The Art of Disclosure, the Ethics of Monologue in Conor McPherson’s Drama: St. Nicholas, This Lime Tree Bower and Port Authority

Clare Wallace

No appraisal of Conor McPherson’s work for theatre can completely sidestep his extensive use of the monologue. More than half of his plays to date use the device. Although many of his contemporaries in the 1990s and 2000s such as Sarah Kane, Neil LaBute, Eugene O’Brien, Mark O’Rowe, Enda Walsh or Mark Ravenhill have intermittently turned their hands to stage monologue, none has seemed quite so engaged with the form as McPherson. Rum and Vodka, The Good Thief, This Lime Tree Bower, St. Nicholas, Port Authority and Come On Over all involve actors addressing the audience. Indubitably McPherson has demonstrated his skill with dialogue too in The Weir, Dublin Carol, Shining City, and The Seafarer, yet these plays are also structurally dependent on narrative. Over the years McPherson’s work has showcased the naturalistic portrayal of character and an ear for the cadences of everyday speech. Dramaturgically, he has remained faithful to a vision of the stage as a space where ‘ordinary human emotions are expressed very simply.’⁵⁷¹ Consequently his plays are rarely underpinned by abstract, mythical or epic structures; instead they unfold the ways in which ordinary people attempt to make sense of their lives and their decisions.⁵⁷² Indeed in a note published with the text of St. Nicholas McPherson comments directly on his belief in a universal human need to seek meaning and the responsibility reason bequeaths us.⁵⁷³

Monologue drama and performance encompass a very wide spectrum of projects, some traditional, some experimental, some autobiographical, making generalizations about the genre difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, what is fascinating about monologue theatre in all its diversity is its potential to ‘solicit … questions about the very nature of theatre itself, about the nature of performance and audience response, truth and illusion, narrative and experience.’⁵⁷⁴ Although McPherson’s drama is firmly planted at the conventional end of this spectrum, these issues still resonate strongly in the work. Such questions also point to monologue theatre’s often divisive character. Playwright Marina Carr is not alone in her contention that ‘there is something intrinsically un-dramatic about the monologue … You can indulge your “literary sensibility” … but finally, that is not what theatre is about. It is about the spoken word and conflict.’⁵⁷⁵ By contrast McPherson has stated that the monologue form permitted him ‘to tell smaller stories in a bigger way.’⁵⁷⁶ Despite the threatened diminution of mimesis by diegesis, when successful, monologue theatre not only releases the vital potential of narrative performance, but also has the power to stimulate spectators to consider their role in the performance situation and to respond in unforeseen ways. McPherson’s work with monologue reveals his acute consciousness of both these dimensions to the form.

Acts of disclosure in McPherson’s drama are complemented by an acknowledgement, in interviews, of his interest in the collusive and mischievous aspects of the theatre experience. Perhaps paradoxically, simultaneous with the recognition of this sense of playfulness is a certain critical consensus that McPherson is, as reviewer Patrick Brennan recently put it, ‘a deeply moral playwright.’⁵⁷⁷ So how do these elements interact? In what follows I shall explore the implications of the monologue form, and trace the contours of relations between monologous disclosure and the question of ethics in McPherson’s three most significant monologue plays: St. Nicholas, This Lime Tree Bower and Port Authority.

Monologue, Meaning, and Morality

The malleability of the monologue, its tendency to deconstruct the fourth wall of the stage, and to map out a space of performative subjectivity are certainly among the factors that have led to its popularity on the contemporary stage. And in its challenge to the theatre of dramatic illusion, monologue points toward the ways in which reality and identity are discursively constructed.⁵⁷⁸ Contemporary monologue spans the poles of elevated, often confessional authenticity, and ambivalent or possibly false communication, as can be observed to some degree even within McPherson’s own work. It is precisely the pivotal quality of ambivalence that might serve to distinguish modern monologue from its predecessors. As Deborah Geis has elaborated, contemporary monologues rarely serve a solely revelatory purpose, as for instance a soliloquy might; rather they tend to foreground their own theatricality and possible trickery.⁵⁷⁹ While McPherson’s theatre shuns direct autobiographical reference common to some of the theatre work Geis examines, his monologues subtly unfold the ambiguities of narrative as a means of knowing and communicating, thereby suggesting narratological and by extension ontological provisionality and uncertainty.

