Who wrote The Aeneid?
An Irishman wrote it.
That's your only clue.
(Frank McGuinness, Carthaginians)

The power of myth, so J. Micheal Walton states, is that "it becomes personal by virtue of its universality, inviting decodings tied to each new occasion or circumstance. Myth can reveal you to yourself." Thus, "as Irish writers have turned to ancient Greek material as translators, adapters, commentators, or what you will, so in the process, through myth, they have tended to unmask themselves"1. This paper will look at three Irish playwrights who share this interest in re-mythologising contemporary issues and in their plays re-appropriate the various themes that classical mythology investigates. Additionally, they have each been involved with the Field Day Theatre Company, founded by writer Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea with the intention of establishing a new dramatic tradition that would culturally unite Ireland in ways that politics did not succeed in doing.

In Brian Friel's Translations, the play that launched the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, classical myth plays an important role. The character of Hugh repeatedly refers to Rome, Greece, and Carthage as analogues for Ireland's historical experiences and recalls, for instance, how after just having married his "goddess Caitlin Dubh Nic Reactainn" (referring to Cathleen ni Houlihan, the allegorical female figure of Ireland) he set out for the 1798 rebellion carrying the Aeneid in his pocket. But "homesick for Athens, just like Ulysses" he returned and so, instead of heroically sacrificing himself for mother Ireland as conventional nationalism would require, he put his domestic life first. We are meant to consider, of course, whether this defiance of the myth that, as Horace put it, "it is sweet and honourable to die for one's country," is not ultimately the more heroic act. Interestingly, it is Friel's Carthaginians, the Irish, who understand Latin whereas his Romans, the English officers, know as little Latin and Greek as they do Gaelic. At the end of the play the hedge-schoolmaster Hugh recites Vergil:

What Juno prophesied were the Punic Wars in which the Romans, descendants from the Trojan Aeneas, would destroy Carthage to re-found it as their colony and make it one of the main cities of their expanded Roman empire. Towards the end of his speech Hugh stumbles over his words, not because his memory fails him but because he realises that another people sprung from Trojan blood, the English descendants of Aeneas's grandson Brutus, are now on the verge of destroying his Gaelic culture.

Friel is not the first to understand the historical colonial relation between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for the struggles between Britain and Irish nationalists. The analogy is popular in Irish literature, with Seamus Heaney as probably the best known contemporary writer to make use of it in his volume of poetry North (1975). In his Carthaginians playwright Frank McGuinness also draws on this comparison. McGuinness's involvement with Field Day has been somewhat complicated, for both his Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme and his Carthaginians were rejected by Field Day for reasons that remain unclear. Though sympathetic to Field Day's concerns, McGuinness has expressed his worry that it "associates itself very strongly with the colour green. Don't you think art is more colours than green?"2 Perhaps it is partly because he lacked the conviction that, as Seamus Deane phrased it, Field Day could reflect a rainbow, that he never got more closely involved in the company's activities.3 And this is regrettable, for not only is he an accomplished dramatist, but with his extraordinary ability to write about the experience of "the other," something which characterises many of his plays, McGuinness's views and contributions could have had a refreshing effect on Field Day's activities.4 Moreover, with its unusual non-naturalist style and its effective use of classical metaphors, his Carthaginians would have been a welcome addition to Field Day's list of productions. Though never actually produced by the Field Day Theatre Company, this play is therefore relevant to this discussion.

Carthaginians was written to memorialise the massacre of Bloody Sunday and towards the end various characters deliver names and addresses of the victims; where the rest of the play's style is non-naturalistic and often ironic, this moment gives it a sharply realistic resonance. McGuinness fills his text with wide-ranging references from classical mythology to contemporary popular culture, like the "yabba-dabba-dooh time" of the Flintstones.5 Appropriate to its main Carthaginian analogy, the play begins with music from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which blames Aeneas for his betrayal of Dido. In Greek legend, Dido fled to Africa after her husband was killed by her brother Pygmalion, and there founded Carthage. In McGuinness's Carthaginians, Derry is understood to be Northern Ireland's Carthage, which is evidenced in the following dialogue:

PAUL: A harbour. An empire. Part of a great empire.
GRETA: British Empire?
PAUL: That's dead. Roman Empire.
GRETA: Catholic?
PAUL: Roman. This city is not Rome, but it has been destroyed by Rome. What city did Rome destroy?
GRETA: Carthage.
PAUL: Correct. Two points. Carthage.
GRETA: How are we in Carthage?
PAUL: Tell them you saw me sitting in the ruins, in the graveyard. I live in Carthage among the Carthaginians, saying Carthage must be destroyed, or else-or else-
GRETA: What?
PAUL: I will be destroyed. (Silence.) I would like to go to Carthage.
GRETA: I would like to go to Rome.
PAUL: I would like to see the pyramids. I'm building a pyramid. But I'm no slave. I am Carthaginian. This earth is mine, not Britain's, nor Rome's. (17)

Rome not only symbolises imperial Britain but also papal authority that still holds Catholic Ireland in its grip. As Elizabeth Cullingford says: "to be Carthaginian is to reject not only the Union but also the prospect of 'Rome rule' offered by the Catholic South, a prospect that northern Protestants dread."6 Accordingly, Paul blames St Malachy, the dominant figure of church reform in 12th-century Ireland who brought a more Romanised Catholicism, for the present state of Derry. "He saw the waters rise over Derry," Paul says, "He saw it, but will he stop it? No [...] if I find St Malachy hiding in this city, I'll kill him, I'll kill him, I'll knock his teeth down his throat" (15). Hark similarly focuses on the bad state of Derry and its problematic past. Parodying Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech he cynically says: "one people, one nation, one country. Black and white, white and black, sisters and brothers, brothers and sisters. Catholics shall stand with Catholics, Protestants with Protestants." When he is asked if it "should [...] not be 'Catholics will stand with Protestants'?" he replies that "I speak of dreams, sister, not of insanity" (26).

Where Vergil's focus had been on Aeneas,7 McGuinness, like Purcell, concentrates on Dido and moves back to the tradition before Vergil that described Dido primarily as the celebrated founder of Carthage rather than a hysterical, abandoned, and victimised woman. McGuinness transforms Dido into a different kind of "queen," an energetic and creative gay man who, as Cullingford states, "queers the gendered binary that constructs colonisers as male and colonised as female."8 In this respect, McGuinness's approach is much more original than that of Seamus Heaney who in virtually all of his poems in North continues the traditional gendering of colonising Britain as the violent male and colonised Ireland as the violated female. McGuinness undermines this conventional paradigm that links heroic nationalism to sacrificial martyrdom and male violence and, accordingly, in Dido's transvestite play The Burning Balaclava (a blunt parody of Sean O'Casey and a mockery of both Protestant and Catholic ideals) it is not a male but a Derry mother who makes a living out of violence: "I depend on the dying," she explains, "I knit all the balaclavas. The more that dies, the more I'm given. Violence is terrible, but it pays well" (42).9 In contrast to this masculinised mother from Derry, the feminine Dido mocks his war effort for its sexual nature: he will "chat up Brits" and "corrupt every member of Her Majesty's forces serving in Northern Ireland," and for this he will be "venerated as a national hero. They'll build a statue to me. I'm going to insist it's in the nude with a blue plaque in front of my balls. (Holds an imaginary plaque before himself.) This has been erected to the war effort of Dido Martin, patriot and poof" (11). Dido, then, can be read as a parodic Mother Ireland. As Susan Cannon Harris states, "Catleen ni Houlihan is male and explicitly refuses the kind of blood-sacrifice that she is ordinarily supposed to demand."10

