Daniel Shea
The Great Hunger; Sheep’s Milk on the Boil; Good Evening, Mr Collins; The Gallant John-Joe; What Happened Bridgie Cleary
Introduction
Tom Mac Intyre’s kind of theatre, at least in Ireland, is its own category, and Tom Mac Intyre the writer adheres to what can only be called a vision, a calling that only few hear and follow. For the reader coming for the first time to his work there is much to stumble over. Even admirers sometimes will make a pause at the menagerie of Irish and foreign vocabulary, at the antics of houyhnhnms, shape-shifters, dwarves and fairies in remote places, or at word choice like ‘farewell lactic Slopes of Innocence, / welcome vales awash with cuntal juice’ (ABC, p. 3) and ‘Jesus stabs Ireland in the epididymal canal’ (Lovely Sweeney, p. 46). But Mac Intyre has always drawn audiences because he writes with so much at stake for himself and because this shows in both the risks and the risqué in his career. In a theatre culture all but ignorant of dance and physical theatre Mac Intyre has helped extend the reach of both; for a society once loath even to talk about sexuality Mac Intyre has staged a girl’s first period (in Snow White) and the father’s male desire for the sex of his daughter (in Dance for Your Daddy); and to a country whose folklore attests to an avid imagination regarding the doings of the fairies Mac Intyre has fostered through his work what he terms ‘the spirit magic’.1
Born in Bailieborough, County Cavan, on 10 December 1931, Tom Mac Intyre grew up in the small-town Ireland of mid-century, where the middle-class family and the Catholic Church held individual emotional and intellectual development in check, but also where folkways and the bits and pieces of a dying Gaelic culture harboured the resources which could subvert the conservative communal structure if somebody just tapped them. Mac Intyre has bent the landscape, the dialect, the folklore and the storytelling of the Midlands to his creative ends, and an oeuvre of poetry, short stories and, most notably, plays stem from this Irish source and from his unique style.
After the novel The Charollais in 1969 and the publication of new and selected short stories in 1970, he wrote a book-length investigative report on a 1970 political scandal involving the IRA and translated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish poems before turning to the theatre. His first effort, Eye Winker, Tom Tinker, was staged by the Abbey in 1972 and, Mac Intyre has recalled, was found by one reviewer to be ‘disgracefully conventional’2 – an astounding critique in retrospect on Mac Intyre’s subsequent home out on the fringe of mainstream Irish theatre. From here, Mac Intyre’s stated aim has been to break with conventional theatre as widely practised, up to just recently, in Ireland.
During the 1970s (since drama schools in Ireland were first established in themid-1980s) the usual route for anyone looking to do theatre differently was either via the Continent or the US. Mac Intyre had been to both places. Besides immersing himself in the study of dance and theatre from Vsevolod Meyerhold onwards, he admired the work of Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham and Tadeusz Kantor. Collaboration with students at an Ohio college on the production of his Deer Crossing in spring 1978 carried over into the formation of Calck Hook Dance Theatre. In April of the following year Calck Hook was in Paris producing Mac Intyre’s Doobally/Black Way (the town name Dooballagh translates as ‘black pass, black road’) to public and critical acclaim, but on transferring in October to the Dublin Theatre Festival the play was ill-received, and on its second night police had to remove protesting members of the audience.3 By 1983, when the Abbey staged Mac Intyre’s next production, The Great Hunger, he was ‘at once both loved and hated’ in Dublin.4
Although the number of performing venues and styles open to Irish theatre practitioners has, specifically since 1985, increased threefold,5 by the early 1980s Ireland had only a few people capable of executing a professional production of a play like The Great Hunger. Physical and dance theatre demand collaboration, and few great works of the genres can be attributed to just one person. Theatre like this, which ‘depends entirely on an intersection of energies to ignite the work’,6 takes risks which theatre that focuses on plot and dialogue does not, but it also can achieve things other theatre can’t.