Such concerns, initially at least, seem Beckettian in character. Beckett’s experiments with the limits of stage monologue, the failure of narrative and the self alienated in language from Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) through to Ohio Impromptu (1981), can scarcely escape any Irish playwright working with the form. Yet if Beckett’s approach is existential and modernist, McPherson’s is essentially different in focus and effect. Language itself is not problematized, narrative is not abandoned. Thus McPherson’s use of monologue is much more readily associated with the dramatic models provided in the Irish context by Brian Friel, Tom Murphy or Frank McGuinness, or Billy Roche as reviewers and critics have remarked.

As cultural cliché would have it the Irish have a genetic predisposition towards storytelling. It is little wonder then that in 1997 McPherson’s London break-though with The Weir was greeted as evidence of a continuing tradition of native Irish narrative talent. At the very moment when many young British playwrights were provocatively staging the outcomes of a postmodern consumer culture, the young Irish playwright was popularly perceived as a voice of cultural authenticity and traditional dramatic craftsmanship. The Weir was welcomed by reviewers as a genuine instance of ‘the Irish love of fable … [and] pure theatrical poetry.’⁵⁸⁰ However, The Weir was actually McPherson’s third play staged in London.

This Lime Tree Bower and St. Nicholas had been produced by the Bush Theatre in late 1996 and early 1997 respectively. Notably all three plays make extensive use of narrative monologue but to apparently vastly differing ends. In The Weir, a realist fourth-wall drama, the device was widely understood as a vehicle for authenticity (emotional and cultural). The same device as it is used in This Lime Tree Bower and St. Nicholas, both of which break the illusion of the fourth-wall, seems to direct interpretion away from a celebration of types of authenticity and towards states of ethical ambivalence.

As noted above, McPherson was not alone at this time in turning to the monologue format. Unsurprisingly critics have subsequently sought to explain the significance of the proliferation of monologue theatre of Irish provenance in the 1990s and early 2000s in various ways. One convincing interpretation advanced by Brian Singleton is that monologue served as a space for the articulation of contemporary Irish masculinities in crisis.⁵⁸¹ Eamonn Jordan partially concurs with this analysis, but further elucidates the connotations of monologue specifically in terms of ‘narrative as identity formation,’ ‘licence and embellishment,’ ‘the notion of naivety’ and the role of audience.⁵⁸² Both these readings of the meaning of monologue in Irish theatre might be usefully conjoined, as I have argued elsewhere, with Jean François Lyotard’s theory of the changing status of narrative in The Postmodern Condition (1979).⁵⁸³ Lyotard asserts that the predominant characteristic of knowledge under postmodernity is an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives.’⁵⁸⁴

Grand narratives or belief systems ‘such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth’⁵⁸⁵ have been undermined and depleted. In a specifically Irish context, the authority of the Catholic Church, nationalist ideology, the primacy of rural experience and traditional notions of family constitute metanarratives that over the course of the last thirty years have splintered. Such metanarrative mechanisms, in Lyotard’s terms, are substituted by a multiplicity of language games and micro narratives that can only exist and function provisionally.⁵⁸⁶

It is pertinent then how character in McPherson’s work is a function of narrative. Read through Lyotard this might be understood as indicative of the doubtful, yet habitual, condition of identity in postmodernity and its particular inflection in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Monologue theatre in this context is remarkable as a site of narrative contestation and the performance of ambivalence. Without substantial onstage action, how characters speak, their vocabularies and the rhetorical devices that they employ constitute their identities. Thus in the telling of their stories, in effect, they talk themselves into existence (in contrast, it might be argued, to Beckett’s characters who seem to talk themselves out of existence). As Scott T. Cummings remarks ‘I have a story, therefore I am’ might be considered the motto of McPherson’s drama to date.’⁵⁸⁷ Or, as McPherson himself rather controversially puts it, it is the words which are to do the work rather than the spectacle of the stage design or the characters’ actions.⁵⁸⁸ Notably too, in the productions of the plays directed by McPherson, he insists on a diminution of physical action, a voicing rather than an acting out of story. Even considering the work produced since the publication of his essay, Cummings’ assertion that the plays ‘all hinge on personal narratives, public confessions of private sins which provide first an entertaining evening and then, upon reflection, an investigation into the nature and function of story itself’⁵⁸⁹ remains valid. The result is not an unequivocal affirmation of the truth of story. Throughout the narratives and anecdotes, doubt and dissensus are inherent to the performance of telling and this sense of doubt inevitably rebounds on our sense of character. As already mentioned, the intrinsically mischievous dimension to his work has been pointed out by both McPherson himself, and his commentators.⁵⁹⁰ Though initially apparently ordinary and familiar, his staged stories ‘take advantage of the listener’s initial trust … [often] going to implausible extremes.’⁵⁹¹ Repeatedly this involves the small-scale story, legitimated only in the act of telling which is itself multi-layered and dubious.

