Stewart Parker’s Pentecost

Anne F. O’Reilly

Stewart Parker’s theatre has been considered in terms of a theatre of hope which endorses ‘play’ and builds hope on the fanciful. […] It reinforces the idea that humour is essential today for the successful dramatization of horror. (Murray, 1997:194) Murray identifies how Parker’s ‘whole dramatic aesthetic was bound up with a concept of play’ (197): Parker himself believed that

if ever a time and place cried out for the solace and rigour and passionate rejoinder of great drama, it is here and now. There is a whole culture to be achieved. The politicians, visionless almost to a man, are withdrawing into their sectarian stockades. It falls to the artists to construct a working model of wholeness by means of which this society can begin to hold up its head in the world. (Parker, 1986:19)

Denise Levertov, adverts to a similar function for the artist in a poem entitled ‘Making Peace’ (Levertov, 1988:41). She suggests that the poets are the ones with the responsibility to ‘give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar / imagination of disaster’ (emphasis in original). Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (Parker, 2000:169-245), set in the Belfast parlour house, ‘slap bang in the firing line’ (Pentecost 179) of the late Lily Matthews, a house, ‘almost suffocated with the furnishings and bric-a-brac of the first half of the century’ (Pentecost 171), invites the audience through a type of ‘heightened realism’ towards such a new imagining:

When we come to offer the audience an image of wholeness we can cease the task of picking over the entrails of the past, and begin to hint at a vision of the future. (Parker, 1986:19)

Pentecost draws attention to the power of the imagination to imagine the as yet unimagined. In turn it looks critically at many inherited ways of imagining, whether in thought, belief, or action that hinder and hamper the emergence of the full human being. It focuses on the dualisms and dichotomies that emerge from such limited imagining. This play uses the resources of theatre to enable the audience to suspend disbelief, to imagine ‘what if’, to face the roots of conflict, to dialogue with shadows and ghosts, in order to imagine an end to the endless cycle of retribution, that the Northern Ireland troubles had become.

Pentecost explores many questions around the areas of identity and belonging, home and exile, relationship and barrenness, feelings and passion (whether accepted or denied) and the ability to grieve. The inability of any of the characters to sustain healthy or fruitful relationships, caught as they are in various repetitive patterns of dependency or destruction, mirrors the warring society outside the door. The way religious ideology encourages such a narrow, bigoted and limited way of imagining is contrasted sharply with the broad mystical vision that is at the heart of Parker’s imagining. In an article in 1985 Parker stated:

I see no point in writing a plea for unity between prods and taigs. What use has piety been? I can only see a point in actually embodying that unity, practising that inclusiveness, in an artistic image; creating it as an act of the imagination, postulating it before an audience. (Quoted in Parker, 2000:xi)

The courageous use of the figure of Lily Matthews as a ghost throughout the play reflects the same urge to push our imagining beyond the realist frame, beyond the known into the as yet unknown. The fact that the ghost’s story indicates an unhappy or incomplete spirit, with a history and a life based on denial or secrets never spoken, can symbolize the ancestral voices that haunt this new imagining. Dialogue with these ancestral voices is vital for the community in the now. While the present has to embrace the shadows of its past, the ancestral voices must equally let go their hold on the imaginations of the people in the present. When the present connects with its pain – loss, denial, and impossibility – then a new imagining will occur. Parker re-appropriates the traditional Christian symbolism of Pentecost, as a symbol to hold the energies that he is trying to release. The symbol in the hands of a new community (and not necessarily tied to any religious ideology) will pour a benediction on the people as the spirit is released into the community.

Pentecost is a kind of history play. The action takes place before, during and after the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike of 1974, when militant Protestant workers managed to topple the power-sharing executive intended to replace direct rule from London with local authority divided between Protestants and Catholics.

