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Mimesis, Diegesis, and Narrave Frames: Gregory,
Becke, McGuinness
Eglanna Remport, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, HU, remport.eglanna@btk.elte.hu
Locaon always maers – especially in Irish drama. Drawing on the spaal theories of Michael
Issacharo, Hélène Laliberté and Ruth Ronen, the arcle invesgates the unique interplay between
dramac space and the themac concept of the universal in three Irish plays: Augusta Gregory’s
The Workhouse Ward (1908), Samuel Becke’s Waing for Godot (1953/55) and Frank McGuinness’s
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985). I trace a special line of inuence
between these plays through the lens of spaal theory, and further the discussion of the geographies
of Irish drama as examined in Chris Morash and Shaun Richard’s Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of
Space and Place (2013).
Open Library of Humanies is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Open Library of Humanies. © 2024 The
Author(s). This is an open-access arcle distributed under the terms of the Creave Commons Aribuon 4.0 Internaonal
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OPEN ACCESS
Remport, E 2024 Mimesis, Diegesis, and Narrave Frames:
Gregory, Becke, McGuinness. Open Library of Humanies,
10(1): pp. 1–24. DOI: hps://doi.org/10.16995/olh.10477
2
Introducon
Michael Issacharo has developed a theory of mimetic and diegetic dramatic spaces
that is based on Gérard Génette’s theories of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ in fictional
narratives (Issacharo, 1981: 211). Issacharo renames ‘setting’ as ‘mimetic dramatic
space’, one communicated visually and transmitted directly to the audience (1981: 215).
‘Diegetic dramatic spaces’, on the other hand, are spaces evoked in the dialogue of the
characters, or mentioned in stage directions (Issacharo, 1981: 215). Hélène Laliberté
gathers Issacharo’s mimetic and diegetic dramatic spaces under her own category,
‘l’espace physique’, one that includes ‘l’espace o’, the space o stage (1998: 136, 135).
She agrees with Issacharo that ‘theatre space’ (i.e. the building and the auditorium)
and ‘stage space’ (i.e. set design) should be treated separately from dramatic space or
the ‘story-space’ textually referenced in a play (Issacharo, 1981: 212; Laliberté, 1998:
135). Ruth Ronen also draws on Issacharo’s ideas on spatial arrangements, grouping
his categories for dramatic spaces under ‘scenic space’ and ‘extrascenic space’, the
latter close to Laliberté’s notions of l’espace o (1986: 423). As a critic of narrative
fiction, Ronen engages with Issacharo’s theory of drama (1986: 423) when proposing
a new theory, that of ‘frames’, for understanding spatial arrangements. Ronen devises
a framework of multiple frames: ‘first frame(s)’ (i.e. setting), ‘secondary frames’,
‘inaccessible frames’, ‘spatio-temporally distant frames’ and, lastly, ‘generalised
space’ (1986: 425–428). She identifies these frames through their immediacy to the
storyline, or ‘story-space’ that she sees as the ‘global organization of a story’ (Ronen,
1986: 427).
What follows is an analysis of dramatic spaces in three twentieth-century Irish plays
within the frameworks proposed by Issacharo, Laliberté and Ronen, indebted as they
all are to the narrative theories of Gérard Genette. Adapting their approaches, I consider
Augusta Gregory’s reference to small towns and townlands in Galway’s Kiltartan area
in her play The Workhouse Ward, and her unlikely mention of the Kamchatka Peninsula
on the eastern shore of imperial Russia. I further examine Samuel Beckett’s references
to various locations in France and in Connemara, County Galway, in the French and
English versions of Waiting for Godot, from the early 1950s, in the light of references
to locality in The Workhouse Ward. Finally, this article addresses Frank McGuinness’s
‘framing’ of Ulster and the trenches of the river Somme in northern France, while also
drawing attention to the city of Strasbourg, home to the European Court of Human
Rights that was established in the aftermath of the Second World War. Besides the
significance of the specific locations and localities to which characters refer in all three
plays, the article also investigates the ways in which universal human themes play out
in these locations: whether they be in Ireland, continental Europe or the Far East. In
3
consideration of the ways in which the three plays under discussion give expression to
issues of universal human value, I draw upon Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s
notion of literary works as expressing ‘universal habits of human thinking and feeling’
(1958: xI). Finally, the article discusses the ways in which the three dramatic works
under discussion engage with one another, establishing a line of continuity within
twentieth-century Irish drama from the period of the Irish Literary Revival in the 1900s
to that of the Northern Ireland Troubles during the 1980s.
Lady Gregory’s Kamchatkan Kiltartan
Gregory’s most acclaimed rural comedies of the west of Ireland are set in the fictional
place of Cloon, modelled on Gort, a small town near her estate in Coole Park, County
Galway. Ann Saddlemyer has observed the universal nature of this particular location:
Cloon is ‘Gort, and nowhere; Ireland and everywhere; it is the boundless country of
comedy’ (1966: 31). Cloon, the diegetic dramatic space, is a location in Gregory’s
‘imaginative geography’, to use the phrase of Christopher Morash and Shaun Richards
(2013: 50); a lieu de mémoire from Pierre Nora’s concept of geographical imagination
(Nora, 1989: 7; Morash and Richards, 2013: 42). Cloon is, in fact, an amalgamation
of real places: Gort and various other ‘Cloons’ around Ireland (in Connemara and
in counties Clare, Leitrim and Wicklow). As James Pethica suggests, it is equally an
imaginary location, where inhabitants can turn ‘a single minor incident into fast-
paced, extravagant farce’ (2004: 71). Cloon itself may be a fictional place, but there are
many other, real place names mentioned in Gregory’s drama, not mentioned in critical
discussion of Gregory’s work hitherto. What follows is a mapping out of the diegetic
dramatic space to which she refers in her plays and its relevance for the thematic
universality towards which she aimed in her work for the Abbey Theatre.
Based on Gregory’s rural comedies, misleadingly huddled under the umbrella term
‘peasant plays’, Cloon has everything that rural Irish townlands would have had at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Cloon has a market place, a post oce, a butcher’s
shop, a general shop, a police station, a newspaper’s oce, churches, and even a train
station outside the town. The one location that is noticeably missing from Gregory’s
rural plays, whatever their geographic location, is the local Irish pub, which otherwise
serves as the setting, for instance, in John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western
World (1907) and in Act Two of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926). Morash
and Richards point out that, according to the manuscript, the opening scene of Synge’s
most famous play, originally entitled ‘The Murderer (A Farce)’, was initially to take place
in a potato garden rather than Michael James Flaherty’s pub (Morash and Richards,
2013: 36). Gregory herself comes close to using a public house as a mimetic space for
4
one of her plays on one occasion only: in The White Cockade, a historical tragicomedy
based on events of the Battle of the Boyne (1690), set in the mimetic space of an inn
kitchen in Duncannon (Gregory, 1970b: 219). The White Cockade is one of her historical
plays, a story of the mixed loyalties of the Kelleher family at the time when Patrick
Sarsfield and King James were fighting the forces of King William of Orange. Other than
this one instance, the pub, as a place where locals gather to gossip, is missing from
Gregory’s plays. This absence stands in notable contrast to the pub scenes in Synge and
O’Casey’s famous plays that caused so much uproar when they were first performed at
the Abbey Theatre in 1907 and 1926.