As has often been observed, Lyotard’s theory of micronarratives encounters an impasse with regard to a system of justice, which requires some generally agreed set of values rather than a profusion of equally valid narrative possibilities. The implications of a micronarrative imperative where self is performative rather than predetermined, and where codes of morality may prove to be just as provisional and contingent, fundamentally challenge notions of moral or ontological stability. Evidently McPherson’s monologues are not apologues; they do not propose a moral course of action to be imbibed by audiences. So where can the assertion that McPherson is a moral playwright figure in this account? Gerald C. Wood argues with some confidence that ‘McPherson’s theatre of mischief is designed to stimulate the moral imagination of his audience, without endorsing any specific morality itself’ and that the ‘plays invite audiences to practise compassion and, hopefully, imagine their own reasonable conclusions.’⁵⁹² For Jordan such practice is not so much a matter of compassion but of resistance; he suggests that ‘If society offers no resonating myth, the final authority might be the myth of self through ‘story’ … the myth of self is an elemental contestation of the demise of metanarratives or master narratives. The struggle to constitute is a defiance of the postmodernist impulse to unhinge subjectivity, and thus of identity in free fall.’⁵⁹³ Monologue from this angle embodies ‘the spectacle of naivety’ that is ‘about accountability and not complicity.’⁵⁹⁴ Singleton, too, points to a rupture of myths, specifically of notions of hegemonic or authentic masculinity. Through monologue alternative constructions of masculinity are voiced, but contrary to Jordan, Singleton highlights the ‘toxicity’ of the identities performed and the disturbing ways in which monologue arrests the possibilities for interaction or transformation.⁵⁹⁵

Each of these conclusions returns by a different route to the question of morality or, more accurately, ethics, in McPherson’s work and how revelation and judgement interact. In an attempt to take the debate in a somewhat different direction I would argue that McPherson’s drama, in which form and content are woven from various narrative games, tacitly demonstrates some of the principle characteristics of the narrative forms Lyotard describes, and inscribes their troubling implications, even when understood to be acts of resistance. In other words, monologue in McPherson’s plays functions in micronarrative terms, raising questions about narrative ethics, ambivalence and subjectivity as spectacle.

Revelation and (Ir)Responsibility

As Adam Zachary Newton notes in Narrative Ethics, Circumstances of narrative disclosure, their motives and their consequence, conduce … to a set of ethical questions.⁵⁹⁶ These derive from a recognition of narrative as a performative act and as ‘a participatory act … part ‘Said’ … and part ‘Saying,’ the latter … being the site of surplus, of the unforeseen, of self-exposure.⁵⁹⁷

Narrative ethics in this frame encompasses the intersubjective relations between text and audience in fiction and between performers, text and audience in theatre. In each of the monologue orientated works I have selected these relations are enacted differently.

The dynamics of narrative, questions of perspective and the construction of discursive reality are presented overtly and provocatively by St. Nicholas. The play explicitly engages the audience in a game of suspension of disbelief, related by an increasingly dubious narrator. The fact that the speaker is anonymous and appears to break out of character at several points sharpens McPherson’s challenge to stage illusion and the established safe distance between audience and performer. The speaker literally tells a story of how he found ‘his’ story – a type of self-legitimating micronarrative. A cynical theatre critic, he marshals an armoury of rhetorical devices to secure credibility for an unlikely disclosure that turns out to be a road to Damascus type tale about an encounter with vampires. He accosts the audience directly and aggressively, employing a variety of strategies to tell the story including description, nostalgic appeals, humour, insults, self-deprecation, boasting, argument and direct refutation of disbelief. Moreover, the narrator’s disdain and acerbic commentary are turned not only on the subjects of his story, but also on the audience. As a result, the audience is never fully allowed to get caught up in the current of the narrative, but is repeatedly reminded of their own role.

