Eamonn Jordan
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme; Carthaginians; Mary and Lizzie; Mutabilitie; Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me
Introduction
Born on 29 July 1953 in Buncrana, which is located on the Inishowen peninsula in County Donegal, Republic of Ireland, Frank McGuinness grew up living close to the border that divides the island of Ireland. In his youth, he spent a good deal of time going back and forth from his home place to Derry. This city is part of the six counties that constitute Northern Ireland; going there required him to cross regularly the border that divided North and South, and to reflect on the causes, impact and issues of partition.1 In McGuinness’s writing, the counties of Donegal and Derry, while both are in the province of Ulster, yet not of the same nation, interplay in a curious, anomalous way to suggest a liminal, divided, doubled and displaced sense of focus and place. McGuinness left his home town in 1971 to study literature at University College Dublin, and while there, the hugely traumatic events of Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972) impacted greatly on him. McGuinness acknowledges that it was on that particular day he lost his ‘innocence’. When he had finished his undergraduate degree, he undertook graduate studies in medieval literature, eventually gaining full-time employment at St Patrick’s, Maynooth University. Currently, he is Professor of Creative Writing in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin.
McGuinness regards himself as both a Northern Irish and a Catholic writer in the very broadest senses of both words. But the reach of his dramatic work takes in many different situations and circumstances, well beyond the concerns of the local and the national. His plays have been translated into many different languages and produced successfully internationally for almost thirty years. Further, his adaptations of Greek and modern European plays have been very well received across the globe. For this range of work, McGuinness has won numerous awards. He is also noted for three collections of poetry, short stories, some screenplays, and articles on playwrights, in particular, written for academic journals and books.2
More than most writers, McGuinness is someone who regularly experiments with form and content. He is not happy to revisit the same types of scenarios with the same dramaturgical imperatives. Genre-wise, he is equally proficient with tragedy and with comedy, and further, he has the capacity to integrate classical and popular cultural awarenesses with great ease. Indeed, the sensibilities of the plays are normally some amalgam of the tragic and the comic, the real and the surreal, the continuous and the discontinuous. By so doing, McGuinness manages to shift register with considerable frequency and deftness. In terms of form, his work varies from a general heightened or expressive realism in The Factory Girls (1982) or The Breadman (1990), to a type of perverted, nightmare scenario found in Innocence (1986) where Act One captures a grim, deprived and depraved social reality and Act Two, in the main, the inner mechanisms of the haunted mind of the painter Caravaggio; it is as if the second act is layered upon the first. Carthaginians (1988) has the episodic/journey structure of ritual, sacrament and pilgrimage, and Mary and Lizzie (1989) is a wild, mobile fantasia inspired by Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Mutabilitie (1996)mimics the Shakespearean five-act form, whereas Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) is an episodic, almost Brechtian history/memory play that sets out to deny empathy and to alienate, by blending monologue, a basic naturalism, simultaneous scenes and a carnivalesque play-within-a-play format derived from the Battle of the Boyne.
McGuinness’s plays are set in a whole host of eras and in very different socio-economic and political circumstances. The Factory Girls is set in a Donegal shirt factory, Innocence in post-Renaissance Italy, and Mutabilitie in Cork in 1598, during the Munster Wars.
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992) is set in a cell in Beirut in the late 1980s to early 1990s, and The Bird Sanctuary (1994) in Booterstown, south County Dublin in the early 1990s.More recently, Speaking Like Magpies (2005) is set in numerous locations in Britain, around the time of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and his latest play There Came a Gypsy Riding (2007) is set in present-day Connemara. His stage environments are frequently fluid spaces that have the capacity to be instantly and substantially altered or transformed. The stage space at the end of The Bird Sanctuary adapts to reveal a miraculous painting, and in Mary and Lizzie scenes shift from a grave scene to a Victorian seaside location, from a dinner party with Karl and Jenny Marx to the camps of Russia, under communist rule. Time and space are fluid. Likewise, stage spaces can be multiple as in The Sons of Ulster, where at one point there are four distinctive and simultaneous locations on a divided, segmented and clearly demarcated stage.