The Great Hunger as well as Mac Intyre’s other, as yet unpublished collaborations at the Abbey’s studio theatre, the Peacock, until the end of the 1980s (i.e., The Bearded Lady, Rise Up Lovely Sweeney, Dance for Your Daddy and Snow White) are the plays that most characterise public and critical opinion of his work. The theatrical idiom perfected during the productions and tours of these years has come to be known as Theatre of the Image. The appropriateness of ‘Theatre of the Image’ as a descriptor of Mac Intyre’s plays lies not in its reference to pictures (i.e. images), but in its reference to the mental faculty which makes pictures (i.e. the imagination). Today, with the widespread use of image files and digital-photo applications, Theatre of the Image is misleading because, while connoting ‘snapshot’, it is meant to describe ‘gestures, signals, objects, sounds, spatial relationships, pacing’ on the stage.7 Alan Read’s Theatre and Everyday Life, a groundbreaking study on the image in theatre, removes notions of metaphor and symbolism from what we normally consider imagery of the stage in order to present a theatre image that is at once discursive (i.e. consisting of text and speech) and sensual (i.e. consisting of visual, auditory and olfactory input).
The salient effect which Theatre of the Image has on a performance is to order speech, the dominant component in conventional play productions and drama texts, not above but beside the other means of performance. Against the conventional relation of much dialogue to little description, the scripts of Mac Intyre’s imagistic plays run for pages with few or no spoken lines. Also, Theatre of the Image taps an energy of the theatre often regarded as little more than the adjunct to normal entertainment practice: the audience. At a Mac Intyre play, those attending either respond to what’s going on by playing their parts in the collaboration which is the performance or they don’t connect and, as runs the line in his poem ‘At the Theatre’, ‘leave at the interval’ (Glance, p. 20).
Patrick Mason has spoken of Mac Intyre’s ‘capacity to surprise’8 the theatregoer, and the past fifteen years have also held other surprises from him. From 1998 to 1999 he adapted Irish and English literature for Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the Irish-language theatre in Galway,9 and so reversed the age-old pattern of dominance whereby Irish literature and drama had been translated for the English-language stage.10 In 1996, he collaborated with Irish Modern Dance Theatre on his piece You Must Tell the Bees, and his 2003 novel Story of a Girl showed him writing in a genre he hadn’t attempted since 1969. In his eightieth year, his most recent play, Only an Apple, is being staged at the Peacock.
The Plays
The Great Hunger (1983)
Through the mid-1980s, in Ireland and abroad, The Great Hunger caused a considerable furore, both delighted and incensed. After opening at the Peacock in May 1983, The Great Hunger went back into rehearsal, was extensively revised, and then toured internationally. Some stops were welcoming, as in 1986 at the Edinburgh Fringe, when the play took a Fringe First Award; some were hostile, as in 1988 in New York and Philadelphia, where the fraternal organisation the Ancient Order of Hibernians complained that this was ‘not the real Abbey at all’.11 Also in Ireland, public opinion was divided over the impressions which were being made of the Irish, especially at the most talked-about stops of the 1988 tour, Leningrad and Moscow.12
Mac Intyre’s The Great Hunger was so lauded and reviled not because it was theatre and dance and mime in one show – that kind of performance had been going on for well over fifty years and, anyway, had been one of the major influences on Mac Intyre’s work in the first place. Instead, the play became such a controversy because it was one of the first occasions of Irish material being treated and Irish artists performing in physical theatre.13 But The Great Hunger deserves more recognition than of just having been one of the first. In it a refined and demanding work of its type pioneered and, at the same time, challenged the field. The images of farmers bent over potato drills, of the tabernacle housing mystery, of collection boxes wielded with aplomb, of the matriarchal effigy struck, in particular, Irish audiences.14