Characteristically, Cloon townsfolk seem to be place-bound, feeling no urge to leave
the dramatic space assigned to them. Therefore, in order to create a plotline, Gregory
adopted the habit of involving a stranger who arrives from out of town to disturb the
stillness of small-town life. Nicholas Grene traces this dramatic device to Henrik Ibsen’s
work, greeted at first with denunciation and dismissal in London during the 1880s
and 1890s before grudging acceptance (Grene, 2003: 51–52). Ibsen’s influence was
certainly noticeable in some of the early plays of the Irish Revival but the influence of
European drama on Gregory’s work ran deeper than Ibsen’s Scandinavian naturalism.
In the autumn of 1908, some months after the first performance of The Workhouse
Ward, Gregory delivered a lecture at an event organized by the Irish-language revival
organisation, Gaelic League. This lecture oers a good illustration of Gregory’s easy
familiarity with the history of European drama. She discussed the history of setting,
characterisation, and dramatic construction employed by a wide variety of European
playwrights from the Greeks, Shakespeare, and Molière to Racine, Goethe, Schiller,
and her own contemporaries (Firín, ‘Lady Gregory on Drama’, 1908: MS 1731; ‘Drama’,
1908).1 A piece in the local newspaper commented that Gregory’s was a ‘thought-
provoking’ lecture, concluding that it ‘gave us a sense of world-culture which some
of us seem to lack just now’ (Firín, ‘Lady Gregory on Drama’, 1908: MS 1731). What
the reporter found most impressive was the skill with which Gregory discussed the
evolution of the dramatic form from ancient times to the late-nineteenth century
(Firín, ‘Lady Gregory on Drama’, 1908: MS 1731). James Little discusses in detail the
debate between Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, and Lady Gregory over The
Poorhouse (1903), an earlier version of The Workhouse Ward (1908), for which Gregory
provided the scenario and Hyde the dialogue (Little, 2023). In light of this debate, it
is significant that she presented herself at a Gaelic League event as someone who was
1 The ocial journal of the Gaelic League, An Claidheamh Soluis, also published a report on Lady Gregory’s lecture given
at the Headquarters (Ard Chraobh) of the Gaelic League in Dublin on Monday 16 November 1908 (‘Drama’, 1908).
5
familiar with the European dramatic tradition stretching back to the antiquity, putting
her own knowledge of drama en par with, if not actually above, that of Douglas Hyde.
Gregory’s knowledge of European drama derived from the many theatre
performances that she had attended throughout the continent, from Paris to Venice.
When it came to writing her own trademark one-act plays, however, she relied on what
she knew best, drawing inspiration from her locality around Coole Park near the village
of Gort in South County Galway. On occasion, she broadened the diegetic dramatic
space of her plays to the greater Galway area and further to the province of Connacht
and west-Munster (with references to Limerick and Cork). Twenty-Five (1903) makes
reference to Kilbecanty and Kilcogan; Hyacinth Halvey (1906) to Esker and the Kiltartan
Cross; The Rising of the Moon (1907) to Ennis; Damer’s Gold (1912) to Knockbarron
and Lough Cutra; On the Racecourse (published in 1926) to Barna, Ballinderreen and
Kilcolgan; McDonough’s Wife (1912) to Galway, Connemara and the river Corrib; and The
Image (1909) to Galway, Ennis, Oranmore, Duras and Ballinderreen.2 As mentioned,
several of her early comedies were set in the diegetic space of Cloon (Cloonmara), the
fictional east-Galway town land that she modelled on Gort: Hyacinth Halvey (1906),
The Jackdaw (1907), The Workhouse Ward (1908), The Full Moon (1910), and Coats (1910).
Gregory’s most popular play, Spreading the News (1904) lacks any reference to a specific
Irish locality. However, Brenna Katz Clarke observes that, when it was performed at the
Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the stage was richly decorated with market bills from around
Gort, lending a very specific local colouring to the rural Irish market scene in which the
story unfolds (1982: 58).
Adding a further splash of local colour to her genre pictures of Cloon, Gregory had
her characters talk in a stage version of an east-Galway dialect, which she named
after the parish of Kiltartan. Gregory created a dialect for the specific purpose of
writing plays and for writing up the folklore material collected in the local district.
Mary Lou Kohfeldt explains that, while gathering folklore, Gregory would take note
of phrases and grammar formulae that local inhabitants would use when speaking in
the Irish language. She then translated these phrases and grammatical structures into
English, thereby creating her own version of east-Galway Hiberno-English (Kohfeldt
1985: 131, 139). Christopher Murray argues that, for this reason, Gregory’s English
dialogues abound in linguistic structures that were unique to the Irish language, such
as circumlocution, emphatic word preference, and the use of the Kiltartan infinitive
(1997: 45–46). Ann Saddlemeyer saw the frequent employment of these structures
create a certain semantic ‘neatness’ in Gregory’s writing, allowing her to control the
2 Throughout the arcle, in the case of plays, dates refer to year of rst performance, unless indicated otherwise.
6
dialogues with almost ‘classical precision’ (1966: 19). She would use these linguistic
structures also in her collections of Celtic legends, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), and
Gods and Fighting Men (1904), as well as in her two collections of Galway folklore, The
Kiltartan History Book (1909) and The Kiltartan Wonder Book (1910).