Some concepts confidently recur again and again, and others are less frequent or reappear in subtle ways, but ultimately, as with all great writing, it is the interplay between what is similar, familiar and repetitive, and what is diverse, diffuse and different that has the potential to generate quality work. In his writing, the dramatic focus has been on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and loyalists, and on the impact and legacy of imperialism. There is an obsessive compulsion to interrogate the Irish–British relationship, from multiple points of view. An additional layer is added by the introduction of American characters to the clash between the British and Irish ones; sometimes there is a reliance or over-reliance on an American character, usually male, who is deployed as a way of opening up entrenched binaries that had traditionally induced biases, stereotypes, objectifications and persecutions. There are also the issues of class identities, communities, genders and sexual orientations, which are best evaluated through his fascination with artistry, with the obligations of the artist or visionary to filter, contest or manipulate the circumstances of their existences. McGuinness locates his plays in situations where despite restraint, confinement or imprisonment, the characters reinscribe the space through language, prayers, songs, poems, melded images, gestures, and through the re-enactment or reconfiguration of social norms, rites and customs. He contests culturally embedded rituals by using parody, perversion or sinister takes on such conventions, habits, mindsets and reflexes.
The Plays
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985)
After the success of The Factory Girls (1982), the next two plays Borderlands (1984) and Gatherers (1985), which McGuinness scripted for Team Theatre, a Theatre-in-Education company, show evidence of the broader aspirations of the writer. The substance of that ambition struck resolutely home with the extraordinarily elaborate and brilliant Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. This play deals with a group of eight loyalists, who have signed up to fight for the British Army during the First World War in Ulster’s 36th Division. Initially, their almost unanimous, unswerving impetuses to fight are deemed to be an expression of loyalist Ulster’s commitment to Britain, which also serves as an inducement to Britain to maintain its rule over the whole island of Ireland. As the action progresses this loyalty is put under increasing pressure, first by the homosexual, upper-class character, Kenneth Pyper, secondly by the horrors of war, and, thirdly, by an emerging sense of personal individuation and maturity that each of the soldiers adopts. This allows the mask of the tribe to slip.
The horrors of war ensure that the soldiers make a whole series of recognitions that complicate and contradict their initial motivations and certainties. McIlwaine notes: ‘We’re not making a sacrifice. Jesus, you’ve seen this war. We are the sacrifice’. The play opens with the Elder Pyper, the only survivor of the eight, reflecting back on the carnage that was the Battle of the Somme. He is haunted by those who have died, for they refuse to leave him in peace because he misrepresents their actions and betrays their values. The tension between tribal acts of remembrance and false testimony is vital. Part Two is set in an army barracks when the recruits first get to know each other, and Part Four is set just before the soldiers go into battle. Part Three marks the temporary homecomings of the soldiers in pairs, and four locations are discernible onstage with mini-scenes, cinema-like, with cross-cutting and fading from one to the other, until eventually, all four spaces are visible and simultaneously active, and a cacophony of distinct voices and sensations coalesce.
As someone who would have strong nationalist beliefs, and as someone who would be perceived to be Catholic, however lapsed, for McGuinness to write about the rival tradition with such decisiveness and integrity has been praised by many. Of course, McGuinness is reflecting on and dramatising otherness, but he does not romanticise or simplify unionist values and impulses. Instead, he establishes complex motivations for his characters, but he also identifies different strands of loyalism that move away from a stereotyping or homogenisation, something most opponents tend to do when it comes to those they challenge. Further, the soldiers are robust and aggressive individuals, prompted by a self-destructive blood lust. The central character, Pyper, is the source of a trickster consciousness, but his shifting of perspective is brilliantly tracked through the drama. At the initial stages, Pyper is someone out to self-destruct, and is nihilistic and antagonistic in his undermining of others. By the end of the play, he so much wants to belong that he is accused by the others of trying too hard to participate in the rituals of the tribe, before they go into battle. Perversely, he is the only one who survives.
As war plays go, there is considerable tension on stage throughout. As the play is set in 1916 it chimes with nationalist commemorations of the Easter Rising in the same year, which was for many the beginning of the end to British rule. Further, the play is equally about paramilitaries in the 1980s, both loyalist and Republican, who were perversely and delusionally re-enacting the same sacrificial imperatives of the Somme and of the Easter Rising. More crucial still is the fact that the victory of King William over King James at the Boyne is regarded as the mythic moment that consolidated a loyalist sense of destiny. That McGuinness has his soldiers re-enact the Battle of the Boyne, filtered through the loyalist Scarva tradition and permits a novel ending to such a battle, where the traditional outcome is reversed, says as much about the imperiousness of history, as it does about the imperatives of McGuinness’s dramaturgy to destabilise and to unsettle expectations.
