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Music and the Irish Imagination

 | 
Thierry Dubost
, 
Alexandra Slaby

Staging Irish music

Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians: A Choral Theatrical Celebration of the Dead

Matthieu Kolb

Abstract

Frank McGuinness has described Carthaginians as an attempt to celebrate the dead, who are in this case not only the victims of Derry’s 1972 Bloody Sunday but a group of fictional traumatised survivors and witnesses testifying to the distressing, bewildering experience of living in a disjointed, violent world of seemingly defunct history, mythologies and symbols. This ritual of celebration is also one of the most musical plays of McGuinness’s in which music and songs are meant to heal the dead both on stage and in the audience. To this effect, the dramatist resorts to Dido’s dirge, from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, to both lyricise and distance the characters’ grief. Besides, his analytical and thematic treatment of songs throughout the play contributes to dramatising a cultural crisis of symbolical representation and lyrical expression epitomised by the sectarian strife in Derry. To resolve that representational crisis, McGuinness relies ambivalently on the theatre space as an imaginative choral space of celebration.

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Estratto del testo

Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians, first performed at the Peacock Theatre in 1988, tells the story of three women and four men from the Catholic community of Derry holding a week-long vigil in Derry’s Creggan graveyard. Years after Bloody Sunday,1 which they all witnessed as civil rights marchers, they are waiting for the dead to rise. It quickly turns out that the dead to be resurrected are themselves, the mourners, showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder such as survivor guilt, suicidal inclinations, feelings of foreshortened life and death in life.2 Their funereal vigil does not only enable them to assert an imperious desire for justice and vent their grudges against the oppressive culture of sectarian hatred and bigotry within their own community, but is also a therapeutic ritual: they try to liven up by telling jokes and singing, playing quiz games, partying and acting in The Burning Balaclava, a camp play-within-the-play parodying stereotyped Troubles drama.3 Eventua...

Autore

Matthieu Kolb has been teaching at the université de Haute Bretagne (Rennes II) since 1997. He completed his PhD thesis, Espaces dramatiques et postdramatiques dans le théâtre de célébration de Frank McGuinness [Dramatic and Postdramatic Spaces in Frank McGuinness’s Theatre of Celebration], at the université de Caen – Basse-Normandie in 2012. His research focuses on contemporary Irish theatre.

 

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