The speaker describes how, as a cultural arbitrator, he can take advantage of ‘the best of everything. [He] could stand there with the cast and ruin their evening. And get paid for it.’⁵⁹⁸ Ironically, in his current role he has even replaced the cast. As Cummings explains, the narrator as critic feeds, like the vampire, upon others – upon their artistic endeavours, and upon their fear of his power. Moreover, his role as storyteller may be equated to the procurer role he fulfils for the vampire household – drawing in victims / listeners, exploiting their sympathy and feeding upon their credulity.⁵⁹⁹ The narrator also plays upon the construction of identity through storytelling and the arbitrariness of such micronarratives that function not because they reveal a profound or universal truth, but as a process of self-performance; as he suggests early in the monologue, ‘we all need a purpose in life, even if we’ve got to make it up.’⁶⁰⁰

McPherson’s interest in questions of credulity and theatricality are indicated in his prefacing the play with an anecdote which highlights the contexts in which ‘lies’ are acceptable. People do not ‘expect complete strangers to lie’ to them in a pub for instance, but in the theatre invented stories are expected. He goes on to stress how, in a monologue, the character on stage is in fact a guide ‘telling us about somewhere outside the theatre, not trying to recreate it indoors. The theatre is simply where we meet him.’ This relationship, however, is far from ‘simple’ and involves the audience’s collusion with the actor and ultimately participation in a ‘type of playing.’⁶⁰¹

Such playing is primarily concerned with states of ambiguity that efface the boundaries between fact and fiction and implicitly those between responsibility and irresponsibility. As if to highlight this matter, the speaker in St. Nicholas opens with a childhood reminiscence – ‘When I was a boy …’⁶⁰² to introduce the subject to vampires. He addresses what might be the audience’s immediate assumptions or associations, appealing to common knowledge of superstition and fiction and by using the second person plural – ‘like all of us’ – or the ideas ‘we get in books.’⁶⁰³ Then he begins to challenge them with the assertion that vampires materially exist, they are ‘Matter of fact,’ ‘casual’ and ‘ordinary.’ As such, ‘practical things’ must be learned in order to deal with them. Later, he more forcefully interrupts his own story in a collusive manoeuvre, appearing to drop the pretence of character to refute audience scepticism:

Mm. There’s always going to be a smugness about you listening to this. As we all take part in this convention. And you will say, “These vampires are not very believable, are they”? And you are entitled. This convention. These restrictions, these rules, they give us that freedom. I have the freedom to tell you this unhindered, while you can sit there assured that no one is going to get hurt.⁶⁰⁴

Casting convention aside, he then goes on to criticize the audience’s reliance on ‘the lazy notions foisted upon you by others in the effort to make you buy more popcorn.’⁶⁰⁵ While ‘we’ think we can apprehend the world through science, in fact we understand it very little in practice. To illustrate his point he notes, ‘We may know that the earth goes round the sun. And we may know that this is due to “gravity”. But not one of us knows why there is gravity. So don’t sit there and cast judgement on the credibility of what I say, when you don’t even know why you aren’t floating off your seats.’⁶⁰⁶ In making disbelief the focus of attention, McPherson’s play self-consciously folds theatricality and the mechanics of storytelling back upon themselves but at the expense of the audience.

At one level then, the core of the play is a narrative crisis – the speaker’s self-confessed problem is a deficit of innovation. He is plagued by what is a highly postmodern dilemma – he feels doomed to process, respond to, and recycle others’ artistic products. ‘I had no ideas. No ideas for a story. […] Nothing ever came. I could only write about what there was already.’⁶⁰⁷ His frustration is colourfully expressed:

Tried to convey the feelings I had. That I genuinely fucking had – for people. I loved people. I loved the stupid bastards … I wanted to let my compassion seep out across the stage. Handicapped people in love. Queers and lesbians absolving each other. A liberal, fucking, all encompassing … you know.⁶⁰⁸

The first and most obvious irony is that as the rest of his story amply testifies the narrator is a hardened misanthrope. Even when trying to claim compassion for humanity, language betrays him. Without doubt the effect is comic, yet the inclusivity of the final ‘you know’ also presumes a certain audience complicity with the sentiments expressed which are, upon closer scrutiny, none too complimentary. Narrative desire here is exploitative and self-serving.

At the end of the play the narrator boasts how he now has a story. But what is that story? His tale is one of self-destruction, in which the protagonist must reach a nadir in order to re-evaluate his life – a familiar narrative trajectory. It is also one in which a wayward protagonist encounters vampires, but manages to live to tell the tale – again, an old favourite with multiple variations in literature and film. It might be argued, with considerable evidence, that in spite of the concluding bravado, the narrator still ‘only write[s] about what there was already.’⁶⁰⁹ Recognition of this cliché may figure in the game the monologue plays with its audiences.

