«A Solution to the Present Crisis» ? Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy

Abstract

The penultimate production of the Field Day Theatre Company was The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney who had been a Director of the company from its inception in 1980 to its effective demise in 1993. The play is overwhelmingly concerned with the ability of the protagonist Philoctetes to overcome the « wound » of division and achieve reconciliation with his erstwhile enemies and as such is a clear dramatic expression of the Field Day concern with finding « a solution to the present crisis ». The Cure at Troy, however, is a direct translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes and as such is part of a general trend within contemporary Irish drama, which includes Heaney's fellow Field Day director Tom Paulin, to adapt or translate the tragedies of ancient Greece into a direct or oblique relationship with events in contemporary Northern Ireland. But tragedy, in the words of Georges Steiner, provides «no answers» and it is the discrepancy between the tragic form as exemplified by The Cure at Troy with its « fated » conclusion and the corrective objectives of Field Day wich is the concern of this article.