Innocence (1986)
Pyper is matched by the figure of Italian post-Renaissance painter Caravaggio in Innocence. The play is set on the day the artist murders Ranuccio Tomassoni. McGuinness takes not only inspiration from the events in the life of the artist but also from his paintings, and McGuinness utilises and recontextualises images, props and symbols that recur in Caravaggio’s works. The play is about creativity and patronage, about sexual orientation and Catholic damnation, and about the historic as well as the contemporary. When first produced in 1986, homosexuality was illegal in Ireland.3 Yet here on the stage of the Gate Theatre was not only a gay artist, but also Cardinal Francesco del Monte paying for sex with rent-boys, Lucio and Antonio, while at the same time using his religious position to justify, damn and deny. By him, homosexuality is equated with vice and damnation. The principally external social reality of the first act is displaced by the act that follows it. The second act takes an audience inside the mind of Caravaggio, in such a way that the acts are not about continuity, but a layering process, the superimposition of one on top of the other. Thus audiences experience a very different type of play.
This is not a history play, more a compression of Caravaggio’s life into a tight time span, and is a fictionalised version of the life, of which there are many other narrative accounts. Of course, there is a distinction to be made between the character of Caravaggio and the artist. There is an obvious danger in bleeding one into the other. So authenticity and verisimilitude are not foremost either to the dramaturgy or to the scenography of the play’s first production. Joe Vanêk, in his design, utilised objects from across different time-periods in order to establish anachronisms.4 This is a play not only about perceptions of damnation, but also is about redemption. The vision of the artist is to see salvation in all things. Caravaggio used those trapped in poverty and/or prostitution to pose for him as saints and sinners alike. Famously, Caravaggio used the bloated corpse of a dead prostitute, who had been pulled from a river, as a model for the Virgin Mary. At the core of Caravaggio’s artistry is the ability to marry creativity and destructiveness, to balance compositionally light and dark, and to refigure key moments of Christian iconography within a homoerotic template. The intensity of the paintings springs from the corruption and poverty of his society, the impetuous rages of the artist, the unsettled nature of the unconscious, as much as from a transgressive brilliance and stylistic innovation that he brings to his work. Caravaggio is a mass of contradictions, equally creative, aloof, detached, calculating, reflective and caring, as well as being spontaneous, intuitive, violent and murderous. Through patronage and the procedures of commissioning, art is often commodified and its ideological imperatives and expectations implicitly normalised, while the artist functions as a mere possession. Caravaggio is both a confirmation and challenge to that perspective.
The play opens with a nightmare scenario, as Caravaggio sleeps in Lena’s hovel. He is haunted by people in his life and by objects and images that recur and dominate his work, such as a skull, the red cloak and a horse. The co-mingling of people and objects, trauma and creativity are clearly established and such an overlap continues on right through the play. As the play progresses, the spectator meets a range of characters including the Cardinal, the young male prostitutes, the artist’s brother, and their dead sister as well as Lena, his companion of sorts. By the end of the play, she takes on the mantle of an artist, in a world turned upside-down. It is a carnivalesque reversal: ‘Lena . . . I knew then somehow we’d won, we turned the world upside-down, the goat and the whore, the queer and his woman’.
Carthaginians (1988)
The companion piece to The Sons of Ulster (the Protestant/loyalist play) is Carthaginians (the Catholic/nationalist play). It deals with the trauma and tribulations induced by Bloody Sunday, an occasion on which British paratroopers shot dead fourteen people on the streets of Derry, claiming that they were responding to an attack by Republican paramilitaries. While the time between the play’s first production and the actual incident itself is brief, unlike The Sons of Ulster where the time span is substantial, Carthaginians still should be characterised as a history/memory play. The play’s women characters gather in a graveyard, hoping to witness the dead rise. The male characters have different attachments to the same space. The dead do not rise, but the characters who have existed in a liminal space of suffering take the chance to purge their consciousnesses, to rest and move on. Each has to face individual horrors, and each has to connect back into the world of the living.