Recalling Newton’s notion of narrative as a participatory process, the ‘type of playing’ undertaken by St. Nicholas implies that this ludic monologue comes at the price of ethics. The storymaking staged in St. Nicholas is clever, but coercive. Although McPherson emphasizes the human quality of interpretation and the responsibility of reason, the structure of the monologue affords the audience little space to exercise such capabilities. As already noted stage illusion is undermined through direct address, yet the audience’s role is strongly predetermined by this mode of address. They are interpellated aggressively as passive auditors, their values and judgements are assumed, and, without the option of reply, they are berated for these assumed values and judgements.

This Lime Tree Bower unfolds without such overt self-reflexivity; monologue here is the vehicle for a cluster pseudo-confession. As I have suggested elsewhere, the play ‘can be seen in part to return to the alcohol-soaked, yet curiously lucid, narrators of [McPherson’s] earlier plays and a core set of moral dilemmas, but both these elements are realized in a theatrically richer fashion … the ensemble monologue structure facilitates multiple points of view [and] gives rise to a mosaic of observations and stories that ultimately fit together as a coherent whole.’⁶¹⁰ The three speakers – Joe, a teenage schoolboy, Frank, his brother who works at the family chip shop and Ray, a philosophy lecturer who is their sister’s boyfriend – each tells stories of their recent past to the audience, and apart from one exception, they ignore each other on stage.

Each speaker’s monologue deals with acts of transgression and their responses to transgression fashion our view of their characters, thus questions of narrative and ethics are embedded from the outset. McPherson establishes a sense of structure and movement with the arrangement of the acts of disclosure, achieved through a fixed rhythm of turn-taking, but also within each character’s monologue via speech patterns. What results is a narrative performance composed of 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.

Joe’s naivety is conveyed by both the thematic foci of his monologue but also by the guileless mode of expression. His concerns are juvenile, his vocabulary simple. Self-doubt limits his perspective on the events he relates and the conclusions he draws. He oscillates in a confused manner between his adoration of Damien, the new boy in school, masturbatory fantasies about the girls he sees in the park, and another girl, ‘Deborah Something,’ he claims to be really interested in, but has ironically ‘only ever seen from the side.’⁶¹¹ Joe’s analytic horizons are comically suggested by his preference for his brother’s ‘thrillers and westerns’:

I liked his books because the sentences were always short. The writers gave you the facts. In school we did books where nobody said what they meant and you had to work out what everybody wanted. [In contrast] [t]hese books knew how to be read.⁶¹²

McPherson balances this artlessness with a nascent adolescent self-consciousness that links narrative self exposure with the development of a sense of judgement. Repeatedly Joe’s monologue indicates the problem of knowing who to believe, or how to act, as he puts it, in a ‘town full of spoofers.’⁶¹³ He instinctively responds negatively to Damien’s apparently flirtatious relationship with his own mother, and he is unable to dissimulate when he knows he is ‘being false.’⁶¹⁴ Yet, when he witnesses his friend rape a drunken girl although he feels physically sick, he fails to intervene. Naïve moral response is clearly not wedded to action.

Ray, in stark contrast, is a misanthropic and purportedly amoral opportunist. The character provides a prime example of what Singleton has described as toxic masculinity: self-destructive, and implicitly, if not actually, violent.⁶¹⁵ His bravado and disingenuousness are evident from the beginning of his first speech when he describes waking up in bed with one of his students but pretends amnesia with regard to her identity – ‘What was her name? I can’t remember.’⁶¹⁶ Ray’s narrative bristles with swearwords, sarcastic retorts, harsh judgements and smoulders with aggression. He drinks in the student bar because ‘[he] hate[s] academics’; he despises the students who buy him drinks; he refers to the student he has slept with as ‘a stupid fat bitch’; the Head of the Philosophy Department is a ‘terrible gobshite’; even his girlfriend ‘annoy[s] the fuck out of [him]’ because he suspects her of superior intelligence.⁶¹⁷ Accordingly, the character’s ethics are described less by his reported actions than by the ways in which they are enunciated.