Gregory’s eortless control of dialogue is evident in The Workhouse Ward, a re-writing
of her (semi-)collaboration with Douglas Hyde, The Poorhouse (1903). The setting, or
mimetic space, of the play is the ward of the workhouse in Cloon, long-term home of
protagonists Mike McInerney and Michael Miskell. The story takes place on the feast
day of a local saint, Saint Colman, born in the sixth century to Kiltartan chieftain Duac
and Queen Rhinagh (Rioghnach) (‘Kilmacduagh’, n.d.). Although the two bed-ridden
paupers were reared in Skehanagh (An Sceachánach) in County Oaly, they have picked
up the local south-east-Galway dialect of Kiltartan. Mike and Michael’s banter drives
the story forward until the catharsis of the play: the arrival of Mike McInerney’s sister,
Mrs Donohue, in what Nicholas Grene would call an ‘Ibsenite manner’. She invites her
brother to come and live with her in Curranroe, in the Burren, County Clare, following
the death of her husband, John Donohue. Mike was willing to leave the ward, on one
condition: he would depart with his workhouse mate, Michael. Remembering their
childhood shenanigans, his sister refuses to welcome Michael Miskell to her home,
eventually leaving the two paupers in Cloon. They do not seem to mind the outcome
and resume their bickering with one another. Éadaoin Ní Mhuircheartaigh (2016: 39)
and James Little (2023: 1028) note that this behaviour is reminiscent of the comical
tradition of a twosome dialogue: agallamh beirte. Gregory herself was familiar with
this poetic tradition of ‘performance dialogues requiring intricate and witty repartee’
(Blake, 1999: 147). Ní Mhuircheartaigh notes how Lady Gregory worked with Douglas
Hyde in the composition of plays in both English and Irish during the early 1900s,
when Hyde was President of the Irish-language revival organization, the Gaelic League
and highlights the interest of both Gregory and Hyde in the agallamh style of Irish
dramatic dialogue (Ní Mhuircheartaigh, 2016: 38–40).3 Minimising the plot of The
Poorhouse, Gregory manages to bring the new, re-written version of the play closer to
a native Irish poetic tradition, rooting it firmly in the locale of east-Galway. As for the
expanded diegetic space of the play, when Mike and Michael resume their arguing, they
mention several place names where they had dwelled before: their lieux des mémoires
are Ardrahan, Turlough, Duras, Newtown Lynch and Lisheen Cranagh. James Little
(2023: 1027) notes that Gregory was careful in choosing these place names, suggesting
3 I thank Dr Éadaoin Ní Mhuircheartaigh for kindly making her arcle available, tled ‘Drámaíocht Dhúchasach? An tAgal-
lamh Fileata ar Ardán na hAthbheochana’.
7
that her intention was not only to add further splash of local colour to The Workhouse
Ward, but also to re-claim the original scenario from Douglas Hyde, a year after it was
produced in English at the Abbey Theatre in April 1907.
Gregory had chosen what Hélène Laliberté calls ‘l’espace physique’ of her plays to be
specific to the Irish Midlands and East Galway, rooting her plays clearly in rural Ireland.
Simultaneously, she also sought universal appeal. She elaborated on this issue in the
notes to her 1914 political comedy, The Wrens:
Sometimes in making a plan for a play I set the scene in another country that I may
be sure the emotion displayed is not bounded by any neighbourhood but is a universal
one. (Gregory, 1970a: 266; emphasis added)
Saddlemyer (1966: 33) calls this method a ‘process of deliberate “endistancement”’, a
type of geographical distancing being an integral part of Gregory’s playwriting method.
This method of ‘endistancing’ the subject material from the espace physique allowed
the dramatist to achieve a more thorough engagement with what Brooks and Warren
(1958: xl) describe as ‘universal habits of human thinking and feeling’. Several of
her plays of rural Ireland dealt with universal themes, such as the loss of a loved one
(Donough’s Wife, 1912; The Gaol Gate, 1906), anxieties over finances and debt (Twenty-
Five, 1903; The Jackdaw, 1907; Coats, 1910), anxieties over false pretences (Hyacinth
Halvey, 1906), fear of leaving home (Twenty-Five, 1903), gossip (Spreading the News,
1904), and the belief in the magic of nature (The Full Moon, 1910). Gregory reiterates
her habit of ‘endistancing’ in another lecture from the 1910s, ‘Making a Play’, claiming
to have used it so that she was sure that her characters’ emotions were universally
relevant (Gregory, n.d.).
In ‘Making a Play’, Gregory remarked that when writing a scenario for a play, she
would ask the following questions regarding location and historical period:
If all this happened in Kamschatka [sic] would it be interesting?
Would it interest in other periods of time? (Gregory, n.d.)
This allusion to Kamchatka is intriguing as the location carried literary, historical
and political associations during the first few decades of the twentieth century when
Gregory began her career as dramatist and theatre director at the Abbey. Since the
publication of Sydney Owenson’s classic The Wild Irish Girl in 1806, the adjective
‘Kamchatkan’ became a synonym in Ireland and Britain through the nineteenth century
8
for ‘remote’ or ‘located in the middle of nowhere’.4 Gregory wanted to make sure that
her characters’ conversations, ‘minutely articulated’, as she put it in her lecture, would
be meaningful in places/countries far removed from Ireland (Gregory, n.d.). She herself
had travelled far and wide, from Ceylon and India to the Ottoman Empire, from Egypt
and Sudan to Spain and Portugal, from France and Italy to Britain and the United States.
Wherever she travelled, she always took note of local ways of life, and the eorts made
to alleviate the poverty of those living o the land (Remport, 2018: 97). The mimetic
dramatic space of The Workhouse Ward obviously referred to Irish poverty and to the
devastation of the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the theme of loyalty and betrayal
within a family was long-enduring, carrying universal relevance. It had appeared as a
prominent thematic thread in European drama from the ancient Greeks to the works
of Ibsen. In ‘Making a Play’, she addresses all the main aspects of playwriting: ‘us[ing]
every situation to the full’, ‘let[ing] every conversation climax’ and ‘every event
grow out of character’, ‘giv[ing] twists’ and providing ‘changes of moods’ filled with
‘passion’ (Gregory, n.d.). She was adamant that ‘without a strong, rich emotion’ a play
would feel ‘cold’ (Gregory, n.d.). The play needed to articulate the feelings of characters
within it convincingly, regardless of whether the espace physique was the far away land
of Kamchatka or Gregory’s local parish of Kiltartan.
Samuel Becke and his Resistance Connacht
Critics have enumerated the various ways in which Beckett’s theatre related to the
literature of the Irish Revival (Harrington, 1991; Bair, 1993; Knowlson, 1997; Morin,
2009; McAteer, 2010a). Katherine Worth (1978), Gregory Dobbins (2009) and Ronald
McDonald (2002) have traced a strong line of influence from the works of Revival
writers, such as John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats and Sean O’Casey.