The playlet, The Burning Balaclava, written by the gay character, Dido, who writes under the pseudonym of Fionnuala McGonigle (F. McG . . .) is a key turning point in the drama, as the characters enact a cross-gender cast masquerade that travesties the rhetoric and sensibilities of all religious and political allegiances. As with the mock battle in The Sons of Ulster, which of course has a cross-tribal cast and a half-Catholic, Crawford, masquerading as King William of Orange, play or metatheatricality, in both instances, is the liberating, revitalising energy, which facilitates a shift of consciousness. After participating in The Burning Balaclava, the characters begin to imagine anew, and the stranglehold of the trauma begins to weaken. By the play’s end, each character finds a way of letting go of guilt, denial, the deep hurts, and severe injustices that the events of Bloody Sunday brought about and have come to symbolise.5 Both directly and indirectly, The Sons of Ulster and Carthaginians reflect the clash between Protestantism and Catholicism, loyalismand Republicanism. In the work there is this constant binary distinction between Catholic and Protestant; it continues to be expressed in plays such as Speaking Like Magpies, which was performed as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Gunpowder season and which reflects on the plot by Catholics to murder the Protestant King James I. The play ends with Queen Anne, admitting to her secret Catholicism; thus the cycle of inter-religious conflict has another impetus and another source.
Mary and Lizzie (1989)
Mary and Lizzie is a fantasy piece, inspired loosely by Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which McGuinness was adapting around the time. The two Burns sisters, Mary and Lizzie, flee Ireland having been warned about an impending famine. They head to Manchester, where they live with Frederick Engels, successful businessman, writer, and friend and financial supporter of Karl Marx. These two sisters had been almost written out of history, and McGuinness’s work is both an act of retrieval and an assault on Victorian sensibilities, exemplified by Marx particularly, who for all his insight had written disparagingly about the Irish in his book The Conditions of the Working Class,6 despite having lived with these two women for a long time, and despite their role in escorting him through the underworld of poverty and the inhumane living conditions found in industrial Manchester. Scenes range from the women of the camps in Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century, awaiting the return of British soldiers, to the work camps of Russia under communist rule, from the underworld where the sisters meet their dead mother to an encounter by the seaside with Queen Victoria (performed by a male). Space and time are meshed in most unsettling and brilliant ways, so that poverty and dispossession are registered, and intellectual reflection is shown to be incapable of distilling the essences of inhumanity. The two sisters also challenge the founders of Marxism on the grounds of gender and nationality. These men, despite their brilliance, are confined by many of the prejudices of their own times, classes and cultures. Engels and Marx can clearly reflect on class, power and inequality, but are far less successful on imperialism, race and gender. European class biases as much as British ones are contested by the play.
Mutabilitie (1997)
Moreover, this play’s breadth and fluidity contrast sharply with the five-act Shakespearean form of Mutabilitie which plots the tensions between the indigenous Irish and the ruling British classes, represented by the poet Edmund Spenser7 and his partner, Elizabeth. While ruled by the mythic Queen Maeve and her partner King Sweeney, the Irish revolt is led by the File, or Poetess and her partner Hugh, who work for the Spenser family inside the fortress.8 File imagines redemption taking the form a of man coming from a river and when a member of an acting troupe, called William Shakespeare, is saved from the water, File believes that she has discovered a redeemer. Neither William nor an uprising bring lasting change. Elizabeth regards the Irish as ‘vermin’, ‘animals’ and ‘savages’. Spenser shares her perceptions:
We must win this people to England’s laws, to England’s custom, to her religion. If we fail, then we abandon this people to the devil.
His concept of colonialism is thus substantiated by the civilising imperative of imperialism, which denies the material benefits of conquest or that imperialism itself might be ever construed as evil. While Mutabilitie initially imagines redemption through the rescued body from the river, it is later reconstituted, by the Irish finding the lost Spenser child and agreeing to foster rather than take him as a hostage.
