Lisa Fitzpatrick - Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland

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A Carysfort Press ebook

First published as a paperback in Ireland in 2010 by

Carysfort Press Ltd

58 Woodfield, Scholarstown Road, Dublin 16, Ireland

ISBN 978-1-904-505-44-0

2008 Copyright remains with the author

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This book is published with the financial assistance of The Arts Council

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Table of Contents

This book emerged from a symposium on the performance of violence on the contemporary Irish stage that was convened by Drama at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Ulster in Derry, in November 2006, and generously supported by the Universitys Humanities Research Institute. The symposium raised and discussed issues that ranged from the significance of silence in the performance of violence to the representation of violence in music and registers of speech, to technical problems of performing the work of in-yer-face playwrights like Martin McDonagh, and I would like to thank all the speakers for their thought-provoking contributions to this project. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Carole-Anne Upton, Tom Maguire, and Paul Devlin, all of whom have contributed in various ways.

As editor I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the contributors for their valuable interventions into this important topic. My thanks to the publishers, particularly to Eamonn Jordan for his support throughout the process: Alan Bennis: Chris McCallion: and the colleagues and students at the School of Creative Arts whose input and critiques were invaluable.

The performance of violence on stage has concerned theatre practitioners and theorists since Aristotle, with the concept of decorum, borrowed from his Poetics and developed by Horace and by Renaissance scholars like Castelvetro, Scaliger and Robortello, still often referenced in contemporary scholarship. Yet stage decorum is more often honoured in the breach than in the observance, particularly in the Anglophone theatre tradition to which Irish theatre largely belongs. Scenes of violence are commonplace from the enactments of the scourging and crucifixion in the medieval Mystery Cycles to the In-Yer-Face movement, and more or less graphic representations of murder, rape and torture can be found, in both comedies and tragedies, throughout theatre history. This tradition gives contemporary playwrights like Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Gary Mitchell, and Martin Lynch, amongst others whose work is discussed here, a long and rich theatrical genealogy. Yet the problems of performing and witnessing violence are rarely explored. How are acts of violence represented mimetically and diegetically on the Irish stage, and in what ways and why are those representations limited? What are the ethical issues involved in representing violence? How is it received?

Performance as defined here, though, is not limited to the theatrical, but is based instead on Richard Schechners Seven Functions of Performance. Schechner lists, to entertain: to make something that is beautiful: to mark or change identity: to make or foster community: to heal: to teach, persuade, or convince: to deal with the sacred and/or the demonic (46). He visualizes performance as both a fan and a web, composed of and incorporating a variety of human activity including, crucially, the eruption and resolution of crisis, ritualization, and rites, cere-monies (2005, xvi). This book is divided into two main sections, the first of which deals primarily with theatrical performance, the second with place and space. This structure is not intended to be restrictive, however: the essays speak to each other across both parts of the collection. In different ways, they explore a range of aspects of performance in relation to violence, asking, what is the role of space and place? And where do public street performances such as processions, parades, and commemorative rituals fit into the Irish Republic as it nears the centenary of 1916, and the emerging post-Ceasefire society in Northern Ireland?

Danine Farquharsons essay Pity vs Fear , which opens this col-lection, identifies three main discourses of violence: Arendt, who argues that violence is arbitrary, and vastly under-examined: Deleuze, arguing that it is unfathomable and does not speak, and Bowman, who defines it as that which disturbs the sacred by breaking into an integral space. This ripping of the sacred into the open is what connects Arendts conception of violence as arbitrary and Deleuzes as unfathomable: we cannot predict the outcome: the results of violence are tangible but the violence itself is not. For Farquharson, The Oresteia is a performative theorizing of violence, and that trilogy, together with Carrs intertextual Ariel , forms the primary material for her discussion.

Also, returning to Greek tragedy, but this time to Heaneys translations, Eugene OBrien explores the intimate relationship between violence and justice, quoting Derridas argument that the founding moment of law is a performative and interpretative violence:

how to distinguish between the force of law [loi] of a legitimate power and the allegedly originary violence that must have established this authority and that could not itself have authorized itself by an anterior legitimacy so that, in this initial moment, it is neither legal nor illegal, just nor unjust (234).

Analyzing Heaneys The Burial at Thebes (based on Antigone ) and The Cure at Troy (based on Philoctetes ), OBriens essay examines the poet-playwrights aesthetic, ethical, and political engagement with the violence in Northern Ireland.

It is not surprising that a number of essays address recent and historical political and cultural developments in Northern Ireland, post-Ceasefire. Paul Devlins essay Restaging Violence provocatively suggests a revisioning of Martin Lynchs The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty to address a contemporary iconography of terrorism and human rights abuses, as the work nears its thirtieth anniversary. Using Foucaults and Sojas concepts of heterotopia and Thirdspace, he examines the dramaturgical implications of dislocating Fogarty from its original socio-political and spatial context to restage it as an essentially new theatrical event. Devlin argues that such productions or revivals may create sites to stage heterotopic crises, to situate the spectatorship in new, panoptic relationships to contemporary crises. Lisa Fitzpatricks essay considers three recent productions as examples of the utopian performative, in which the audience affectively experience moments of intersubjective connectedness, that allow glimpses of other possibilities. The productions under discussion are all rooted in sites or landscapes of cultural and historical significance, their haunted status contributing to the experience of shared history and memory among the spectators. The essay considers ways in which theatre in Northern Ireland has been engaging with experiences of trauma, violence and grief as the post-Ceasefire society continues to take shape.

Alongside Devlins and Fitzpatricks address to spectatorship, essays by Tom Maguire, Paul Moore, and Cormac Newark all address another element of the reception process: the aural. Moores paper proposes that the auditory is at least as important as the visual in his exploration of the work of 1950s comedian James Young, whose radio performances engaged with the sonic ecology of Belfast and Northern Ireland to conjure a range of characters, both male and female. Youngs denunciation of sectarianism is problematized by Moore in his analysis, as it both issues a demand to stap fightin while, in performance, representing Catholics as Other to normative Northern Irish Protestant identity. Cormac Newark explores the representation of violence in music. Ian Wilsons opera Hamelin , staged by Opera Theatre Company in Dublin in 2003, tells the story of the Pied Piper , but with dark intimations that the violent trauma of the story is more domestic and intimate than the tale of the Piper suggests. Newark analyzes the musical score and libretto to identify the methods by which the repressed violence of Hamelins recent history is represented to the audience. Tom Maguires essay on speaking violence in Conor McPhersons monodramas also addresses the issue of what is heard. Both Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief contain scenes of extraordinary violence, but these are spoken by the solo performer rather than enacted under the spectators gaze. Maguire explores the role of silence in the ethical representation of diegetic violence, noting that silence can mark the unsayable, the inexpressible: and its importance in allowing the audience time to reflect. These moments of reflection allow the audience to engage imaginatively with the horrors that they do not directly witness.