Unfortunately, Dido has a crush on the homophobic Hark, who at one point violently grabs him by the balls and shouts "Is the united Ireland between your legs? What happens when cocks unite? Disease, boy, disease. The united Ireland's your disease." Dido touches on the core of Ireland's actual problems with his reply that "some people here fuck with a bullet and the rest with a Bible, but I belong to neither" (21). Indeed, it is his femininity and anti-heroism that ultimately make him a survivor, and his creative nature, contrasting starkly with Paul's and Hark's pessimistic and vengeful characters, implies a view of life that is ultimately constructive rather than destructive. Importantly too, Dido is the only character in the play whose definition of himself is not dictated by "the dream/nightmare of Derry's identity."11 As Cannon Harris suggests, with his play-within-a-play The Burning Balaclava, Dido tries to show his fellow Derrymen that they can similarly redefine themselves by introducing them to "a reality in which gender, sectarian, class, and national identities are obviously, comically, and equally performative."12 But her conclusion that Dido ultimately fails to bring this point across is not supported by the strong suggestion that he does transform the lives of his fellow Derrymen. As their guide towards a better way of dealing with the effects of Bloody Sunday, he changes their perception from one primarily defined by violence and bitterness to one characterised by empathy and forgiveness. In the end the guns, balaclavas, and religious images are placed on a white sheet, because it is time to "wash the dead," "forgive the dead," "forgive the dying," "forgive yourself" (68-9). Where the play had started with a wounded bird, now birds are singing and, further symbolising the changed emphasis from death to life and from revenge to forgiveness, a strong light illuminates the characters on stage. In their shared catharsis, they have found some relief from their mourning and despair over the events of Bloody Sunday.

Before leaving Derry, Dido performs a protective ritual by throwing flowers on the sleeping characters. He tells them to continue to "play" (70); it is through play, after all, that they have found the road to healing and renewal. It is time to "love [Derry] and leave it," Dido says, "while I walk the earth, I walk through you, the streets of Derry. If I meet one who knows you and they ask, 'How's Dido?' Surviving. How's Derry? Surviving. Surviving. Carthage has not been destroyed" (70). Though physically moving away from Derry, on a symbolic level it is not the city that Dido leaves behind, but the old view of Derry that sees it as nothing more than a shattered, hopeless place. And so, like the Dido of classical legend, McGuinness's character is a founder of a new city, perhaps even a new civilisation: one that is able to forgive and that dares to hope again.

* * *

Next to this Carthage analogy another framework of myth that Field Day contributors have turned to is contained in Sophoclean tragedy. Tom Paulin's and Seamus Heaney's adaptations of respectively Antigone and Philoctetes appear alongside other translated works from Chekhov and Molière, which demonstrates Field Day's recognition that "it is necessary to look beyond Ireland in order to examine the condition of Ireland."13 Yet Paulin and Heaney are by no means the first to employ Greek tragedy as a colonial metaphor for the current state of Ireland. Writers like J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey and W. B. Yeats are but a few of many to do so in the previous generation of playwrights, and the number of contemporary Irish adaptations of Greek tragedies is no less striking.14 Marianne McDonald explains that "it is appropriate that the Irish who were taught to associate the classics with the British occupiers have [...] taken over the classics to express their own national concerns," so transforming these texts into "poetic weapons and tools for discourse: microphones for the new dialogues."15 Yet to see such adaptations only as an act of defiance toward imperial Britain is simplistic because, as playwright Colin Teevan explains, they also reflect the development of the debate "from plays which follow the them and us, victim and oppressor paradigm, to plays that examine the dichotomies in various constructions of Irish identities."16 As we have seen, in its undermining of conventional gender oppositions McGuinness's Carthaginians was one such play.

Recent Irish writing revisits Antigone and Medea, whose female protagonists defy conventionally male authority. Teevan explains this as a reaction against the climate in 1980s Ireland, "where women had been rendered powerless even over their own bodies by a patriarchal society [...] the writers, admittedly male, turned to a body of myth that dealt with women forced beyond the laws, pushed out of society and compelled to take desperate measures."17 With the female struggle against a patriarchal authority as one of its main themes, Tom Paulin's The Riot Act, written after Antigone, is a good example of this use. In Greek legend, Antigone is the daughter born of the incestuous union of Oedipus and his mother. After Oedipus's death, Antigone and her sister Ismene try to reconcile their brothers Eteocles and Polyneices who are fighting over the crown of Thebes. Yet both brothers die in battle and their uncle Creon becomes king. When Creon finds out that Antigone is planning a secret burial of Polyneices, whom he has forbidden a funeral, he locks her up in a cave and plans to have her executed. According to Euripides, Antigone escapes and has a happy life with her beloved, Creon's son Haemon. According to Sophocles and Paulin, however, she hangs herself, after which Haemon commits suicide as well.