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992)
If both previous plays challenge the dominant hegemony of British rule through a dialogical opposition between two hostile, but clearly unequal, groupings, the third part of the trilogy, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, endeavours to diffuse clear binary distinctions between the English/British9 and Irish characters, Michael and Edward, respectively, through the manipulation of stereotype and through a constant breach of an audience’s expectation, grounded as it is in cultural norms and expectations. McGuinness attempts to move away from the imperatives of history and the injustices and misrepresentations that these bring. In this play, Edward and Michael are held hostage with an American, Adam, in a cell in Beirut. The play was inspired by McGuinness’s response to the actual cycle of hostage taking that occurred in Lebanon in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Adam is the honest broker, and in many respects, he is the agent of change. Further, in Lebanon, there is little or nothing to distinguish between bearing a British or Irish passport. To the hostage takers, these men are simply citizens of a Western world, enemies to their own values, and representative of Western democracies hostile to their own core beliefs. Edward tells of flashing his Irish passport during his abduction in the hope that his Irishness will bring him some sort of dispensation, but to no avail. By the play’s end, the spectator is to assume that Adam is dead, Edward is to be set free, after suffering a nervous breakdown, and Michael, the initially prissy Englishman, is still being held. Michael’s strength and his traditions have seen him through thus far. The play is about negotiation and the letting go of national imperatives and prejudice, but is never simplistic. It is through the use of storytelling and the creative imagination that the chained hostages move towards some sort of liberation. There is no happy ending in the traditional sense. Michael’s future, in terms of the drama, is notionally precarious.
Summary
McGuinness’s work invites careful scrutiny, given that many of his plays are written almost as parallel, even parasitical texts to those he has adapted. Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, as well as the major classical Greek figures, all have faced serious challenges to their dramaturgical representations of women. The above cluster of writers are accused at worst of isolating from the dramatic action and immobilising within the theatrical spaces their female characters, thereby unleashing a rampant, deviant misogyny that pandered to the prerequisites of the individual ruling classes of their own times, or at best, of careless objectification and stereotyping, especially in terms of ending plays with the suicide of female characters. In addition, feminist critics have argued that most Irish male playwrights offer their female characters a very limited range of functions within the drama and that a narrow range of behaviours are part of audience expectations. In the traditional Irish play women were almost always obliged to substantiate patriarchal rule and were associated with home, otherness and the land.
Obviously, one can test the dramatic action of a play to see if the women characters have access to similar types of behaviour, thoughts and feelings as those of their male counterparts of the same class, or if not, analogous access to a wide array of simple, complex and comparable emotions, whether there are isolations, immobility, exclusions or the absence or restraints on agency. In Mutabilitie, for example, File is willing to commit all kinds of crimes in order to see her country freed, yet when the young son of the Spensers, who has gone missing, wanders into the Irish camp, he is looked after with great care, thanks to her intervention. A gendered identity, culturally and historically shaped, can be almost free floating, and is grounded in artifice, metatheatricality and the sensibility of play, yet alert to its own transitional reality. Artistry is one specific expression of this. McGuinness populates his plays with male and female artists. The advice to most playwrights would be to stay away from writers, painters, actors, theatre directors, especially poets, as these characters tend to be too knowing, overly expressive and perceived as self-indulgently performative. The tendency is to get artists onstage to be the voice of the playwright, all-knowing and self-consciously alert to their existences, and more importantly, willing to enunciate at length their predicaments. McGuinness seems to have wholeheartedly ignored that sort of advice. While artistry foregrounds gender, it must be offset by the actions of the characters that cannot be withdrawn as pretence, or shielded from their actions. For instance, murder cannot be retracted.
So, it is not so much that the artist is a visionary, but a troubled artist whose ability is to see others or their own society with a greater clarity than they see themselves. Instead the artists are often uncomfortable and uncertain with their own compulsions. Helen Lojek points out that:
McGuinness’s male artists are typically geographic exiles . . . Women artists like Eleanor Henryson in The Bird Sanctuary and File in Mutabilitie remain geographically as well as imaginatively in their homes. The male artists launch their quests horizontally across the surface of the earth; the female artists quest vertically, exploring the depths of place and self.10
Pyper in The Sons of Ulster is a sculptor. Once Pyper survives the war, he sings the piper’s tune, that limited mythology of war to which his tribe subscribes, but it is also a narrative which betrays the fundamental memory of his dead comrades. Therefore he is haunted by them to remember the story in all its complexity and not to distil it down to the coherence offered by a blood sacrifice narrative imperative. In The Sons of Ulster, Pyper’s creativity is stunted by the obligations and conventions of tribe and by an inability to break free of a cycle of control and intervention. The playful and imaginative performativity of Pyper from the play’s off is grounded more in his self-destructiveness and pain than in any liberating consciousness. Loyalist destiny is located in repetition, as it is for those who uncritically rehash and recycle mythic patterns of self-sacrifice, in the name of a worldview that is passed down almost unmediated from the Battle of the Boyne. Dido in Carthaginians is the budding playwright who writes under a pseudonym, as if such a name will give distance from the trauma of post-Bloody Sunday Derry.