Emilie Morin (2009), Michael McAteer (2010a), and Morash and Richards (2013) have
investigated the resemblance between Yeats’s and Beckett’s drama, especially that
between Waiting for Godot and Yeats’s Purgatory (1939). Further observations have been
made of the parallels between Beckett’s absurdist tragicomedies and Gregory’s short
one-act comedies of Cloon, amongst them The Workhouse Ward and Coats (1910) (Morin,
2009; Remport, 2004; Roche, 2004). Beckett himself may have ignored Gregory in his
writings on Ireland, but he mentioned The Workhouse Ward as a play of interest for him,
in a letter dated 25 January 1931 (Morin, 2009: 104). Morin asserts that Beckett had
always shown an interest in the theatre scene in Dublin, despite his several and extended
4 My thanks to Professor Claire Connolly for drawing my aenon to the reference to Kamchatka in Sydney Owenson’s
The Wild Irish Girl: A Naonal Tale (1806).
9
absences from Ireland (Morin, 2017: 21–24). One particularly active period of Beckett
as a theatre-goer was the 1930s, when he frequented the Gate, the Queen’s, the Gaiety,
and the Royal in Dublin, as well as the plays of Dublin Drama League at the Peacock
(Morin, 2017: 21–22). Morin notes that Beckett was particularly keen to see Henrik
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Gate and The Wild Duck at the Abbey Theatre (Morin, 2009: 22,
24). Back in Paris, he was a member of the ‘Irish’ circle of the École Normale Supérieure
and Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, ‘Shakespeare & Company’, as his contemporary Samuel
Putnam has noted (1947: 96–97). James Joyce, Thomas MacGreevy, George Reavey
and Beckett moved among intellectuals of Paris’s Latin Quarter, interested in literary
developments in Ireland, England and continental Europe (Putnam, 1947: 96–97).
MacGreevy and Jack B. Yeats, whom Beckett had befriended, knew Gregory well,
both as a dramatist and as the aunt of art collector Sir Hugh Lane. Gregory’s death in
May 1932 did not go unnoticed in Beckett’s literary circles. Travelling the part of Ireland
that she knew so well, Beckett and his brother, Frank, set out on a three-week walking
tour of Connemara, Co. Galway, in August 1931 (Bair, 1993: 131), the same year in which
he was to see Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward at the Abbey (Morin, 2009: 104). Mary
Junker suggests that some of the diegetic space of Waiting for Godot, ‘mediated through
the discourse of the characters’, could be linked to specific geographical locations in
Connemara: its capital, Clifden (An Clochán); the mountain range of the Twelve Bens
(Beanna Beola); the stony surroundings of Recess (Sraith Saileach), and the Glen Inagh
(Gleann Eidhneach) (Junker, 1995: 48–49; Issacharo, 1981: 215).5 Junker considers the
recurring references to stone, mountainy land, and the ‘skull in Connemara’ in Lucky’s
lengthy soliloquy, as references to the ‘[g]ranite, a plutonic rock, [that] underlies the
lowlands of the region’ and the ‘[q]uartzite, a metamorphic rock, form the conical
peaks of the Twelve Bens’ (Junker, 1995: 48). In these instances, Connemara becomes
for Lucky’s character a lieu des mémoires, a ‘place of memories’. Connemara was also
a personal lieu des mémoires for Beckett himself, not only for his tour of the west of
Ireland. Vladimir and Estragon’s references to boots and sore feet in Waiting for Godot
recall the walking tour of the Beckett brothers, as Mary Junker observes, strengthening
the case for the espace physique of Waiting for Godot as a remote part of Ireland (Junker,
1995: 51).
Beckett’s manuscript versions of Waiting for Godot disclose a distinct Hibernicising
tendency in his first translation(s) of En attendant Godot (published in 1952) (van Hulle
and Verhulst, 2017: 302–308). The Hibernicising tendency is apparent, despite Beckett’s
5 Thereaer, in order to simplify maers, the French-language tle of the play, En aendant Godot, will be used to refer
to the French version of the play, rst performed in Paris in 1953, and the English-language tle, Waing for Godot, will
be used to refer to the English-language version of the play, rst performed in London in 1955.
10
claims to the contrary (van Hulle and Verhulst, 2017: 303). When it comes to locations,
‘Connemara’ replaces ‘Normandy’ in Lucky’s soliloquy; France’s La Planche region is
referred to as the ‘bog’ in the English translation; and instead of the reference to French
writer and philosopher, Voltaire, there is now a reference to Ireland’s Bishop Berkeley
(Beckett, 1952: 122 and 61). Beckett alters the diegetic dramatic space of the play’s
original espace physique in the English version in multiple ways: first, the references
to Paris (the Eiel Tower) are omitted, as are references to the Île-de-France (Seine-
et-Marne), the Loire region (La Planche) and the Pyrenees (L’Ariège), the small town
of Roussillon and the farm of the Bonnellys. Second, Beckett substitutes the Vaucluse
region in southern France with the ‘Macon country’, which Estragon satirically calls
‘Cackon country’ (Beckett, 1965: 62). Geographically, Mâcon and Saône-et-Loire
are located in Burgundy, a famous vine region in eastern France. Beckett’s choice of
region in the English version is noteworthy in sustaining the connection to the famous
wine-growing tradition of Vaucluse. Furthermore, he retains the ingenious Vaucluse-
Merdecluse jeu de mots in the Macon-Cackon word play, ‘Merdre!’ being a syntactic
equivalent of the four-letter swear word in English.
Emilie Morin asserts that the English versions of Beckett’s work should really be
considered as ‘textual reworkings’, rather than literal translations, due to the amount
of changes the playwright had administered during the ‘translation process’ (Morin,
2009: 79). She further claims that Beckett’s practice may be likened to Gregory’s own
translations/adaptations of French dramatist Molière’s seventeenth-century comedies
to her local Kiltartanese dialect (Morin, 2009: 79–80). Gregory’s translations were
published in The Kiltartan Molière in 1911, joining her two previous collections, The
Kiltartan History Book (1909) and The Kiltartan Wonder Book (1910). Beckett habitually
revised Waiting for Godot, adding and deleting details, which resulted in various
typescripts and manuscripts (see the Genetic Map in van Hulle and Verhulst, 2017:
166). One of the ‘Irishisms’ added in the English version was the word ‘blathering’ used
in Vladimir and Estragon’s dialogue, a term that van Hulle and Verhulst (2017: 306)
describe as ‘fitting the play’s general atmosphere of negativity and purposelessness’.