Their strike included ‘the closing of factories and the shutting off of the power supply and proceeded to threats to the water and sewage systems before the Unionist members of the executive resigned, thus ending the experiment in self-government.’ (Richtarik, 2000:269)

The entire play takes place in the house of one Lily Matthews (deceased), to which four younger people are drawn, an estranged married couple Lenny and Marian, Ruth a battered wife, and Peter, a returned emigrant. Stage directions in the first act indicate that Lily Matthews’ house ‘in spite of being shabby, musty, threadbare’, has all ‘clearly been the object of a desperate lifelong struggle for cleanliness, tidiness, orderliness – godliness’ (171). All the memories of her life are contained within this house, all her souvenirs, mementoes, secrets – a chronicle of a century, which embraces the personal, the religious and the political. The four younger characters (three who are thirty-three years old and one who is twenty-nine), invade this space, bringing with them their stories, seeking reconciliation or resolution. They, in turn, bring their personal, religious and political imaginings into dialogue with one another and with the ghost of the place. Lenny, a one-time socialist, who plays the trombone, has just inherited Lily’s house and is offering the contents of it to Marian (his ex-wife), who has a furniture antiques shop. Lily was a Free Presbyterian, loyal to the crown as her many Coronation mugs attest. Lenny agrees to sell Marian the house if she signs divorce papers which she has not done even though they have been living apart for almost two years. Marian would like her divorce acknowledged by the Catholic Church – ‘the one and only place where it actually means something’ (178). For Lenny ‘the church is beneath my notice, it’s beneath contempt, if the church won’t recognize my divorce, that’s fine, great. Because I don’t recognize its existence.’ (178)

The ghost of Lily Matthews appears for the first time in Scene Two. Marian has made a cup of coffee, into which she has poured a shot of brandy. She proposes a mock toast to the late resident. Marian is convinced that her mind is playing tricks on her when Lily appears, and refuses to be frightened. ‘I don’t want you in my house … I don’t want you in here, breathing strong drink and profanity, and your husband deserted’ (181). While Marian assures her that she has not brought with her all the symbols of Catholicism, nonetheless Lily feels that she is an idolater, and her resistance goes very deep – to what is inside the other.

Marian: I’ve changed nothing. I’ve brought nothing with me. See? No Sacred Hearts, no holy water, not even a statue of yer woman – everything still in its place the way you left it, the way you wanted it.

Lily: You’re here. With all that’s in you. (Entering the kitchen) This house was my life. (181)

The symbols that define religious traditions have a powerful hold on the imaginations of their devotees. The Catholic / Presbyterian divide is one of word versus sacrament, where any Catholic attempts to image the divine are interpreted by Lily as idolatrous. The house has been her life, since she moved to it in 1918 with her husband Alfie. It was burnt down in 1921 ‘by a pack of Fenian savages’ (183). Marian, however, identifies with Lily’s dislike of her, ‘seeing as the place where I’m least welcome of all is the inside of my own skull … so there’s something we can agree on at least, Lily. I don’t like me either’ (183). An initial moment of connection between the two characters although initially denied by Lily, will give way later in the drama to a shared loss, guilt and an inability to grieve.

The second appearance of the ghost sees her still quite disgruntled that the four intruders are ‘tramping your filth all over my good floors’ (209). Lily’s sense of insider/outsider is named in terms of filth. And she continues: ‘You’ve been to your mass again, I can smell it off you.’ The sense of self-definition is sustained by naming the other in terms of dirt/excrement/unclean. This perception of the other as unclean or a defiler enables the perceiver to feel morally superior, cleaner, and hence more godly. Such negative perceptions of the other builds barriers that allow a denial of the other’s humanity. It is a short move then to perceive the other as more animal-like, as the next outburst from Lily reveals: … look at this place, you have it like a pigsty …are there not enough runty litters running the streets, whelped by your kind, reared with a half-brick in their fists, and the backsides hanging out of their trousers. (211)

Marian tries to break through Lily’s defences by sharing something of her own human journey, her own loneliness and struggle and desire for privacy, while Lily tries to drown out her request by singing an old hymn (‘Oh, God Our Help in Ages Past’) – almost as if to exorcise her. But Marian continues to speak:

You think you’re haunting me, don’t you. But you see it’s me that’s actually haunting you. I’m not going to go away. There’s no curse or hymn that can exorcise me. So you might as well just give me your blessing and make your peace with me, Lily. (210)

When Marian produces a child’s christening robe from Lily’s sewing basket we know that we are in the realm of the unspoken, the hidden, dark secrets that underlie a life. The text tells us that Marian found it folded up, ‘hidden amongst your underwear’ (211). Lily’s denial of her connection to this shadow causes her to project her anxiety outwards and to name the one who has uncovered the secret as the ‘devil’, and ‘The Antichrist’ (211). The attribution of the title of the demonic to what has been denied or suppressed in oneself ensures that people will continue to persecute each other in order to keep the shadow at bay.