The play The Great Hunger represents an acute challenge for the critic trying to recount its plot and analyse its structure. Irish writer and theatre practitioner Dermot Healy has remarked that Mac Intyre’s plays are ‘beyond paraphrasing’,15 and although this is less true of his productions since 1994, it accurately describes his Peacock work during the 1980s. A reasonable account of the story of the play would begin with the death or departure of Maguire’s father (a nonentity in the action) and Maguire’s subsequent inheritance of the farm. Where the action picks up is with Maguire’s decision not to marry but to support his mother and sister. When his mother dies, he is beyond marriageable age, and from her he inherits more of the same frustration and desolation that he has experienced all his life. Maguire’s death, foreshadowed in scene 21, is depicted as a time hardly distinguishable from his life. The idea to stage Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 poem ‘The Great Hunger’, which Mac Intyre remembers being talked about since the 1960s,16 was probably inspired by the speaker’s invitation to ‘wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain’ (I) when, following ‘Applause, applause’, the spectacle of Maguire’s life ends in ‘Silence, silence’ (XIV).17 The poem has, besides, about five delineated characters and a strong storyline, so that with little alteration it could provide the material for a dramatic production. But Mac Intyre approached it differently. As a note heading the 1983 script of The Great Hunger explains:
It has not been the aim to put Patrick Kavanagh’s poem on the stage; rather, attending closely to it, to convey theatrically its central themes and supporting motifs. The language of the play is taken exclusively from the poem; the images are either taken from the poem or have evident roots there.18
The major themes of sexual, emotional and spiritual dearth, which the titles of both poem and play actually refer to,19 are conveyed by fewer than a hundred lines from a poem of over seven hundred, so the images have to carry the greater part of the adaptation.
The poem is rich in imagery, and in it are found the men scarecrows (I and XIV; sc. 2), Maguire masturbating over the coals (V; sc. 3), ecstasy at green-leaved branches (III; sc. 5), ploughing (III; sc. 9), pub guests ‘propping up’ each other with their company (XI; sc. 10), and Maguire pawing the ground ‘with the awkward grace of an animal nosing about for a clean place to die’ (XIV; sc. 21). Besides such discerning selection of images from the poem, the play successfully translates poetry for the stage because the images are created with the same economy in theatrical terms as are the metaphors in phrasal terms. The play adapts, then, not just in choosing and arranging the material of the poem, but also in forging a theatrical style for what had known only literary expression.
What the audience of The Great Hunger sees on the stage are the pivots of Maguire’s world, and what they watch are the menial jobs of his day and the shaping events of his life. All this is presented not realistically, but expressively. The audience should not, for example, be disturbed by Maguire’s mother being a wooden statue, but they should recognise in the interrelation between actor and prop a definitive side to Maguire’s psyche. The effect such transferences at the levels of both structure and performance will have on an audience is to reformulate outward things and occurrences as expressions of Maguire’s inner life. For this to succeed not only must the functions of speech and figure be bent towards expression through performance, but also space and, by analogy, time must be restructured so as to convey the material in fitting images.
Space in the play is a fluid dimension, crystallising only at the three meaningful locations in the peasant’s life: the field, the kitchen and the church. Time in both the poem and the play is conceived of in cyclical terms. At the opening of the play, Maguire enters in a dream, awakens to act out the reality of his life and, at the ending, lies down in the cemetery again to slumber. This structuring of space and time provides the optimal backdrop on which to project archetypal images and to portray Maguire’s psyche. A prime example is scene 13.
Maguire, ‘Sitting on a wooden gate’, can see the tussling between Agnes and Malone for sexual control but cannot be seen by them. But this is no simple voyeurism because the ‘Two centres of simultaneous action’, as the Nebentext directs, interrelate and interfere in complex ways to reflect on the personality of Maguire. He is the blatant witness to things he will not see, but there is actually nothing for Maguire to see because Agnes and Malone part as they had met: celibate. Although this alone would be a sore enough reminder that the only kissing going on in Maguire’s world happens when he overcomes every human instinct to kiss his mother’s corpse, Maguire will still watch them through the lattice of the gate, hanging upside down, his legs in a V, jigging alternately each foot – in short, clowning to deflect his tension over sins no one is committing.