Yet ‘blathering’ also recalls Gregory’s paupers at the workhouse ward who pass their
time in idle chat. Gregory herself wrote that, no matter where her two Michaels may be,
it was still ‘better [for them] to be quarrelling than to be lonesome’ (Gregory, 1970a:
260). Further exploring the characters’ ‘interconnectedness’, Anthony Roche (2004:
181) points out that the protagonists of Gregory and Beckett’s respective plays seem
to be ‘one composite personality’, as if two sides of the same coin. Beckett’s lectures
at Trinity College Dublin from the early 1930s reveal the influence of Racine’s drama:
Racine was known for attaching ‘confidants’ to his main characters, ‘serving as
11
sounding boards to reveal the protagonists’ divided consciousness’, turning dialogues
practically into monologues (van Hulle and Verhulst, 2017: 171). It is certainly possible
to find a common ground between Gregory and Beckett’s theatre through their shared
interest in the drama of the Grand Siècle and through Racine’s use of the character of
the ‘confidant’, whose main dramatic purpose is to reveal the protagonist’s ‘divided
consciousness’. However, The Workhouse Ward may have been a direct influence in itself
on En attendant Godot /Waiting for Godot, given the prominent standing of Gregory’s play
during the early decades of the Abbey Theatre. Further similarities between the two plays
are the plotline and circular dramatic structure, and the preference for minimisation
in characterisation (Remport, 2004: 69–73). Developing the plotline of a play to the
climax with as few characters as possible was one of Gregory’s playwriting maxims,
mentioned in her lecture, ‘Making a Play’ (Gregory, n.d.). Beckett was undoubtedly
averse to the nationalist, patriarchal and parochial character of Irish drama of the
early-twentieth century, but he still aligned his work to a certain kind of minimalist
drama of the Revival, such as we encounter it in plays by Synge, Yeats, and Gregory.
Issacharo (1981: 215) claims that dramatic tension in a play ‘can often arise from
the interplay between the mimetic and diegetic space’ and that this tension ‘is often
contingent on the antimony between visible space represented and invisible space
described (Issacharo, 1981: 211). Waiting for Godot seems to be the case in point: the
mimetic dramatic space is that of the road, the tree and the mound, first seen when
the curtain rises on the opening Act; the diegetic dramatic space is that of Ireland (in
the English version) and France (in the original, French version). In the first instance,
the diegetic space is construed through references to various locations in France, as
detailed above, seemingly the characters’ lieux des mémoires (Rousillon and Vaucluse).
In the second instance, the diegetic space also contains a location that can be termed as
a ‘lieu de non-mémoire’: the location of Godot’s dwelling place. Vladimir and Estragon
do not know the whereabouts of this place, nor the way to find it; all they know is that
a messenger from Godot comes from time to time to remind them to wait. In the play,
the dramatic tension lies in the denial of any meaningful connection between the
mimetic place, where Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot’s arrival, and the espace
o, the space o stage, where Godot seems to dwell. Like The Workhouse Ward, in Godot
the protagonists do not establish a physical connection with Godot’s space o stage,
thereby emphasising the meaninglessness of their situation. What Issacharo (1981:
216) calls the ‘non-visible diegetic space’, the espace o, remains invisible throughout
Beckett’s play. Isacharo (1981: 215) remarks that ‘emphasis on diegesis’, on the non-
visible, was a characteristic of the drama of Racine and Corneille, two of the greats of
the Grand Siècle who Gregory and Beckett read.
12
Further to Beckett’s experience of French history and culture as they relate to the
mimetic and diegetic dramatic space in Waiting for Godot: in Negative Dialectics (1973:
380), Adorno stipulated that Beckett ‘has given us the only fitting reaction to the
situation of the concentration camps’ and the devastating consequences of the Second
World War. Adorno was aware of the extent to which elements of En attendant Godot
related directly to the ordeals of Beckett and his partner, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil,
during the German occupation of France between and 1941 and 1945 (Knowlson, 1997:
303). While in Paris, Beckett worked for the Resistance cell ‘Gloria SMH’, which he left
for the small town of Roussillon, his and Suzanne’s place of refuge from the Gestapo.
Roussillon receives the most prominent treatment in En attendant Godot, its red sand
and rocks referenced as espace physique and lieu de memoire, in addition to the harvest
Beckett had attended in a small town nearby (Beckett, 1952: 86). Beckett worked at the
Bonnellys vineyard in return for grain, potatoes and wine for himself and Suzanne,
at a time when food was scarce in the south of France (Knowlson, 1997: 323–324).
Knowlson argues that Beckett’s regular visits to the Bonnellys, and to Aude’s farm in
Clavaillan, also oered Beckett relief from the claustrophobia of village life (Knowlson,
1997: 331). Oliver Hirsh has recently reiterated a reading of Beckett’s play that relates
to the playwright’s wartime experiences: according to Hirsch, the protagonists of En
attendant Godot were two Jewish men who, fleeing the Gestapo, were waiting for their
contact person, a man called Godot, at France’s border with Switzerland (Hirsh, 2020:
181). In this context, En attendant Godot is a work filled with biographical references
to the war: while he was in Paris, Beckett’s Jewish friends were being arrested and
transported to concentration camps in Germany, or were trying to flee the Gestapo
(Knowlson, 1997: 314–315). Some critical readings of Godot from the post-war period—
that of Theodore Adorno, for instance—stemmed from these ‘inescapable’ textual
allusions to the Second World War (Knowlson, 1997: 380).
Widening the scope of interpretation, S. E. Gontarski considered the nature of
universal human suering and the futility of human existence as two key concepts in
Beckett’s play (Gontarski, 1983: 9, see also Hirsch, 2020: 178). According to such an
interpretation, Godot takes place in a ‘non lieu’, a non-place, one that is simultaneously
nowhere and everywhere; where two characters are waiting endlessly, for someone that
they do not know, at a time that is never identified. Saddlemyer’s reading of Gregory’s
Cloon comedies ring true for Beckett’s Godot: the setting is ‘nowhere, Ireland and
everywhere’ (1966: 31), with France added in the mix for Godot. Also relevant to Godot
is Saddlemyer’s characterisation of location in Gregory’s plays as a ‘boundless country’
of tragedy (Saddlemyer, 1966: 31). Such a location serves the expression of Brooks and
Warren’s ‘universal habits of human thinking and feeling’ (1958: xl). In The Theatre of
13
the Absurd (1961), Martin Esslin linked the ‘sense of metaphysical anguish’ looming
over the playwright’s early work, including Godot, to the ‘absurdity of the human
condition’ (Esslin, 1961: xix), at a time when the general feeling was that of ‘despair at
being unable to find a meaning in existence’ (12). Further to this, the espace physique
of the ‘desolate landscapes’ and ‘depleted universe’ of Godot should be understood,
argues Morin (2009: 96), as ‘existentialist documents of the human condition’. Beckett
himself had looked for confirmation of these feelings and thoughts in the works of his
French contemporaries: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant)
and Albert Camus’s The Outsider (L’Étranger) influenced his contemplation of the
value and meaning of human existence (Rabaté, 2016: 43). The playwright’s personal
experiences obviously impacted upon the composition of Godot, including: his walks
in the Mâcon country (Saône-et-Loire) and in Connacht (Connemara) in the summer
of 1931; his bickering with his brother Frank over family and Ireland during that time;
his interest in the works of Jack B. Yeats (especially Two Travellers, 1942) and Caspar
David Friedrich (especially Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1925–30); and Beckett
and his friends’ struggle for survival during the Second World War. Yet during the
long re-writing and translating process that van Hulle and Verhulst (2017) detail in
their manuscript analysis, Beckett also succeeded in creating a dramatic piece which
‘endistanced’ the playwright’s own personal experiences of hardship of the 1930s and
early-1940s, masterfully addressing universal human suering, and the seemingly
futile nature of human existence.