By interrogating the figure of the artist, whether it is a theatre director, playwright, sculptor or poet, issues of gender and sexuality are most clearly explored and revealed. Eleanor is bisexual, Caravaggio is homosexual, as are Dido, Pyper, Gabriel and Conrad in Gates of Gold (2002), and Rebecca in The Factory Girls. Of this list, Rebecca is the only one not an artist. Her creativity is of a different order. McGuinness is not only opening up a debate about homosexuality, as homosexuality was illegal in Ireland until 1993, but equally he is not just attempting representations that are simply about gender or sexual orientation or discrimination. Instead sexuality is part of his characters’ constructions, not the single focus of consideration.
His gay characters can be relatively innocent like Dido or destructive, even murderous: Caravaggio kills, and Eleanor brings death, even if it is through magic. In Mutabilitie, File is learned in law, languages, maths, astronomy, poetry, medicine and magic. She is also very violent. Yet, the play concludes with File’s invitation to the Spenser child to drink milk and eat. She has the power to create and to destroy, as do almost all of McGuinness’s artists. Moreover, the plays insist on the responsibility of such awarenesses. So, when it comes to gender and sexual orientation, McGuinness seems to avoid the traditional pitfalls of writing that is accused of a constraining gender bias or prejudicing same-sex passion. If you look across the range of the work it is possible to argue that the female characters, whether heterosexual or homosexual, seem to have the same access as to behaviours, choices, emotions and responses, both positive and negative, as their male counterparts. Further, with some exceptions, women characters have a similar access to ritual and to the contestation of reality through the frameworks of play. Yet, in the early plays, when it comes to mixed-gender casts, I have recently argued that the male characters seem to have greater access to performativity than the females.11Carthaginians and Innocence are obvious evidence of it, but as the work progresses that tendency is countered in plays such as Mary and Lizzie and in The Bird Sanctuary. It is only in terms of sexual promiscuity that the two genders significantly differ.
McGuinness’s work is rich, complex, vigorous, and a huge challenge to academics, audiences, and to those who perform the work. His reputation is advanced by good performances, but more importantly, it will be enhanced by a distance from the immediacy of the work. Already the merits of his early and mid-career work are being revised upwards, and in the future, the questions raised initially by some commentators, about what has been seen as the overwritten or the unwieldy weave of the work, will be seen in far more positive ways. To conclude, in the work the deep sectarian divisions of Northern Ireland are overlaid with the historical imperatives of British imperialism and its control of Ireland. An additional layer is added when artistry, gender and sexualities are deployed to explore and expose entrenchment.
McGuinness’s plays are set in borderlands, within a liminal consciousness, in spaces where there is the inarticulateness and the urgency of the language, where there is no intimacy and great warmth, where deviance brings clarity and perversity assertiveness, where the ritualised imagination breaches conventions, and where the impossible can happen. McGuinness is the Irish playwright who has written most frequently about the past, about carnage of history, but indeed he is equally a playwright of and for the future.
Primary Sources
Works by Frank McGuinness
Gates of Gold (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Mutabilitie (London: Faber and Faber, 1997).
Plays 1 [The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Innocence, Carthaginians, Baglady] (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
Plays 2 [Mary and Lizzie, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Dolly West’s Kitchen, The Bird Sanctuary] (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Secondary Sources
Cregan, David, ‘“There’s something queer here”: Modern Ireland and the Plays of Frank McGuinness’, in Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan (eds), Special Issue: Performing Ireland, Australasian Drama Studies, Vol. 43 (2003), pp. 66–75.
Hiroko Mikami, Frank McGuinness and His Theatre of Paradox (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2002).