Sheep’s Milk on the Boil (1994)
Sheep’s Milk on the Boil retains the dance and visual elements of Theatre of the Image, but while lending more substance to plot and, a corollary of this, transforming the incantatory poetry of a Great Hunger into idiomatic dialogue expressive of individual personalities. In structuralist terminology, speech in Theatre of the Image stands in a complementary relation to the non-verbal information of a production, as in expressionist theatre,20 while in a play like Sheep’s Milk on the Boil verbal and non-verbal information both reflect and complement one another. Precisely these relations account for the individual figures of Mac Intyre’s later plays, in contrast to the types of his Theatre of the Image. Also, in imagistic plays the action phases are juxtaposed because the actions and events rise, peak and fall separately and connect to one another primarily through common themes, verbal repetition or shared movement, gestures and props. Sheep’s Milk on the Boil, in contrast, builds suspense, explains events and describes figures through dramatic exposition, proceeds to the resolution of a conflict – in short, it has a plot.
The play opens with Biddy starting to doubt Matt’s faithfulness when he returns from the mainland, but his odd behaviour, the audience sees, is because of the mirror he has brought back and wants to keep only for himself. Two troupes of fairies intervene ostensibly to resolve the conflict, the Visitor on Biddy’s behalf and the Inspector of Wrack on Matt’s behalf, but mischief seems their first intent. Matt’s and Biddy’s fight escalates, not least because the fairies try to seduce them both, until Matt finally reveals the mirror to Biddy. This only drives Matt and Biddy further apart, so they enter the woods and spend a wild night with the fairies. Matt is repelled, but Biddy attracted by the experience so that, when the fairies on departing try one last time for each, Biddy goes and Matt, calling her back, stays behind.
Sheep’s Milk on the Boil may draw its material from the fairy lore of Ireland, but it builds on the themes of emotional inhibition and sexual mores as they also occur in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907). The points of contact between the two plays begin already with the playwrights’ express sources and purposes. In his 1907 preface to the play, J. M. Synge argues that, since in Ireland
the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.21
Mac Intyre’s own views on language are the following: the midlands idiom – in his words ‘a quite extraordinary mix of late medieval, Elizabethan, Scots, and a throbbing, eloquent, plangent undertone of the recently lost Gaeilge’22 – is the linguistic reservoir from which he draws a great part of his grammar and vocabulary. Young writers in Ireland today must make use of the wealth of linguistic expressiveness unique to the Irish, that mixture of native and foreign languages which has given them their own tongue, Irish English.23 The tremendous artistic advantage to be garnered from this position is the same that Synge finds in the ‘rich and living’ language of the people: the freedom to crack the syntax and inflate the words of English in ways that outside the setting of rural Ireland would seem bombastic and ridiculous.
Mac Intyre seeks such freedom not just in the way the Irish speak, but also in the way they move. Long before any reading or travel introduced him to dance and physical theatre, Mac Intyre was impressed by the performance which was fair day in his home town Bailieborough.24 Coupling Irish speech with Irish physicality, Mac Intyre gives form to that reality which Synge identifies as ‘the root of all poetry’, and so ‘the imagination of the people’ or, as one might write today, the Irish collective unconscious provides the ultimate source for and receives creative expression from speech and movement on the stages of The Playboy of the Western World and Sheep’s Milk on the Boil.
These two plays are, in themselves, similar on many heads. In neither are libido and sex covered over in any way, so that Pegeen’s fears alone at night have the faces of ‘the harvest boys’, ‘the ten tinkers’, and ‘the thousand militia’; Christy’s hiding places in the bogs are familiar as ‘where you’d see young, limber girls, and fine, prancing women making laughter with the men’; and Matt’s and Biddy’s inhibitions are assailed by the eroticism, the perversity and the hurt of sexual relations with the fairies in the wood at night:
A nest of spiceries
Vagrant kisses, wayward juices
shadows put to many uses . . .
Fits and seizures melt your garments
stir your limbs and ripe endowments
Farewell reins, farewell halters
strut your stuff for further orders
Prosper Jack, prosper Jill
foot the bill tomorrow morning . . .