Marian’s own shadow haunts her, the death of her child, Christopher, at five months of age, five years previously. The spectre of barrenness and childlessness also haunts the play. Ruth has lost three children, partly due to the violent beatings of her abusive partner. Lily’s story of the child conceived, born and abandoned almost thirty years earlier unfolds in the course of the play. Marian feels that she is at home in the house because it is a childless barren house. She recalls the death of her own child:

Marian: Christopher would have been five in August. Starting school. If he hadn’t gone. Left me. Given up the ghost in me. My own soul left for dead. He was our future, you see. Future, at a time like this …what could it possibly mean – a future? In a place like this? (212)

The loss of the child brings about a corresponding loss of soul both personal and political. It also stands as a powerful metaphor for the inability to produce anything new or sustaining in the political situation. Lenny’s account of the child’s death voices similar feelings. The birth of the child had radically changed their relationship, they had become ‘married lovers’.

It’s the one time so far I’ve ever felt one hundred per cent alive. For five months. That was how long it lasted … that was how long the sprog lasted. At that point he checked out, he’d seen enough. Maybe it was the prospect of having me as a da, you could hardly blame him … (205)

The marriage started to ‘go dead too’ from that moment on. No new imagining was possible. Outside on the streets there are sounds of escalating violence as the Loyalist strike continues and the Northern Ireland Agreement is under threat. The outside is now mirrored on the inside of the house where Marian feels increasingly besieged. The house for her was a refuge, where she felt she could withdraw, find some peace, be on her own. She speaks lines reminiscent of Lily’s earlier in the play as she asks Lenny and the others to leave:

I’m sick of your filth and mess and noise and bickering, in every last corner of the house, I’ve had enough […] You find a refuge, you find a task for your life, and then wholesale panic breaks out, and they all come crowding in the door, her and you and that trend-worshipping narcissist. (224)

The conflict between Marian and Lenny is deep and the wounding repetitive and unrelenting. The lines of argument are familiar to them both. Lenny accuses Marian of avoiding facing her own reality, she accuses him of not being able to face up to emotions (226). Lenny feels that Marian is unhinged, having heard her talking to herself in the middle of the night. Marian urges him to leave her in the house: ‘I’m staying here with my tongues – and you’re going home with your trombone’ (227).

Lily’s story begins to unfold. An initial mirroring takes place in relation to Marian and Lily’s age. Lily was thirty-three, (the age of Christ and the age Marian is now) when she went to Groomsport with the English airman Alan Ferris. After the affair she was forced to abandon their child in the porch of a Baptist church. She spent her whole life keeping the secret, torn apart with guilt, grief and fear of the wrath of God:

nobody to help me, only me here in this house, gnawing and tearing away at my own heart and lights, day in day out…until I was consumed by my own wickedness, on the inside, nothing left but the shell of me, for appearances sake. (231)

At all costs she had to preserve the outward façade of respectability as she made her life-long secret atonement for the sins of her flesh. The tension between flesh and spirit is very strong. Marian senses how much Lily loved Alan Ferris, and tells her that he introduced her ‘to the body’s actual passion’ (232) but Lily’s religious paradigm will only allow her to interpret the relationship negatively. He was at first like a ‘fair-skinned archangel’ but in memory and retrospect he becomes ‘a dark angel. Angel of death. Agent of Satan’ (232).

The telling of Lily’s story opens a new space between the characters where a new imagining can begin. Peter recalls a time when the troubles had just started when he, Lenny, and another friend, high on LSD, ‘felt a messianic impulse, to slay these ancient monsters, we felt summoned as a holy trinity of the new age, father, son and holy ghost’ (235) to take a stash of jars of LSD and put them into the reservoir and into the city’s water supply as a solution to the ancient animosities:

We could turn on the population, comprehensively, with one simple transcendental gesture, that would be it, the doors of perception flung wide, wholesale mind-shift, no more bigotry and hatred, a city full of spaced-out contemplatives like the three of us. (26)

Fortunately or unfortunately the reservoir had just been blown up by the UVF and their plan was foiled. His speech echoes Blake’s admonition to those seeking religious experience to cleanse the doors of perception. As a transcendental gesture it would go beyond anything previously imagined. (Although there is evidence that in the 1960s many interested in mystical and psychedelic experiences considered something similar.) It seems that the ability to imagine such an action is almost more important than carrying it out. The parodic use of religious images in the ‘messianic impulse’ or the new age ‘holy trinity’ accompanied by the energy of ‘what if?’ allows a playful new imagining to take place, at least for the audience.