Ray’s specialization in philosophy and, in particular, utilitarianism lends his toxic narrative an additional twist. Having petitioned for the right to question the visiting eminent Professor Konigsberg (who ironically prefers monologue to dialogue), his intervention is substantively non-verbal – he vomits dramatically before the auditorium and over part of the audience. The fantastically disgusting story functions as a punctuation mark in the play. Not only does it incorporate the disbelief of the spectators at the lecture, it seems designed to inspire scepticism among the play’s audience or readers and finally, it also provokes the play’s only lines of dialogue:

FRANK: (To Ray): I never heard that.

RAY: I’ve been saving it.⁶¹⁸

This moment might be understood as an acknowledgement of ‘shared discourse’ that serves to fix ‘the narrative of the monologue in a shared reality.’⁶¹⁹ Frank’s reflection upon Ray’s storytelling and the stage direction that the characters are aware of each other emphasize the performative dimension to all the monologues and, therefore, the blurring of distinctions between collusion, concealment, truth and falsehood. Why does Ray save this part of his story? If the characters are performing for each other then what is the status of Joe’s naivety? Is it too a performance? What is the space they occupy from which they relate their stories and how is the audience to understand their role in this space? These are dilemmas raised by the play which remain unresolved.

The denotative mode of the third speaker balances the extremes of his co-monologists. Frank represents a realistic approach both in narrative and ethical terms. He meets his father’s weaknesses for storytelling and alcohol with tolerance and solves the problem of his father’s debt to a loan shark by robbing the loan shark. Frank’s reasoning is founded on the assertion that ‘principles will only fuck you up, because no one else is ever moral,’⁶²⁰ a conclusion he has reached through the example of his own blighted father. Thus, if Joe is naïvely moralistic and Ray is cynically amoral, then Frank, in recognizing his father’s rightness and his own wrongdoing, is pragmatically immoral.

At the play’s conclusion Joe introduces a key question that brings us back to the relations between narrative disclosure and ethics – ‘So in the end it was like things started off good, and just got better. Is that cheating? I don’t know. It’s hard to say.’⁶²¹ Joe expresses surprise at their story’s happy ending, thus indirectly suggesting that they have managed to trick their way out of the fates they deserve. Indeed, despite the speakers’ differing modes of perception, it is important that none take the consequences of their reported actions. Their evasion is served as entertainment, ethical dilemmas are side-lined, and the audience is left with amusement and equivocation.

The combination of acts of disclosure with the ensemble monologue format recurs in Port Authority with different emphasis. Again the stage functions as an abstract space where the spoken word prevails, yet in contrast with This Lime Tree Bower the impression produced by the three monologues is of paralysis rather than movement. Gone is the cynical, laddish bravado and humour of the earlier play. What is offered by Port Authority is a spectacle of sincerity and regret. This performance is composed of monologue blocks – contiguous but discrete – delivered in stage limbo. As it gradually becomes clear, although they share references to Dublin locations, they refer to different times and are not chronologically arranged and, as Jordan observes, ‘the connections between the three characters initially appear incidental at best.’ Admittedly the layering of the speeches intimates a more ‘complicated perspective,’⁶²² but the ultimate effect is an emphasis on selves in isolation, tentatively, even apologetically, attempting to make sense of experiences of failure.

While the play lacks any religious superstructure it is sprinkled with subtle religious references that complement its confessional tendency. The ringing of a bell before each character speaks gestures toward ritual perhaps vaguely recalling the Angelus bell. Just as the Angelus prayer is directed to the Virgin Mary, here the bell prompts stories anchored in responses to women, perceived by the speakers to be untouchable, unobtainable or superior in some way. We meet these characters in a temporally and spatially unspecified place – ‘in the theatre’ as the sparse stage directions indicate – as they relate accounts of ‘transitional moment[s]’⁶²³ in their lives. Kevin, an unemployed young man in his twenties, has just moved out of home to share a house with some friends, one of whom he has a crush on. They both begin relationships with other people despite being strongly drawn to each other. Dermot, an unsuccessful middle-aged salesman and covert alcoholic, is offered a desirable new job and momentarily basks in the prospect of success amongst his affluent new colleagues. However, during a heady excursion to Los Angeles with his future colleagues and boss it is discovered that he was employed on the basis of mistaken identity. He returns home to his wife and son in humiliation, a casulty of crony capitalism and a victim of his own insecurities and weaknesses. Joe, a retired widower who lives in an old people’s home, receives a photograph in the post that takes him back to the past and a moment when he found himself attracted to his next-door neighbour.