Jackson, Joe, ‘The Healing Touch’, Irish Sunday Independent, 21 April 2002.
Jordan, Eamonn, The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997).
—, ‘Meta-physicality: Women Characters in the Plays of Frank McGuinness’, Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 142.
Kiberd, Declan, ‘Frank McGuinness and the Sons of Ulster’, Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 35 (2005), pp. 279–97.
Kurdi, Maria, ‘An Interview with Frank McGuinness’, Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing, Vol. 4, Nos 1–2 (2003), pp. 113–32.
Lojek, Helen (ed.), The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2002).
—, Contexts for Frank McGuinness’s Drama (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004).
Long, Joseph, ‘FrankMcGuinness in Conversation with Joseph Long’, in Lilian Chambers et al. (eds), Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners (Dublin: Carysfort, 2001), pp. 298–307.
West, Derek, ‘Joe Vanêk in Conversation with Derek West’, Theatre Ireland, Vol. 29 (1992), p. 26.
Notes
1. As Hiroko Mikami establishes, ‘For people of the Inishowen peninsula, Derry/ Londonderry is a natural capital, to which they still commute for work or shopping, crossing the border on a daily basis.’ See Hiroko Mikami, Frank McGuinness and His Theatre of Paradox, p. 3.
2. See details of the holdings in the Philip Tilling archive in ibid., pp. 165–232.
3. Joe Jackson notes: ‘Because once upon a time – specifically 1990 when I last interviewed McGuinness – we had to rely on subtextual hints when it came to the subject of his homosexuality. Such as? My asking if imposing his own “sexual uncertainties” on to characters in his plays makes those characters “misrepresent broader realities, less disturbed lives than his own, perhaps”. To which Frank could only reply, basically, “That’s a fair point and I do ask myself continually am I doing that.” Clearly, the closet still was Frank’s favourite room. At least during interviews. “I did declare myself, but not in print,” he responds. “And I do believe that in my plays of the Nineties – particularly The Bird Sanctuary and Dolly West’s Kitchen – my homosexuality is more clear than ever before. Though in the earlier plays it definitely is more coded. And often the key issue. Whereas in the later work it’s just another part of the play.’ (Joe Jackson, ‘The Healing Touch’).
4. Joe Vanêk suggests that Innocence was marked ‘by a refusal to be frozen by anachronism – Innocence did not belong to a specific period’ as the design incorporated Victorian fires, fifties chairs and a lot of ‘modern junk’ into an ‘ostensibly Renaissance setting, thus ensuring that the play was seen not merely as a museum piece’ (Derek West, ‘Joe Vanêk in Conversation with Derek West’, p. 26).
5. In later plays like The Breadman and in Dolly West’s Kitchen, McGuinness returns to his home place of Buncrana. The former deals with the guilt of The Sinner Courtney and his near madness in the aftermath of his brother’s drowning. These incidents are the backdrop to the presence of those fleeing from the Northern Irish troubles and not finding the hospitality in Donegal for which the Irish are supposedly renowned.
6. According to McGuinness’ ‘And, of course, from that experience he wrote The Conditions of the Working Class, which is probably one of the key-texts that influence twentieth-century history’. (Kurdi, ‘An Interview with frank McGuinness’ p. 120).
7. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene honours his virgin Queen, Elizabeth.
8. Joseph Long, ‘Frank McGuinness in Conversation with Joseph Long’, pp. 298–307.
9. I am conscious that slippage between English and British is a constant in the discussion, and this seems to reflect what the plays themselves do.
10. Helen Lojek, Contexts for Frank McGuinness’s Drama, p. 102.
11. Elsewhere I argue, ‘They talk, they act, they accuse and they pervert expectations and norms. But there are gender differences. What the female characters, whether heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, seldom have, however, is access to the same levels of sexual desire . . . Clearly, female sexual desire is not as licensed like that of Caravaggio in Innocence or Gabriel and Conrad in Gates of Gold. Only Mary and Lizzie Burns can be considered as sexually expressive or assured. Also notable is the inclusion of many women that either have lost children or can’t have them. There are few women with living offspring, which taps into a different anxiety.’ See Eamonn Jordan, ‘Meta-physicality: Women Characters in the Plays of Frank McGuinness’, p. 142.