Marian recounts her imagined version of the sexual encounter between Lily and Alan and how Lily’s life was interpreted as a punishment from a wrathful God for the sins of the flesh. Lenny wonders what it ‘was like here before Christianity’ (238) implying that there might have been a healthier attitude to bodiliness and sexuality than what emerged in the Christian era. Lenny’s story leads further into this imagining and re-visioning the relationship between body and spirit. He recalls a night when he sat on the beach with a woman (out of her head on various substances) who lay beside him naked, singing in a deep throaty voice the words of ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. At the same time he observes a group of nuns going swimming, exulting childlike in the water. His reflection leads him to see a profound connection between body and spirit and a new way of imagining how religion before Christianity might have celebrated this connection:

– and it doesn’t take a lot to see that the nuns are experiencing their sex and the vocalist her spirit. And for a crazy few seconds I all but sprinted down to the nuns to churn my body into theirs, in the surf foam, and then bring them all back to the lady vocalist, for a session of great spirituals … and maybe that’s how it was what it was like here. Before Christianity. (239)

Ruth offers a correction to Lenny’s interpretation of Christianity, seeing it in more joyful, incarnational and embodied ways:

You don’t even know Christianity. You think it’s only denial, but that’s wrong. It’s meant to be love and celebration.

The day is Pentecost Sunday which leads to a long recital from the Acts of the Apostles about the coming of the Holy Spirit on the apostles who had assembled in the upper room. The passage concludes with the promise from the prophet Joel which deals with the outpouring of the Spirit: ‘Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. This passage validates the dreaming and the imagining that preceded it and continues to open the space to-wards further imagining. It is assessed cynically by Peter who says that for a people never done calling on the name of the Lord that the province of Ulster should be the most saved in the world instead of the most ‘absolutely godforsaken’ (241). He parodies the group of them gathered in the house as a holy family. Inescapably bound up with that which he has tried to escape, Peter appears like a character from a Tom Murphy play as he lashes out in anger and disgust at the iconography and the place called home, hating it and needing it at the same time:

We’re such an Irish little family, the strong saintly suffering ma and the shiftless clown of a da here, no damn use to man or beast. (242)

The only absence is the Prince of Peace himself whom Peter then goes on to imagine

dandering down Royal Avenue … The Son of Man … in the middle of the marching ranks of the Ulster zealots, watching at the elbow of the holy Catholic Nationalist zealot as he puts a pistol to a man’s knee, to a man’s brains, to a man’s balls, the Son of God in the polling booth, observing the votes being cast in support of that, suffering the little children with murder festering in their hearts, what would Jesus Christ do with us all here, would you say? (243)

The sense of traditional religion (both Catholic and Protestant) as having strayed very far from the peaceful ideals of its founder, and its contemporary expression as zealous, hypocritical and deceitful akin to the biblical Pharisees is also a theme found in Murphy’s plays. Lenny takes Peter’s imagining further and suggests that Christ would ‘close down every church and chapel, temple and tabernacle in the whole island, put them to the torch, burn them into rubble’, that he would lead the priests, pastors and people up to the lonely mountains and ‘flay them into the rock, until the Christianity was scourged out of the very marrows of their bone’. When traditional religion no longer existed, a new kind of redemption would be offered:

until the people could discover no mercy except in each other, no belief except to believe in each other, no forgiveness but what the other would forgive, until they cried out in the dark for each other and embraced their own humanity … that’s the only redemption he’d offer them. Never mind believing in Jesus Christ. That’s the point at which Jesus Christ might just begin to believe in us. (243)

There is a sense in which Lenny’s vision is the essence of the Christian story which traditional religious ideology has obscured. Contemporary theological interpretations of religion make many similar points in their hermeneutics of suspicion. Even within the Christian tradition, contemporary feminist and liberation theologies offer a prophetic critique of how and where religion has sided with the rich and powerful, validating certain experiences and denying or negating others. The call to a radical re-reading of the gospel message has also led many theologians to critique the notion of religion per se, inviting a new kind of imagining (Cf. Ó Murchú 2000).

Marian urges Peter and Lenny beyond their anger, towards a letting go of church, priest and pastors arguing that ‘…there is some kind of christ, in every one of us’ (244) which we either honour, deny or violate. The other characters are uncomfortable with this language. Marian continues to talk about her child whom she had called Christopher: Because he was a kind of Christ to me, he brought love with him … the truth and the life. He was a future.

