Narrative dysfunction in The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh and On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr

Abstract

This essay considers the aesthetic and political uses of narrative failure, as staged in contemporary Irish drama. I shall discuss The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh and On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr as deliberately dysfunctional interventions in a tradition of storytelling in modern and contemporary Irish drama. I argue in The Walworth Farce, the catachrestic combination of story and drama leads to a wider assault on mimesis and a loss of distinction between the fictive and the actual worlds. In On Raftery’s Hill, in contrast, the clash of modes creates a rupture, through which Carr indicts the abuse of women and children in state institutions in twentieth-century Ireland. I conclude that while Walsh’s play posits a world of generalised dysfunction that limits its political engagement, Carr exposes specific dysfunctions and inequalities in Ireland at the turn of the millennium.