In his comprehensive discussion of the various adaptations of Antigone, George Steiner describes the play's primary theme as "the confrontation of justice and of law, of the aura of the dead and the claims of the living."18 With such a general issue at its core, it is indeed unsurprising that the story of Antigone has been adapted to fit so many different contexts. Anthony Roche discusses its specific applicability to the Northern Irish situation where any political leader is forced to deal with "the difficult balance between the claims of the status quo and the urge to revolution" and "between the need to build stable political structures and maintain tribal loyalties," and therefore inevitably finds himself in a position close to Creon's.19 Not only the struggle between private and public morality, but also issues like the clash between Creon's political and Antigone's religious priorities and the violation of the dead find painful parallels in Northern Ireland's contemporary situation. Accordingly, the 1980s witnessed three appropriations of Antigone, by Brendan Kennely, Aidan Matthews, and Tom Paulin.

Paulin is arguably Ireland's best known polemicist, with frequent appearances in the newspapers and on television. Though born in England, he was raised in the North of Ireland as a Protestant Unionist and, as he explains in his Ireland and the English Crisis (dedicated to Brian Friel and Stephen Rea), he dreams of a non-sectarian republican state that would bring together both Catholic republicans and Protestant dissenters whose tradition "went underground after the Act of Union and has still not been given the attention it deserves."20 Paulin's version of Antigone finds its origin in an argument with Conor Cruise O'Brien over the interpretation of the play. O'Brien was one of the first to apply the story of Antigone to the Northern Irish situation, yet rather than wholeheartedly sympathising with Antigone's predicament, he criticises her action and justifies Creon's behaviour by saying that, though Creon's decision to forbid the burial of Polynices was rash, "it was also rash to disobey his decision [...]. Creon's authority, after all, was legitimate, even if he had abused it, and the life of the city would become intolerable if citizens should disobey any law that irked their conscience."21 In his view the violence that comes out of Antigone's "free decision" is a "stiff price for that handful of dust on Polyneices"; with reference to the Northern Irish situation he adds that "after four years of Antigone and her under-studies and all those funerals [...] you begin to feel that Ismene's common sense and feeling for the living may make the more needful, if less spectacular element in 'human dignity.'"22 O'Brien, then, favours obedience to authority, something which to Paulin suggests unacceptable passivity and submission to Northern Ireland's status quo. In "The Making of a Loyalist" (1980), he criticises O'Brien for holding Antigone responsible for the victims of the conflict and suggests that in such an argument "the Unionist state is virtually absolved of all responsibility and Creon's hands appear to be clean." He refuses O'Brien's reading of Antigone's private morality as unequal to Creon's public one and defends his own interpretation that "neither the right of family, nor that of the state is denied; what is denied is the absoluteness of the claim of each."23

To engage more thoroughly in the argument with O'Brien Paulin wrote his own interpretation of Antigone, entitled The Riot Act.24 He thus acted according to his belief that "culture is an argument [...] ideas should be flying about and banging into each other," because "if you occupy a static position then things sort of ossify."25 Paulin viewed Antigone as a play that belonged in Ireland and his own adaptation is both through language and references specifically set in the North, with Creon as a Unionist politician and Antigone as a republican martyr. Retrospectively Paulin explains how he wanted Creon to be a kind of "puritan gangster, a megalomaniac who spoke alternately in an English public school voice and a deep menacing Ulster growl," and so Creon's transformation into a brutal man is accompanied by a distinctively Ulster dialect, making him a symbol of both Westminster politics and Northern Irish unionism.26 When, after the death of Antigone and his own son and wife, Creon finally acknowledges the republican position, he does so with words referring to W. B. Yeats' poem "Easter 1916," which deals with a similar conflict of personal and political loyalties; "I changed it, but./ Aye, changed it utterly" (60), Creon laments, and he finally allows Antigone to bury her brother with green laurel leaves, another endorsement of Irish republicanism.