Both plays have settings on the western coast and figures whose communities have sparse contacts to the outside world. Finally, and most importantly, the plays have structurally identical endings at which one figure regrets not having pursued her or his partner but can’t find the courage to.
The enigmatic title Sheep’s Milk on the Boil Mac Intyre has explained as being, in Irish folklore, the response to a question: ‘What frightens men?’ Answer: ‘Sheep’s milk on the boil.’ For Mac Intyre the milk stands for ‘the wave of the female fecundity, fertility’, so its boiling is the sign that the peak is being reached.25 Olwen Fouéré, who played the Inspector, has described how her costumes expressed the ‘heightened female sexuality’ which her figure embodies, and she has compared playing the Inspector to living ‘all the fantasies you’ve ever had about playing all the female icons over the years that you’ve seen in the movies’.26 Fouéré’s insight into the personality of the Inspector draws attention to the archetype of femininity at the base of this figure and behind her relationship to Matt.
Pursuing the function, typical of Mac Intyre, by which a figure’s unconscious is projected on to denizens of the other world, I correlate the Inspector with the anima Matt represses and the Visitor with the animus Biddy is beginning to unleash. These correlations can be extended to The Playboy of the Western World so that Matt and Biddy stand in direct relation, respectively, to Pegeen and Christy. Biddy is able to leave behind jealousy and Christy vanity because they consciously reflect on themselves, that is, on where they are, who they are with, and how all this is determining who, at the moment, they are. Christy finds his way out of that stifling Mayo village by subduing his father – murder, in the end, isn’t necessary – and, thus, mounting the possibility of his actually becoming the playboy everyone has taken him for. Biddy’s success in self-awareness is best measured against Matt’s failure. While he, in his ‘dotesomes’, will regret having stayed back and chosen the settled life over life on the road, she will thrive because (to quote the speaker of Mac Intyre’s ‘Pot Black’ pleading with a woman to accompany him on the same track) she has overcome ‘the fear of danger to encounter the danger of fear’ (Yes, p. 73).
Good Evening, Mr Collins (1995)
Mac Intyre’s Good Evening, Mr Collins met with acclaim and success, not least because again, as in The Great Hunger, material or history very familiar to Irish audiences was re-expressed in unlooked-for form.27Good Evening, Mr Collins first played on the Peacock stage from 5 October 1995 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. It was then re-rehearsed and revised to open in 1996 again at the Peacock. A national tour followed. So Sheep’s Milk on the Boil and Good Evening, Mr Collins played back to back at the same venue, and this concentration of Mac Intyre’s attention and efforts is evident in two varied treatments of the same problem: what does the man do who is frightened by the feminine inside?
Marina Carr, in her programme note to the 1996 production, applauds the decision to have one actress play the parts of all three women because this doubling performs the crux of Collins’s problem not with women, but with woman. These women figures in one actress represent, Carr writes, ‘the vital connection between Collins and his fate’.28 It would appear a bad decision, on the other hand, to have Collins always acting in full consciousness of his assassination as well as to skip this potentially dramatic event for the seemingly anticlimactic lying-in-state in City Hall. But this structuring of figure and plot are really just the rigorous consequence of the play’s take on Collins’s end: while his fate lies all the while in his hands, Collins remains incapable of seizing it because he cannot face the feminine, whether as projected on to others or inside himself.
Good Evening, Mr Collins is the play of Mac Intyre’s recent work that most resembles, from a structural standpoint, the Peacock collaborations with Hickey and Mason. The plot, unlike that of Sheep’s Milk on the Boil, is subservient to the images expressing Collins’s personality, nor does a dramatic figure, as inWhat Happened Bridgie Cleary, dominate the action.
The historical background to Good Evening, Mr Collins is the last five years of Michael Collins’s life when, rising to various positions of leadership during the fight against England and in the administration of the new state, he made for himself bitter foes and devoted supporters. The action picks up with the figure’s counter-intelligence campaign before the War of Independence, and while some scenes can be chronologically pinpointed, such as 1.8 at Dublin’s Gresham Hotel during Christmas 1920 and 2.8 at Dublin City Hall during the final days of August 1922, other scenes lie outside all historical or biographical reckoning to function instead as sites where Collins’s inner troubles are played out on the set.