Marian’s experience of the death of her child has taught her much about what it means to be mortal and human. For years she felt him ‘like a raw scar across my own spirit’ (244). Her journey through his death, set against the background of Northern Ireland and its conflict pushes her beyond cause-and-effect thinking, beyond blaming the other into a new embrace of a shared humanity. The child’s mortality teaches her about her own mortality, and urges her beyond hatred to a space where she can begin to love the Christ both in herself and in others:

I denied him. The christ in him. Which he had entrusted to my care, the ghost of him that I do still carry, as I carried his little body. The christ in him absorbed into the christ in me. We have got to love that in ourselves. In ourselves first and then in them. That’s the only future there is.

There is a sense of indebtedness to the ghosts of the past:

We owe them at least that – the fullest life for which they could ever have hoped, we carry those ghosts within us, to betray those hopes is the real sin against the christ, and I for one cannot commit it one day longer.

Parker’s ‘image of wholeness’ enables him to move beyond an endless obsession or lamentation over the past into a vision of the future. This sense of re-visioning is also applicable to Parker’s search for new forms of theatre that are more inclusive, and trans-formative. Harris suggests that Parker’s expectation ‘that Irish theatre might create harmony through shared experience is consistent with theatre’s ritual beginnings, with its mythic death-and-rebirth theme.’ (1991:233) and suggests that theatre’s subtle effect on audiences is ‘both cumulative and unquantifiable’. Parker believes that ‘the play impulse can mediate and offer an alternative to continual sacrifice’ (Harris 235), and in turn offer an opportunity for re-mything:

The challenge will be to find a belief in the future […] to inspire rather than instruct, to offer ideas and attitudes in a spirit of critical enquiry…and above all to assert the primacy of the play-impulse over the death-wish. (Parker 1986:19-20, quoted in Harris, 235)

Mary Condren (1989) similarly draws attention to the sacrificial myths that underpin Irish society and also looks at the gender ideologies behind and within such imagining. She proposes alternate symbol systems where birth not death might be at the centre of a culture’s imagining and meaning-making. Frank McGuinness also explores the futility of sacrificial mythology through the destabilizing effects of play (Carthaginians), and allows theatre to function in a similar mythic way, proposing alternate horizons of possibility. McGuinness (like Parker) also pays attention to the worn-out symbols that cultures use to define and segregate themselves. He playfully explores this through the character of Billy in his unpublished play Gatherers. Billy sells religious icons and symbols to both the Catholic and Protestant community in turn, changing his allegiance as it suits his business.

Parker’s work witnesses to wholeness and the possibility of redemption – believing that ‘a farther shore is reachable from here’ (Heaney). As Stephen Rea noted, Parker does not imagine a specific future for this desolate society, rather

what he did in those particularly dark days was to imagine the possibility of a future at all. (Stewart Parker, Plays: 2 Methuen 2000 xii)

In Pentecost one of his final images is that of Pentecostal fire, suggesting that Parker’s work glows with images of ‘light-fire in opposition to death-fire’:

Torch, burn, turf, drive, flay, scourge, expunge every old view, every old hurt, every old story, every old way of treating each other, until they cry out in the dark and embrace humanity, until they can move from pastness to wholeness. (Harris 1991; 240)

Such a vision is radical, and new. It moves from the wound to the promise in offering a poetics of culture that can begin to sustain a new imagining that finds expression in transformed lives.

Works Cited:

Harris, C., ‘From Pastness to Wholeness: Stewart Parker’s Reinventing Theatre.’ Colby Quarterly, 27, 4 (1991), pp.233-41.

Levertov, D., Breathing the Water (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1988).

Parker, S., ‘State of Play.’ Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 7: 1 (1981), pp.5-11.

--- Dramatis Personae: A John Malone Memorial Lecture, Belfast, Queen’s University, 1986.

--- Plays: Two: Northern Star, Heavenly Bodies, Pentecost (London: Methuen, 2000).

Richtarik, M., ‘“Ireland, the Continuous Past”: Stewart Parker’s Belfast History Plays.’ A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage, eds Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan and Shakir Mustafa (Indiana: University Press, 2000): pp.256-74.

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

Cross Reference: Jones, Devlin, McGuinness, Friel.

See Also: Field Day Theatre Company