rebel against the director and production crew. The rebellion takes numerous forms but largely includes characters getting drunk at Sean’s wake, explaining that it’s out of respect for Sean and for Irish tradition. Mickey, the veteran extra, returns to the set drunk from the funeral and not surprisingly is ordered off the premises. The name Mickey is also used by Jones in A Night in November as the forename of Kenneth’s Irish drinking buddy in the New York pub. The name, long a generic slander against the Irish, evokes a familiar image of untrustworthy, drunken, violent Irishman. Mickey’s behavior only confirms the negatively held stereotype, allowing Simon to affirm his disposability: “there are three hundred and fifty of you… nobody is even going to notice [you]” (Stones 53).

The play’s triumphal end has Jake and Charlie resolutely trying to write their own screenplay, playing the American capitalist game, with, the audience believes, the benefit of local knowledge. They set up a production company, Canvas Productions, named for Charlie’s sole belonging, and pitch their idea to the director who rejects them. Undeterred, Jake and Charlie decide to write the script anyway, armed with little more than their belief in their ideas and each other. The audience takes pleasure in noting that the extras in this movie will be the stars, turning the cameras onto what is, for them, ostensibly real and authentic. Yet the image that Jake and Charlie end on is cows, the same image that is so thoroughly familiar to Irish heritage and cinematic representation that Martin McDonagh chose it to comically comment on the banal and claustrophobic Irish existence in his 1996 play The Beauty Queen of Leenane: “Ireland is fecking boring, that’s what it is. Just look at your window and you’ll see Ireland. (looks out window) There goes a cow” (55).

Come Together: The liminal space as communitas

In the previous examples Jones explores how global capitalism forces a renegotiation of Irish and Northern Irish identity such that what is represented is more simulacrum than anything else. Yet there is also a significant tension in Jones’s plays whereby popular culture, particularly American popular culture, provides a liminal space of participation and rapprochement for characters long distanced from each other. The New York City bar Eamon Doran’s in A Night in November is a Rabelaisian carnival space to support Kenneth’s new identity as Irish football supporter. A man’s life is defined solely by his love of Frank Sinatra and the song “Fly Me to the Moon” replaces the requisite hymns in his makeshift, cross community funeral in Fly Me to the Moon (2012). In The Wedding Community Play (2000), a marriage ceremony of a Protestant bride and Catholic groom is marked by the temporary creation of community not by the acceptance of the marriage, but by the singing of American pop music.

The Wedding Community Play³²⁶ (2000) was a collaborative, site-specific theatre project that ultimately involved over ninety people and was fifteen months in the making. The project began in September of 1998, when six Belfast community theatre groups from across sectarian lines met to develop a community play based on an idea by producer Jo Egan and playwright Martin Lynch. All of the community theatre groups were situated in west and east Belfast, and were committed to creating a collaborative drama about the marriage between a Protestant bride (Nicola) and a Catholic groom (Damian). The production required that the audience move between the Nationalist Short Strand area of east Belfast to the Catholic groom’s house, then the Protestant bride’s house on the Loyalist Templemore Avenue, a short distance away, then on to the church in the city center for the ceremony and then finally to a pub on the banks of the Lagan river for the reception.³²⁷ The production not only cast the city of Belfast as a particular theatre landscape, but used theatre to suggest the possibility of re-mapping the political geography of Belfast to allow for contrapuntal discussions on identity politics, religion, and cross communal marriage in Northern Ireland.³²⁸

The Wedding Community Play project addresses the apparently stubborn divisions of the Belfast inner city where streets are physically closed off from each other by the physical barriers of so-called Peace Walls, and territories marked by political murals, all under a highly militarized system of surveillance. It is not surprising that the two characters in the play have grown up two streets away from one another and never met; the political impositions on the geography, which has then enforced cultural and social discrimination, has made such an encounter highly unlikely, despite the advances of the Peace Agreement and ceasefires. A line was worked into the play that Damian and Nicola met at a U2 concert in the city centre. This is a reference to the famous May 1998 concert at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall where lead singer Bono escorted unionist political leader, David Trimble and his nationalist counterpart, John Hume, onstage for a photo opportunity to drum up youth support for the Good Friday Agreement. It was the first time Trimble and Hume had made a joint appearance since April, when they and six other party leaders struck a compromise accord on how Northern Ireland should be governed. The photo ran on the front pages of the international papers for days.