Each narrative outlines an emotional journey in which the narrator confronts a moment of choice and its consequences. Once more the responsibility of agency is pondered in micronarrative monologue form. Joe, confronted with desire for another woman, is deeply perturbed. He does his best to extinguish his feelings, to behave morally according to Christian principles, but believes that despite his efforts God has seen him. Now that both women have died he finds himself with mementos of them both, attempting to reconcile himself with his decision and his lingering emotions. Dermot, when faced with the prospect of a new career, spirals into drunkenness and deceives his wife. Afterwards he describes himself ironically as ‘one of those figures you see in the religious paintings where God is pointing for them all to go to Hell. And they’re all looking up at him, very much feeling the reality of their situation.’⁶²⁴ In spite of his faults his wife, Mary, welcomes him home with forgiveness, reminding him that it was she who chose him and of her commitment to care for him. Kevin’s passivity runs so deep that he allows himself to be claimed by the girl he is less interested in. Following the death of his grandmother he wonders whether perhaps ‘there isn’t a soul for every person in the world … Maybe lots of us just share a soul. So there’s no judgement, because there’s no point.’⁶²⁵

Unlike the mixed signals emitted in This Lime Tree Bower, Port Authority adheres consistently to a confessional mood. It is difficult to ignore the conclusion drawn by Singleton, that the monologues in Port Authority stage a ‘self-confessed lack of agency in the world and … complicity with that lack.’⁶²⁶ Monologue as it is deployed here positions the audience as witnesses to acts of flawed expiation, observers of human paralysis or failure, and invites empathy. What is interesting about the operation of monologue here is the way in which each speaker comes to a point in their narrative where they view themselves externally as a character in their own drama. This is most explicit in Dermot’s confession:

And it was like I was looking at the three of us there in the garden from high above […]

I could see me and Mary sitting there at the table.

Her hand was on the back of my head.

And I was like a hunched figure.

My face falling slowly into her lap.⁶²⁷

If the effect of confessional sincerity is to give the impression of an apotheosis of authenticity that collapses space for critical response, then it is in moments like these that the game of narrative self-performance is perceptible.

With the exception of Come On Over in 2001, McPherson has not returned to a full scale monologue play, perhaps signalling the end of this phrase in his work, perhaps signalling that the transitional cultural moment of which they seemed a part has passed. What is for certain, as these plays illustrate, is that monologue for McPherson stages a complex interaction between the performance of disclosure, acts of transgression, questions of narrative ethics, and the ambivalent male self, and this nexus is irreducible to singular interpretation or straightforward moral coding.

Works Cited

Adams, Tim, an interview with Conor McPherson, ‘So There’s These Three Irishmen …,’ Observer 4 February 2001 [online].

Brennan, Patrick, Review of The Good Thief by Conor McPherson, Irish Theatre Magazine 21 April 2010 [online].

Cummings, Scott T., ‘Homo Fabulator: The Narrative Imperative in Conor McPherson’s Plays.’ Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, ed. Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort, 2000): 303-312.

Geis, Deborah, Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1993).

Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

Jordan, Eamonn, “Look Who’s Talking, Too: The Duplicitous Myth of Naïve Narrative.” Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, ed. Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006): 125-156.

Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword Fredric Jameson. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984).

‘Marina Carr in Conversation with Melissa Sihra,’ Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, eds. Lilian Chambers, Ger FitzGibbon and Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort, 2001): 55-63.

McPherson, Conor, Plays: Two (London: Nick Hern, 2004).

McPherson, Conor, The Weir and Other Plays (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1999).

Newton, Adam Zachary, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1995).

Singleton, Brian, ‘“Am I Talking to Myself?” Men, Masculinities and the Monologue in Contemporary Irish Theatre,’ Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, ed. Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006): 260-277.

Wallace, Clare, ‘Monologue Theatre, Solo Performance and Self as Spectacle,’ Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, ed. Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006): 1-16.

---, ‘Conor McPherson,’ The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights, ed. Martin Middeke and Peter Paul Schnierer (London: Methuen, 2010): 271-289.

---, Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity and Citation in 1990s New Drama (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006).

Wood, Gerald C., Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief (Dublin: Liffey, 2003).

Extract From: The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right beside the Beyond’, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (2012)

Cross Reference: McDonagh, McGuinness, Carr, Monologues.

See Also: McPherson’s essay on Billy Roche.