The House Image in Three Contemporary Irish Plays

Abstract

The famous cottage kitchen setting of many Revival plays and of their less orig inal imitations, embodies?and, later, endlessly reiterates?the well-known Irish attachment to place. This setting has been so much overused in Irish drama since the beginning of the twentieth century that today, a playwright shows either laziness or great courage to set a play in a naturalistic house. When imaginatively deployed, however, this traditional setting may still serve the dou ble force of the special Irish sense of place, and may also serve to determine the dramatic tension through the interaction of topophilia?which, in John Wilson Foster's definition, is in fact love of self?and topophobia, hatred of place that ensnares the self.1 Some contemporary plays?for instance, in Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964)?are steeped in the simultaneous double force of the home. In others, like Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985), the process of the transformation of one force into the other keeps ambivalences vibrant. The house as image of has long been problematized. Anna McMullen is undoubtedly right in maintaining that home in Irish theatre never seems to he a place, but a or a possibility.2 Nevertheless, the house on the stage often becomes an emotional, psychological shell of the self, carrying both past memory and future possibility?or, if the house emphatically remains incarcerating, that very phenomenon enhances the theme of rootless ness and homelessness. Three recent plays?Stewart Parkers Pentecost (1987), Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill (2000), and Tom Murphy's The House (2000)? each offers exam ples of how the house image can be deployed constructively to enhance the drama, as in Pentecost and The House, or how its enclosed space, if it remains