Frank McGuinness and his Strasbourg Boa Island
Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985)
contains several mimetic dramatic spaces, from army barracks and various sites in
Ulster to the battle field of the Somme in Northern France during the First World War.
The play is testament to the evolution of Irish drama during the twentieth century
and is more complex in its texture and more overtly political in its message than The
Workhouse Ward or Waiting for Godot. The nature of McGuinness’s play points to a
connection between Issacharo’s theory of dramatic space, as discussed previously,
and Ruth Ronen’s theory of fictional narrative space. Issacharo dierentiates
between mimesis and diegesis, understood in spatial terms with regard to visibility
or non-visibility on the theatre stage. Ronen (1986: 423) classifies Issacharo’s
dramatic spaces as scenic space and extrascenic space, the latter corresponding in some
degree to Hélène Laliberté’s notion of l’espace o. Ronen’s theory of frames provides
a useful alternative to traditional notions of dramatic space, permitting more spatial
transgression. According to Ronen, the story-space can change as the plotline itself
14
changes; mimetic spaces can become diegetic in a short timespan (Ronen, 1986: 431,
426–427). For this reason, Ronen suggests the use of ‘frames’, their classification
determined by their spatial immediacy to the plotline (Ronen, 1986: 425–428). As for
the plotline of McGuinness’s Sons of Ulster: it has many spatial and temporal changes
and it resembles plots in narrative fiction, amenable to Ronen’s narrative spatial theory.
Ronen’s theory is also illuminating when considering the association between the local
and the universal in Sons of Ulster.
McGuinness’s play commemorates the young men of the 36th ‘Ulster’ Division, who
had fought in the Battle of the Somme in northern France in what was the longest and
bloodiest battle of the First World War, lasting from July until November 1916. Nuala C.
Johnson observes that ‘during the first two days of the oensive the Ulster Division lost
5,500 (killed, missing or wounded) from the total of 15,000 soldiers’, although numbers
are dicult to estimate due to missing service personnel (Johnson, 2007: 71). Declan
Kiberd contends that the loss was even greater within local communities of Ulster as
‘entire streets of Belfast, and small communities of Antrim were left without young men
because the authorities had made a point of bonding new recruits with neighbours from
their own communities’ (Kiberd, 2005: 279). Sons of Ulster remembers these young men
who enlisted in the British army under Edward Carson’s guardianship, giving centre
stage to eight fictional soldiers: Kenneth Pyper, Craig David, George Anderson, Nat
McIlwaine, Christopher Roulston, Martin Crawford, William Moore and John Millen.
In their mapping of Irish dramatic spaces, Morash and Richards (2013: 91) remark that
these eight young men, and, more broadly, Ulster loyalists, treat the ‘army camps and
battlefields’ of the Somme as lieux de mémoires following the battle that started on 1
July 1916.
Sons of Ulster is a memory play in which Older Kenneth Pyper remembers the horrors
of the war and the futility of the blood sacrifice that the British Government and the
leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party asked Ulster’s Protestant young men to make.
In addressing themes related to the universality of human suering, McGuinness’s
play recalls Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Sons of Ulster contains a number of significant
mimetic spaces, ranging from the battle fields of the Somme to various locations in
Northern Ireland. Depending on the scene in question, these locations also serve as
each other’s diegetic counterpart, or even espaces o (i.e. spaces located o stage).
The closing scene is that of the trenches, what Ronen would call a ‘first frame’ as the
most ‘immediately relevant frame’ to the ‘story-space’ (Ronen, 1986: 425 and 424).
‘Secondary frame’ in the last scene is the battlefield of the Somme, in which the trench
is located, separated from the ‘first frame’ only ‘by a perspective’ (Ronen, 1986: 426).
It can be ‘partially penetrated and become a continuation of the setting’ (Ronen, 1986:
15
426) when the young men leave their trenches. In this spatial setup of the scene,
Ronen’s ‘inaccessible frame’ is that of Ulster, as all actions of the young men are
governed by their loyalty to this location, the name of which Younger and Older Pyper
call out multiple times as Younger Pyper awaits the beginning of Battle of the Somme.
The plot generates a ‘spatio-temporally distant frame’ (Ronen, 1986: 427) when it
returns to Older Pyper’s framework of memories. On the one hand, the ‘story-space’
of the memory is the primary frame of the play, as all other actions take place within
it. Nonetheless, the frame of Older Pyper’s memories does not fulfil the requirement
of ‘remaining the topological (spatial) focus of the narrative’, a strict requirement for
‘first frames’ identified by Ronen (1986: 427).
‘Part 3: Pairing’ in Sons of Ulster is another instance of how McGuinness’s play
bears out Ronen’s theory of narrative frames. After five months of service and amid
war preparations, the eight young Ulstermen are sent back home for a short period of
rehabilitation. The plot of Part 3 takes place in at least four mimetic spaces, or ‘first
frames’, as the eight men are divided into four pairs, each spending their last peaceful
moments in a dierent part of Northern Ireland (Ronen, 1986: 38). One pair, Craig
and (Younger) Pyper, appear on Boa Island, near Enniskillen in County Fermanagh,
washing the blood of the war o their feet and discussing their chances of survival. Boa
Island (Inis Badhbha), in Co. Fermanagh, is a fitting location for such a conversation,
as the location bears the name of an Irish war goddess. In her Kiltartan collection of
Irish legends, Gods and Fighting Men, Gregory wrote that Badb was a ‘battle goddess’ of
the Tuatha Dé Danaan, who used magical enchantments against the native inhabitants
of Ireland, the Firbolgs, residing at that mythical time in Teamhair (Tara) (Gregory,
1970c: 27, 29). Pyper admires some ancient stone sculptures that date back to the
megalithic period of Irish history, long before the spread of Christianity in Ireland
and the denominational division between Catholics and Protestants that had emerged
in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation in England. A sculptor himself, Pyper
admires the beauty of the ancient statues which, in their artistic significance, resemble
the Turoe Stone in Connemara that Mary Junker identifies as an art object in Lucky’s
speech in Waiting for Godot (Junker, 1995: 49).