For both its linguistic and poetic qualities Paulin's Antigone is an interesting adaptation, yet Paulin does not succeed in keeping the balance he so vigorously defended in his argument against O'Brien and which characterises Sophocles' original. Antigone's claim that she is acting out a loyalty exceeding that to the state is never really doubted, while in Sophocles her decisions and actions are repeatedly questioned by her sister, her uncle, and the chorus. Paulin's Creon is evidently not meant to attract sympathy from the audience, and as Fintan O'Toole says, in Creon's initial address to the people of Thebes it is:

Paulin, of course, is concerned with dramatising a different order of conflict, and from the start of the play there is no doubt about his sympathies. Artistically speaking, a negative consequence of this is that by never really challenging the audience to adapt its views and balance its moral judgement, one of the most vital aspects of classic tragedy-that which concerns itself with the continuous interaction between the characters on stage and the people in the audience-is significantly lessened. The reduction of the choric function, both to bring the play back to fifty minutes and because Stephen Rea had advised him to "go easy" on them because "they can be a bit of a bore," plays a significant part in this, for it is through these parts that the audience's different possible moral judgements traditionally find expression.28

By having his chorus leader refer to the first time he spoke his lines (i. e. in Sophocles's play), "it was in another time and place, and in a different language too" (35), Paulin stresses Antigone's iconic status and cleverly legitimises his use of Sophocles's tragedy to comment on contemporary Ireland. Despite Antigone's suggested general relevance, there is nevertheless a problem with the translation of its main theme of the conflict between an individual and the state, because "what this connotes to a modern European reader or audience member is some kind of confrontation between a citizen and his or her government" and "what is missing from this conception is a feeling for the civil community represented by the Greek city-state."29 Viewed less in comparison and more in relation to the original, what is present in the play is a comparable feeling for the repression of a community in twentieth-century Northern Ireland.

Paulin, it must be concluded, is not primarily concerned with recovering Sophocles's balanced ambiguity about whether Antigone was really justified in her decision to bury her brother and act against Creon's authority. His adaptation is necessarily tied up in the Northern Irish context and stems from his conviction that not to take sides in the conflict is to accept the status quo. Understandably, this prevented him from writing the play he (as his argument against O'Brien shows) initially sought to write: one in which the absoluteness of both Creon's and Antigone's claims would be denied, and in which their moralities would be presented as equally complex, equally justifiable, and equally questionable. The situation he was writing from made it unavoidable that Paulin would end up contradicting himself.

* * *

As epigraph to Carthaginians Frank McGuinness uses a quote from Czeslaw Milosz: "it is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of wounds." What Seamus Heaney shows in The Cure at Troy, his first and only play to date and offered to Field Day six years after the production of Paulin's The Riot Act, is that the focus should be on the cure. Heaney adapts Philoctetes, which shares some main themes with Antigone and similarly deals with the conflict between public needs and private morality, between loyalty to one's kin, to the state and to the gods. Philoctetes, the Greek legendary hero who played a decisive part in the final stages of the Trojan War, had been given the bow and arrows of Heracles, but on the way to Troy was bitten by a snake and left behind in exile because of his gangrenous foot. When it is prophesied that Troy can only be taken with the help of the magic bow that never misses its target, Odysseus and Neoptolemus go back to Philoctetes to persuade him to come to Troy. Yet Philoctetes has grown bitter and refuses to return. He is led to realise that in order to defeat Troy, and in order to be cured from his wound-both literally and figuratively-he must co-operate with his fellow Greeks, and go back to Troy.