Such non-realistic scenes are further marked through the dialogue. The referential and appellative functions of language, for example, are overridden by an expressive, poetic idiom that recalls the verse of Maguire or other figures of Mac Intyre’s imagistic theatre. Episodic in structure, the action passes from historical fact to a mimed tennis match (1.3), a nightmarish dance (1.6), and imaginary meetings between Collins and Dev at which they play the parts, respectively, of pupil and teacher (1.4), of husband and voyeur (2.3), and of Commander-in-Chief and priest (2.6). By the time Collins visits his own lying-in-state (2.8), the audience has grown accustomed to relating other people and outward events to inner states of emotion. In this way, ambushes, raids and purges become a significative wartime backdrop to war of another order: Collins’s war on the female sex. Collins’s relationships to women are his obsession and become, as he increasingly and painfully realises (in 1.7 and 2.5), his downfall. He is incapable either of coming to grips with the women in his life or – which in the logic of this play amounts to the same thing – of standing midwife to the labour of a nation.
The Gallant John-Joe (2001)
Another collaborative project from Mac Intyre and Hickey, The Gallant John-Joe was produced by Skehana Theatre Company and performed for the first time on 22 January 2001 in the hotel and restaurant McGrory’s of Culdaff, County Donegal. It then went on tour in Ireland and abroad. The play belongs to a theatrical form which is best described either as the one-person show or as the staged narrative and which, through work during the late 1980s and the 1990s by Sebastian Barry, Dermot Bolger, Marie Jones, Conor McPherson, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh, among others, has quickly become an Irish favourite.
The story behind the figure of John-Joe is this. Father of three girls and widower, John-Joe Concannon will not be deterred from identifying the father of his youngest’s, Jacinta’s, unborn child, and he suspects everyone from hypnotist Dallan Devine to the owner of a fish-and-chips shop where Jacinta once worked. His behaviour, which from the impression he makes seems typical of him, causes Jacinta to admit herself into a mental hospital where it’s then revealed that the pregnancy has been her fantasy. Acting on the belief that his original prime suspect is to blame now for Jacinta’s mental illness, John-Joe murders the shop owner, a Chinese immigrant. Because of a violent outburst at the hospital, John-Joe is barred from seeing his daughter, and he ends his story convinced that he has played the ‘escape-goat’ to the double standards of a small town’s prudery.
One of the biggest challenges to understanding staged narratives is determining time and place of the delivery as well as identifying the addressee(s). It is safe to conclude from the ‘Dirty brown lino’, which defines the playing area, as well as from the Chinese lantern, which must be his trophy of the murder, that John-Joe’s performance takes place in the kitchen where he also spends, anyway, most days. Another challenge of this theatrical form is sifting through the information garnered from the speaker to pick out what is worth believing. John-Joe’s account of what actually happened (i.e. false pregnancy, murder, institutionalisation) must be taken for fact, but his role in all this is near opposite to how he perceives it. For instance, his Joycean Malapropism ‘escape-goat’ describes him in a way he does not intend (a satyr fleeing the site of a rape) but refers in its correct form, scapegoat, to his murder victim, the foreigner who bears away the wrongs of the native community.
The play’s language, for all its vivid idiomatic turns and expressiveness of character, cannot carry the weight of reference and allusion, for example, to Jesus Christ as can a stark Mac Intyre image like Maguire on the gate, upside down, legs a V (Great Hunger, sc. 13). Much is revealed about Mac Intyre’s kind of theatre when it is in the description of a gesture that one of the most striking moments of the performance is found: ‘He views the black invisible load, hovering in the vicinity . . . lets it be’. In this image resides every attempt of the speech to portray John-Joe as the defiant victim who plods on to unforeseeable triumph (as references to Christ and Sisyphus demonstrate). It is a testament to Mac Intyre’s drive to innovate theatre that the theatrically adventurous form of the staged narrative looks, next to his best plays, conventional.