In the play the mixed marriage is hardly embraced by both families. Cassie, the Protestant grandmother of the bride, purposefully wears a red, white, and blue corsage to the church and reception, saying that “God will protect [her] against the Romans” (5). The groom’s parents convey the same concern for not just the safety of the couple but the chances their marriage has at lasting. However, here it is the wedding ceremony that is of particular interest. The wedding ceremony was staged at the First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, the oldest in the city, established in 1644.³²⁹ The scene begins traditionally with the bride walking down the aisle to the bridal march by Wagner, then with a change of lighting and the introduction of American popular music, the ceremony turns into an interactive song and dance number about gender politics and sectarianism. The bride is greeted by characters sitting in the pews frozen in emotionally expressive tableaux, some aghast, some thrilled, all pointing at her walking down the aisle. While the metatheatricality of the ceremony is purposefully alienating, the only sense of community is created by the use of pop standards, which both Protestants and Catholics join in enthusiastically. If the music of U2 brought the bride and groom together initially, this idea of communitas is developed further by the ceremony sing-along, which humorously punctuates moments in the service, including “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart,” “Shout!” “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.,” “Goin to the Chapel” and “Everlasting Love.” At one point during the reciting of the vows, all of the women in the church sing “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart” to their respective husbands. Such a number, while imposing a heteronormative model that doesn’t necessarily include everyone, goes some way towards fostering a sense of community among the disparate members of the congregation, wedding party, and audience. Additionally, as the audience had earlier been divided into different groups seeing concurrent scenes at the different sites, the wedding ceremony is the first time that the audience and company at large share a space. Audience members sing along while characters dance in the church. In some ways, Jones is using popular music so that everyone is able to participate in the celebration of this cross communal marriage. Exploiting the reach of American popular culture, it is perhaps not surprising that the moments of people coming together in the church do not involve sectarian or religious songs, but American pop classics. The musical performances both herald the triumphant, celebratory nature of the service, as well as engage everyone present in the shared language of song. Unlike in A Night in November, no one is needed to whisper the words in our ears so that we might feel as though we belong.

While the wedding ceremony doesn’t have quite the same kind of raucous, carnivalesque quality to Kenneth McCallister’s transformative night at Eamon Doran’s, it does suggest a way to cultivate a liminal space of community that acquires much of its emotional power by its very temporary nature. If identity is shaped more by acquisition of material goods and shared popular culture, then the potential exists for identity, in Jones’s plays to be defined not as fixed, but amorphous, constantly changing, absorbing new products and adding new members who put on new shirts and sing new songs and make their own films. In some ways this advocates a kind of cultural disposability—people linked by their shared superficial desire to consume the same material goods and cultural reference and discard as they go. Jones dispenses with the grand narratives of nationalism and modernity and fixed notions of race and religion and politics.

As cultural theorists examine the role of culture in the reproduction of existing social and economic structures, Marie Jones asks us to think about how material culture and global capitalism both shapes the representation of Irish and Northern Irish identity, as well as suggesting ways in which it its scope may expand to include those not bound by geography or religion or politics. In some ways this is a radical approach to imagining a new kind of identity politics and diasporic participation in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Works Cited

Gardner, Lyn. ‘The Bard of Belfast.’ The Guardian. 11 Aug. 2004.

Grant, David. ‘Introduction.’ The Crack in the Emerald. London: Nick Hern Books, 1994.

Jones, Marie. Women on the Verge of HRT. London: Samuel French, 1999.

---. Stones in His Pocket & A Night in November: Two Plays. London: Nick Hern, 2000.

---. ‘Marie Jones in Conversation with Pat Moylan.’ Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practioners. Eds. Lilian Chambers et al. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001. 213-19.

---. Somewhere Over the Balcony. Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology. Ed. Helen Gilbert. London: Routledge, 2001. 442-69.

---. The Blind Fiddler: A Play. London: Samuel French, 2008.

---. ‘People who could spake for you.’ Lay Up Your Ends: A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. Martin Lynch and The Charabanc Theatre Company, ed. Richard Palmer. Belfast: Lagan, 2008.

---. The Milliner and the Weaver. Women Power and Politics. London: Nick Hern Books, 2010.

---. Christmas Eve Can Kill You. Theater Archive, Linen Hall Library, Belfast. Unpublished.

---. Eddie Bottom’s Dream. Theatre Archive, Linen Hall Library, Belfast. Unpublished.

---. Oul Delf and False Teeth. Theatre Archive, Linen Hall Library, Belfast. Unpublished

Jones, Marie and the Company. ‘“Now You’re Talkin”’ Four Plays by the Charabanc Theatre Company: Inventing Women’s Work. Ed. Claudia W. Harris. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2006. 1-54.

Jones Marie and Martin Lynch, et al. Convictions. Belfast: Tinderbox Theatre Company, 2000.

Lonergan, Patrick. ‘Marie Jones.’ Irish Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide. Ed. Alexander G. Gonzalez. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. 164-8.

---. Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Martin, Carol. ‘Charabanc Theatre Company: “Quare” Women “Sleggin” and “Greggin” the standards of Northern Ireland by “Tappin” the People.’ The Drama Review: TDR, 31. 2 (Summer, 1987): 88-99.

O’Toole, Fintan. ‘Light Heart, Heavy Heart.’ The Irish Times 20 Sept. 1994: 10.

---. ‘Insulting Both Sides.’ Irish Times 5 Dec. 1995, sec. Second Opinion, 12.

---. ‘Review of A Night in November. ‘Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre. Eds. Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003: 157-129.

Winter, Brenda. ‘Introduction. ‘That’s Not Theatre, Love!’ The Lay Up Your Ends Experience.’ Lay Up Your Ends: A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. Martin Lynch and The Charabanc Theatre Company; ed. Richard Palmer. Belfast: Lagan, 2008. 17-39.

Extract From: The Theatre of Marie Jones: Telling Stories From The Ground Up, edited by Eugene McNulty and Tom Maguire (2015)

Cross Reference: Friel, Devlin and McGuinness essays

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