Chapter 3 Remodelling Mythologies: Field Day’s ‘Fifth Province’ and Frank McGuinness’s Ulster Plays 131
Chapter 3 Remodelling Mythologies: Field Day’s ‘Fifth Province’ and Frank McGuinness’s Ulster Plays In his plays Carthaginians (1988) and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme (1985), Frank McGuinness uses the subversive power of theatre to create iconoclastic characters who rebel against the manipula- tion of history by ideologues and to remodel destructive mythologies by dramatizing pluralities in the context of the Northern Irish community. McGuinness’s strong, partly expressionist picture in Carthaginians cele- brates and critically explores his own Catholic background. He dramatizes the Northern crisis of community and identity in the wake of the tragedy of Bloody Sunday 1972, which significantly shaped Catholic consciousness North and South of the border. Conversely, in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, McGuinness imagines the Ulster Unionist viewpoint with a sense of its particular difference, as well as the similarities between the two Northern Irish communities. Taken together, the two plays subvert the yearning for a historical identity, constructed upon ancestral conflict and blood-sacrifice, common to both communities. My discussion of these two plays by Frank McGuinness examines the retrospective invention of myths and icons that pose as history and the use of these in constructive or destructive ways. In a recent study, Carmen Szabó discusses how Irish cultural theorists Luke Gibbons, Richard Kearney and Declan Kiberd analyse Irish writings in relation to ancient mythology: Irish writers consciously employ Greek or Roman mythology to establish a direct link between modern Irish culture and ‘the cradle of European culture’,...
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