Emilie Pine (2010: 61) and Hiroko Mikami (2002: 25) mention the Boa statues in
their critical readings of McGuinness’s play but do not remark on the fact that they
are located in a graveyard. It is significant that the ‘first frame’ of the ‘pairing’ scene
is that of Caldragh Cemetery; and Boa Island, the location of this place of the dead, is
‘only’ the ‘secondary frame’. Janus-faced as they are, the sculptures located in this
mimetic space are reminders of Craig and Pyper’s emotional state: one face of the
statue looks eastward, the other west. Within the actual extra-theatrical location of
16
the Boa statues in County Fermanagh, these alternative directions reflect the opposite
directions in which the people of Northern Ireland look: one group towards Belfast and
Protestant Britain, the other towards Donegal and Catholic Ireland. There is a further
symbolic level governing this double vision: those who look west from Ulster towards
the battlefields of continental Europe, and those Ulstermen in the trenches who look
back to their homeland in the ancient province.
Ronen does not specifically identify a ‘tertiary frame’. If there was such a category,
McGuinness’s Ulster would belong to it, as it is physically related to the ‘first’ and
‘secondary frames’ but is not visualised on stage. The characters’ birthplaces also mark
the place of Ulster: Belfast, Derry, Coleraine, Enniskillen, and Sion Mills (Mikami, 2002:
25). Ulster in this sense is not an ‘inaccessible frame’ because the characters come
from the province. Ronen’s spatial theory, however, allows for changes and transitions
between the frames (Ronen, 1986: 431, 426–27), movements that Issacharo’s notions
of mimetic and diegetic theatrical spaces do not accommodate so flexibly. Ronen calls
one of the frames a ‘spatio-temporally distant frame’, which is ‘constructed by the text
beyond the spatial or temporal boundaries of the story-space or the story-time’ (1986:
427). In ‘Part 3: Pairing’, the location of the Somme functions as ‘spatio-temporally
distant frame’. It is ‘“physically” restrained from becoming immediate surroundings’
of the story-space, ‘belonging to another spatial continuum’, that of northern France
(Ronen, 1986: 427).
Besides Boa Island, there are three other ‘first frames’, or mimetic spaces, in the
‘Pairing’ section: Roulston’s parish church; a rope bridge (presumably, that in Carrick-
a-Rede, in County Antrim); and the Field (Belfast’s Finaghy Field, destination of the
main Protestant Unionist march on the Twelfth of July) (Ronen, 1986: 38). Ronen
would classify these frames as ‘open’ because the service men who appear in them
can ‘go beyond the borders of a frame’, evidenced in the final sections of Part 3. Here,
Older Pyper’s memories dissolve the previously well-established boundaries of story-
frames, as characters start to appear in frames other than their own. Conversations,
too, become more fluid between the pairings, revealing the characters’ thoughts on
faith, Protestantism, marches, war and Ulster. Sons of Ulster undoubtedly illustrates a
community’s ‘devotion to a place’, as Lionel Pilkington notes, the narrative concerned
with the Protestant loyalist community’s devotion to Ulster (Pilkington, 2001: 222).
McGuinness’s play directly addresses issues around the religious and political
divide in Northern Ireland, particularly during the period of the Troubles. The eight,
predominantly Protestant, characters are likened to the Catholic young men of Easter
1916, who fought against British rule in Ireland just months before the Battle of the
Somme. In an attempt to bridge the cross-community divide within Northern Ireland,
17
McGuinness gives his eight characters, particularly Pyper, lines that echo those of
Patrick Pearse, leader of the rebellion in Dublin. In ‘Part 1: Remembrance’, Pyper
notes how similar he and Pearse were in the fervour of their sentiments. This is so,
despite the obvious dierence in their political goals. Pearse and the revolutionary
organisations mentioned in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic fought for Ireland’s
independence from the British Crown. Pyper and his fellow-Ulstermen, many from
the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), fought to maintain Ireland’s position as part of the
United Kingdom.
As much as it is rooted in an Irish dramatic tradition that is informed by the plays
of Gregory and Beckett, Sons of Ulster also transcends the boundaries of Ireland to draw
attention to issues of universal human rights. Relating the play to Brooks and Warren’s
ideas on universality (1958: xl): it addresses some of the ‘feelings and thinking’ of the
gay community north and south of the Irish border, as testified in two famous court
cases before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) during the composition of
the play.6 The discussion of these cases connects with McGuinness’s allusion to what
Ronen called ‘generalised space’, ‘one that has no concrete location in the fictional
space’ (Ronen, 1986: 428). Sons of Ulster advocates the need for cross-community
communication between Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants; it was written at
the time of the New Ireland Forum and the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference
that paved the way for the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985.7 However, Sons of Ulster
also engages with contemporary debates north and south of the border in the 1980s
about the need to respect one’s private and family life, as well as sexual orientation.
The geographical horizon of debates widened when two court cases—Dudgeon v.
Northern Ireland and Norris v. Ireland—were brought before the European Court of
Human Rights.8 Amid what Brian Singleton described as ‘the pandemic that was HIV’
6 David Cregan (2010) and Helen Heusner Lojek (2016) do not connect Sons of Ulster to these legal cases. Brian Singleton
(2011) menons the change in legislaon regarding same-sex relaonships in Ireland only in passing, with no reference
to Jerey Dudgeon’s or Senator David Norris’s court cases at the ECHR in Strasbourg.
7 Lionel Pilkington writes that, ‘in the wake of hosle unionist reacon to the New Ireland Forum’ of the 1980s and the
Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, the play was ‘an aempt to engage posively with the loyalist ideology of Ulster Prot-
estansm’ (Pilkington, 2001: 221). Since the early-1980s, especially aer the Hunger Strikes of Catholic internees in
Belfast’s Maze Prison in 1981, members of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, as well as Ulster’s Protestant
and Catholic communies, had been involved in negoang the terms of a possible resoluon to the polical situaon
in Northern Ireland.
8 On 22 May 1976, Jerey Dudgeon of Belfast lodged an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights to rule against
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern under Arcle 25 of the Convenon for the Protecon of Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, 1981). On 5 October 1983, human rights campaigner
and sexual equality acvist David Norris appealed to the ECHR to request the declaraon that criminal prosecuon of
Irish cizens for homosexual acts were unlawful under the Constuon since ‘secons 61 and 62 of the 1861 Act and
secon 11 of the 1885 Act were not connued in force since the enactment of the Constuon of Ireland’ (Norris v.