Importantly, the conflict focused on is not that between the Greeks and the Trojans, but between Greek and Greek. By using the plot-lines of Philoctetes as a metaphor for the situation in Northern Ireland, Heaney emphasises the need for reconciliation and compromise. Though he keeps close to the original, alterations, including images derived from Ireland's history and a distinctively Irish vocabulary, effectively emphasise the Northern Ireland analogy. The major change is the insertion of an additional passage for the Chorus which directly alludes to contemporary Irish politics and, in its mentioning of both "a hunger-striker's father" (symbolising republicanism) and "the police widow" (symbolising unionism), expresses sympathy with both parties involved in the conflict.30

Heaney claims that his Philoctetes is "not meant to be understood as a trimly allegorical representation of hardline Unionism":

Nevertheless, the association of Philoctetes with Ulster Unionism is emphatic. In Sophocles it is the demi-god Hercules who intervenes to urge Philoctetes to reconcile with his fellow Greeks, and the necessity of this divine intervention to resolve the dilemma suggests a conflict which is humanly irresolvable. Because Heaney "simply had not the nerve to bring on a god two minutes from curtains," he steps away from this deus ex machina, first internalising the change of spirit in Philoctetes's unconscious, and then transposing it to the Chorus, hence to the consciousness of what might be interpreted as the community, or the larger societal structure.32 The result is the powerful suggestion that the responsibility to bring about change does not lie with the gods, but with humanity; it is Philoctetes himself who has to make the first step.

Heaney stresses that his ambition was not to suggest a cure for the conflict, because "I'm not a political writer and I don't see literature as a way of solving political problems."33 Rather, he wrote his play out of a fascination with "the conflict between the integrity of the personal bond and the exactions of the group's demand for loyalty. A sense that the pride in the wound is stronger than the desire for a cure."34 Heaney invites his audience to have hope: though "no poem or play or song/Can fully right a wrong/Inflicted and endured,," and though "history says, Don't hope/ On this side of the grave," it is possible that "once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme" (77). These lines have achieved a certain currency and were frequently quoted,35 yet Seamus Deane argues that such responses "seem to be governed by the belief that it sponsored the arrival of peace, that it is a play about the change of heart that must accompany the peace process" and argues that it is not: "Before peace, it speaks of the arrival of justice - that first. Then war. Then peace. Troy has still to be sacked. The siege - as always in Northern Ireland-continues."36 Yet the need to "sack Troy" is not the main issue Heaney leaves with his audience. Like Stewart Parker, he primarily invites people to be optimistic:

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells. (77)

Perhaps not in complete contrast to, but certainly with a radical difference of emphasis from Deane's comments, Heaney's play is about a change of heart.

The application of the lines from The Cure of Troy to various political contexts illustrates Friel's emphasis that, though the Field Day project should ideally lead to a cultural state and not a political one, out of a cultural state the possibility of a political state follows: "that's always the sequence."37 The Field Day Theatre Company regarded the function of theatre in Northern Ireland in a similar way to playwright Stewart Parker who believed that drama can help "substitute vibrant and authentic myths for the false and destructive ones on which we have been weaned."38 By using classical frameworks as analogies for Ireland's contemporary situation, the playwrights discussed here have greatly contributed to this undertaking.

Notes:

1. J. Michael Walton, "Hit or Myth: The Greeks and Irish Drama," in Marianne McDonald and Michael J. Walton, eds., Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002) p.4.

2. Jennifer Fitzgerald in interview with Seamus Deane, Joan Fowler and Frank McGuinness, Crane Bag 1985, vol 9, no 2. p. 63.

3. In 1995, McGuinness's adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya was staged by Field Day.

4. Where most of Field Day's other contributors ultimately write from a bakcground and experience close to their own, with his Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme McGuinness, himself from a Catholic nationalist tradition, takes on an extra challenge by exploring the roots of unionist opposition to Irish reunification.

5. Frank McGuinness, Carthaginians (London: Faber, 1988) p. 23. Further references will be parenthetically given within the text.