What Happened Bridgie Cleary (2005)
After nearly ten years away, Tom Mac Intyre returned to the Peacock stage with What Happened Bridgie Cleary. This production has also continued his and Hickey’s most recent period of collaboration stretching from Hickey’s direction of Sheep’s Milk on the Boil to his reading of Don Murphy at the 2006 Dublin Theatre Festival.29
The story of Bridget Cleary is just the right kind of material for Mac Intyre because, as the speaker of his poem ‘Bridgie Cleary’ explains the attraction of such stories, it has
the stir o’ company
ye can’t see, it spakes of other
dominions not that far
distant (ABC, p. 21)
This is the same material from which Sheep’s Milk on the Boil is written. In Mac Intyre, dream-worlds, fairies and the afterlife often refer, more prosaically, to the repression and abreaction of the libido or, simply, the interplay between the conscious and unconscious components of our personalities. So What Happened Bridgie Cleary, which takes place in an afterworld of the fairies’ making, has that probing both of the physical in the spiritual and of the spiritual in the physical which has produced the figures, with their conflicts and their ends, of all Mac Intyre’s major poems, prose and plays.
What Happened Bridgie Cleary and Sheep’s Milk on the Boil also share a heavy Irish English idiom in which the remnants of Gaeilge persist. Already in the title What Happened Bridgie Cleary does the linguistic idiom become apparent, and also significant. What at first might seem a question (‘What happened, Bridgie Cleary?’) turns out to be, on account of the dialectical use of happen without preposition, a statement (‘What happened to Bridgie Cleary’). And precisely this is the matter the play takes on to express.
The story of Bridgie Cleary (based on fact, as Mac Intyre acknowledges in the published text) might be said to begin with the fairies who may have entered Bridgie’s life through the strange occurrences in her childhood or through her bond with her mother or through the fairy fort which supposedly had been located on her and Mikey’s house plot on the side of Slievenamon, County Tipperary. In any case, Bridgie and Mikey married (according to historical record, in August 1887), but she had affairs with the landed gentleman William Simpson and with a man whom she fell in love with and whom she planned to leave Ireland with, namely Phildy Reddan. Likely out of jealous rage, but ostensibly out of fear Bridgie was actually a changeling, Mikey and the neighbours burned her (according to historical record, in March 1895), and Mikey served a prison sentence before emigrating to Canada. This entire story precedes the action because the play is set in the afterworld where Bridgie, Mikey, and William find themselves together to atone ostensibly for the sins each has committed against the other, but really for the sins each has committed against her- or himself.
What actually happened to Bridgie Cleary was not the false accusation or the abhorrent burning, but her own failure to act on her love to Phildy. Bridgie wants it known that her story is a ‘Love Story’ and that, for this very reason, she sinned by failing to unfold that story to its end. The petition she makes at the mock re-enactment of her and Mikey’s wedding could stand in as a Mac Intyre eulogy for all those who lose their nerve and buckle under the weight of the fate allotted them:
I want prayers in special for them that nearly breaks outa the shell, the trembly, the timid, that’s often forgot about. Bridgie Cleary knows them all right – she knows them. (To audience) An’ haven’t youse, haven’t youse all met them? The freckened wans that gets almos’ all-the-way outa the shell an’ then, for some rayzon – does the light hurt their eyes? courage fail them? some deloother occur? – for some rayzon they scrunch up, frog in a frost, sink inta quiet.
Summary
Good writing, that is, writing from the unconscious, is in Mac Intyre’s words the end of a ‘spirit journey’.30 In the creative phase, the writer’s psychological well-being is really in danger because he is forcing the portals of symbolic thought and feeling, and these only the initiate may pass. The writing emerging from this intensely introspective and emotionally taxing work is personal while being also universal. It is as if Mac Intyre digs so deep that he is mining the collective veins of the human or, more specifically, Irish unconscious. So it is that with his writing, psychoanalytic and archetypal approaches bring great interpretative returns.