18
in the 1980s and the ‘contingent scaremongering and homophobia prompted by AIDS’
(Singleton, 2011: 120), these court cases advanced the cause of sexual equality on the
island of Ireland on an unprecedented level. The Court’s decisions in favour of Dudgeon
and Norris derived from a legal formulation of universal human rights as regulated in
the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950).
Given this background to the conception of the play, the ECHR in Strasbourg, near
France’s border with Germany, becomes the play’s ‘generalised space’, a space that is
evoked emotionally by the story of the play but has no concrete physical connection to
the story-space (Ronen, 1986: 428). Strasbourg and the debate about universal human
rights form the last and largest ‘frame’ of Sons of Ulster, built around all the other
smaller frames (or, in Issacharo’s terms, mimetic or diegetic dramatic spaces).
This large, ‘generalised frame’, as Ronen would call it, relates also to the memory-
space of Older Kenneth Pyper, who is the most Pearse-like character among the eight
young men of Ulster. McGuinness ingeniously places Pyper and Pearse at the centre
of the collective memory of their respective communities, who seem to worship them
in real-life regardless of their sexual orientation. Pearse and the rebels of Easter 1916
were commemorated on a Republican mural on West-Belfast’s Republican Falls Road,
as was the sacrifice of the 36th ‘Ulster’ Division on murals of the Loyalist Donegal Pass
in South-Belfast. On the one hand, the play engages with sentiments articulated during
Jerey Dudgeon’s case against the United Kingdom in the late 1970s (specifically
concerning the prohibition on homosexual relations in Northern Ireland) and Senator
David Norris’s case against Ireland during the 1980s, on the same grounds. On the other
hand, Sons of Ulster bravely confronts the anti-homosexual campaign ‘Save Ulster from
Sodomy’ that the prominent Ulster politician and religious leader Reverend Ian Paisley
ran at the time. As detailed in the Dudgeon v. United Kingdom reports (1981), the
campaign contributed to a social climate in Ulster that resulted in the assault of men in
same-sex relationships being harassed and assaulted within their own communities,
across communities, and by the local security forces in Northern Ireland. In Strasbourg,
the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of Jerey Dudgeon (1981) and
Senator David Norris (1988), following which a number of legal changes were introduced
Ireland, 1988). Both court cases went on for years, during which period the applicants’ claims of fear, threat, violence,
abuse and harassment were invesgated, whilst the Court heard the standpoint of the legal representaves of Ireland
and the United Kingdom. At the end, the ECHR ruled in favour of the applicants and declared that Irish and Northern
Irish law was in breach of Arcle 8 of the Convenon for the Protecon of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
(CPHRFF) (Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, 1981; Norris v. Ireland, 1988). Arcle 8 ruled that ‘everyone has the right to
respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’ (ECHR, 1950: 11). As a result of the ruling,
new laws were passed in Ireland and Northern Ireland, respecng the privacy of the individual in accordance with the
CPHRFF).
19
south and north of the Irish border. The Homosexual Oences (Northern Ireland) Order
of 1982 (No. 1536; N.I. 19) finally decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting
male adults; and the Criminal Law (Sexual Oences) Bill of 1993 was passed in the Irish
Parliament to the same eect, signed into law by President Mary Robinson on 30 June
1993 (Seanad Éireann debate, 1993). First and foremost, McGuinness’s Sons of Ulster is a
pièce de mémoire, a play about location and memory. However, as with Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot, it is also a pièce de résistance on both a local and a ‘global’ scale, deliberately
and daringly confronting issues of human freedom and human suering.
Conclusion
The three plays under consideration in this article were written and first produced in
markedly dierent historical locations and contexts. Gregory wrote The Workhouse
Ward for the new Irish National Theatre in Dublin at the start of the twentieth century.
Waiting for Godot was composed and performed in Paris in the aftermath of the Second
World War. McGuinness wrote Observe the Sons of Ulster during the 1980s, in response
to the ongoing violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland that broke out in the late
1960s. Beckett and McGuinness’s plays connect through their engagement with the two
World Wars of the twentieth century, and behind Gregory’s comedy lies the tragedy of
the Great Famine, arguably Ireland’s worst historical calamity. The themes of suering
and the seeming futility of human life link the three plays. This is obviously the case
for Godot and Sons of Ulster, but is also observable in that of the bed-ridden characters
dwelling in Cloon’s workhouse. Gregory’s two Michaels are able to make light of their
situation, and Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon play word games while they wait for
the enigmatic Mr. Godot. Awaiting battle near the Somme, McGuinness’s Ulstermen
also bicker with one another and joke about. Pyper and his comrades act out a fictional
Battle of Scarva, the mock-version of the Battle of the Boyne, to brighten their spirits.
As Emily Pine (2010: 62–63) notes, however, this comic meta-theatrical moment
foreshadows the young men’s tragic fate.
My aim in this article has been to show the significant connections between what
appear to be three very dierent, though seminal, plays by Irish-born dramatists of
the twentieth century. Each playwright engages with the European theatre tradition in
their own way, especially so in Gregory and Beckett’s interest in Racine’s work from the
Grand Siècle. Both adapt Racine’s characteristic dialogue between a character and its
confidant masterfully in The Workhouse Ward and En attendant Godot /Waiting for Godot.
Through these Irish antecedents, this dialogue form appears again in Sons of Ulster. The
interconnected lives of the main characters and the extent of their co-dependency is a
further measure of the common patterns that are woven into these three Irish plays.
20
McGuinness’s drama undoubtedly owes much to the Irish and German expressionist
drama as found in plays by Sean O’Casey, William Butler Yeats and Ernst Toller
(McAteer, 2010). Sons of Ulster also shares a debt to the French tradition of theatre that
interested both Augusta Gregory and Samuel Beckett.
Beyond these anities, all three plays display a curious interaction between their
respective dramatic spaces that allows the foregrounding of human stories carrying
universal value. This shared approach becomes evident when considering the plays
through Michael Issacharo and Ruth Ronen’s theories of dramatic and narrative
spatial arrangements. The geographical localities mentioned in the plays, located in
Ireland and further abroad in France and Russia, illustrate Issacharo and Ronen’s ideas
on mimesis, diegesis and narrative frames. Anne Saddlemyer’s notion of geographical
(en)distancing (1966: 33), through which she perceives Gregory’s dramatic technique,
further amplifies the operation of mimesis, diegesis and narrative frames in the plays.
Saddlemyer’s notion entails a playwright’s deliberate creation of distance between
the setting of a play and the human feelings, values and experiences that it expresses.
Whether written during the Irish Revival, after the Second World War in Europe, or
during the Ulster Troubles, the three plays discussed share vital common denominators
in their treatment of locality and universality.
21
Compeng Interests
The author has no compeng interests to declare.
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