Mac Intyre aligns himself with the artistic views and writing of William Butler Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, who represent, in his opinion, a minority tradition in Irish literature.31 He is indignant at the fact that, in his estimate, some nine-tenths of Irish theatre is ‘hopelessly secular’.32 ‘Don’t ask me to go to the theatre or read the novel or read the poem,’ he demands,
that hasn’t that classic note of Irish literature from the year dot: the creak of the door between the two worlds, the whisper that . . . the haunting whisper, the echoing whisper that exists in the corridor between the two worlds. That is the Irish voice at its best. That’s what I seek to articulate, whether it’s in theatre, in fiction or in poetry. In theatre, to play with that in terms of the physical, to try and express the spirit magic through the magic of the body, that’s one of the beautiful challenges.33
As says the speaker of his poem‘Lancelot du Lac’, Mac Intyre writes ‘about love – what else? – and death’ (Stories, p. 38). Likewise, Mac Intyre’s favourite situation, clearly traceable from The Great Hunger to What Happened Bridgie Cleary, is individual free will overcoming or, more often, failing to overcome various forms of subjugation, from societal to interpersonal, from violent to numinous.
Primary Sources
Works by Tom Mac Intyre
Good Evening, Mr Collins; The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays, introd. Frank McGuinness (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 173–230.
The Great Hunger and The Gallant John-Joe (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002).
Sheep’s Milk on the Boil. New Plays from the Abbey Theatre 1993–1995, ed. Christopher Fitz-Simon and Sanford Sternlicht (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1995), pp. 71–110.
What Happened Bridgie Cleary (Dublin: New Island, 2005).
Secondary Sources
Arts Show, The, RTÉ Radio, Radio 1, Dublin, August 2008 <http://www.rte.ie/arts/2008/0811/theartsshow.html>.
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Notes
1. Nice Moves, presented by Deirdre Mulrooney, RTÉ Radio.
2. Playwrights in Profile – Series 1, presented by Sean Rocks, RTÉ Radio.
3. Bernadette Sweeney, ‘Tom Mac Intyre’, p. 253.
4. Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation, p. 233.
5. Ireland, the Arts Council, Views of Theatre in Ireland 1995: Report of the Arts Council Theatre Review, p. 70.
6. Deirdre Mulrooney, ‘Tom Mac Intyre’s Text-ure’, p. 188.
7. Katherine Holmquist, ‘In the Beginning Was . . . the Image’, p. 151.
8. Playwrights in Profile, op. cit.
9. Sweeney, ‘Tom Mac Intyre’s Text-we’, p. 251.
10. Mulrooney, ‘Tom Mac Intyres, p. 191.
11. Quoted in Margaret Kelleher, The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, p. 632.
12. Sweeney, ‘Tom Mac Intyre’, pp. 254–5; Seamus Hosey, ‘The Abbey in Russia’, p. 15.
13. Murray, op. cit., p. 232; Bernadette Sweeney, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre, p. 50.
14. Cf. Hans von Göler, Streets Apart from Abbey Street: The Search for an Alternative National Theatre in Ireland Since 1980, p. 36.
15. Quoted in Mulrooney, ‘Tom Mac Intyre’s Text-we’, p. 191.
16. Playwrights in Profile, op. cit.
17. Cf. Sweeney, Performing, p. 58.
18. Unpublished script for The Great Hunger, n. p.
19. Sweeney, Performing, p. 70.
20. Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, pp. 44–9.
21. J. M. Synge, ‘Preface’, p. 451.
22. Playwrights in Profile, op. cit.
23. Rattlebag, RTÉ Radio.
24. Playwrights in Profile, op. cit.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Sweeney, ‘Tom Mac Intyre’, p. 257.
28. Marina Carr, ‘The Bandit Pen’.
29. Rattlebag, op. cit.
30. Ibid.; Playwrights in Profile. op. cit.
31. Nice Moves, op. cit.
32. Playwrights in Profile, op. cit.
33. Nice Moves, op. cit.