Frank McGuinness was born in Buncrana, County Donegal, one of the three Ulster counties divided from Northern Ireland into the Republic Ireland in the 1920 partition agreement. Donegal’s geographical connection with its vicinities is quite embarrassing, because a very limited amount of its borderline is connected with the Republic, while it shares a large amount of border with Northern Ireland. As Eamonn Jordan further states, “it is this borderland consciousness, this remote zone into which McGuinness leads his audience and his characters that gives his plays their poetic and confrontational quality” (viii). This geographical position makes it easier for Donegal inhabitants to trade with Northern people or to commute across the border for work, hence resulting in ambivalent emotions when vehement conflicts between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists occur in Northern Ireland. Politically, Donegal citizens are identified with Catholic nationalism, but in everyday life, they are frequently interactive with the Protestants on the other side of the border. Instead of
13 The term “Northern Ireland political drama” is borrowed from the title of D. E. S. Maxwell’s 1990 essay published in Modern Drama.
being troubled by Donegal’s geographical and political in-between-ness, however, McGuinness takes delight in such a queer and strange position. In a 1987 interview, McGuinness says that “I was born in the North, which is politically classified as the South, so I’ve got that lovely confusion – I like confusion a lot” (Mikami 3). Taking pleasure in confusion or border-crossing is a typical feature of queer temperance. As my following chapters would show, McGuinness’s plays, in a way, can be as queer as Donegal’s geopolitical position.
Donegal’s geopolitical in-between-ness nurtures a local theater that is very much concerned about Irish identity politics and Northern conflicts. Actually, since the Celtic Renaissance, large numbers of Irish dramatists have been concerned about identity politics on their native land, and Irish drama almost becomes the genre that best articulates political problems. The Irish question,14 such as the problems of Irish-British politics, Catholic-Protestant ethnicity and Southern-Northern identity, is frequently represented and reflected in Irish literature, which becomes what Brian Graham calls “an arena of political discourse and action” (4). In Donegal, when it comes to political theatres dealing with the Irish question, McGuinness is one of the representatives. Like other Irish playwrights in the “arena of political discourse,” in his early plays McGuinness deals with issues of Irishness, the philosophy of national identity, sectarian conflicts, and Ireland’s experience as a colony to Britain.15 When being questioned in an interview whether or not the politics of Ireland is deliberately examined in his plays, McGuinness concedes that he “would no more shy away from it” than he “would embrace it” (qtd. in Lojek 98).
McGuinness’s plays could be as “queer” as Donegal’s geographical position is.
McGuinness’s artistic uniqueness among Irish playwrights, as Helen H. Lojek notes,
14 According to Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture, the term “the Irish question” is first used in the later part of the 19th century to “refer to the long, difficult and often violent relationship between Ireland and Britain” (276).
15 Jordan summarizes the topics of McGuinness’s plays as the follows: “the constitution of the male mind, the role of women in Irish society, the homosexual imagination, the function of art in society, the legacy of religion, the centrality of memory to the Irish psyche, the importance of fiction in the lives of individuals and the possibility of people accepting, freeing or forgiving themselves” (v).
lies in the fact that McGuinness “has brought to the Irish stage characters who are openly gay” (159). David Cregan also offers that no other Irish playwrights “deal with gender diversity and sexual defiance as consistently as McGuinness” (“Irish
Theatrical Celebrity” 671). Christopher Murray uses the word “chameleon” to
describe McGuinness, praising McGuinness for he often “switch[es] points of view in gender and in politics” (Twentieth-Century Irish Drama 204). In reality as well as in plays, McGuinness often travels across borders of all kinds, or to borrow the very words in the title of Riana O’Dwyer’s article, McGuinness often “dance[s] in the borderlands.” As a homosexual, McGuinness transgresses hetero-nomativity not only in reality but also in his drama.16 In most of McGuinness’s early plays, gender and sexuality often highlight the national and ethnic problems. Because McGuinness often depends on gender and sexual issues in his exploration of Irish identity politics, the political themes in McGuinness’s plays can be best approached through an
examination of gender divides and sexual politics.
When analyzing “Northern Ireland political plays,” D. E. S. Maxwell proposes “a list of plays in which ‘the Troubles’ are directly the subject,” and McGuinness’s
Carthaginians is included in the list (1). Carthaginians is premiered for Dublin
Theatre Festival in Peacock Theatre, 1988, and it is often regarded as the companion piece to Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching toward the Somme (shortened asObserve the Sons henceforth), a play premiered also in Peacock Theatre, 1986, two
years before Carthaginians.17 The two plays deal with the national identities of Catholics and Protestants respectively, and both can be “Northern Ireland political drama” if we do not confine the term to the period of the Troubles. Apart from the political concerns, the central characters in the two plays, Pyper and Dido, are both
16 It is an open secret that McGuinness is a homosexual. When Joe Jackson interviewed Frank McGuinness in1990, they “had to rely on subtextual hints when it came to the sugject of his [McGuinness’s] homosexuality,” but when Jackson interviewed McGuinness again in 2002 and talked about McGuinness’s relationship with Philip, McGuinness was “so relaxed in terms of referring, in public, to his homosexuality” (Jackson, paragraph 2).
17 According to Mikami, Observe the Sons and Carthaginians are “often thought of as a diptych” (9).
homosexuals. Apart from their homosexuality, they both have the characteristics of queers – ridiculing gender and sexual norms, or having campy qualities. Observe the
Sons and Carthaginians are two representative plays of McGuinness’s early works
that deal with Irish politics and modern nationalism with gender and sexual issues, and thus Chapter Two and Chapter Three will focus on the political implications lurking behind the intersections of gender, sexuality and nationalism in the two plays.Observe the Sons impresses the Irish audience and brings the playwright overnight fame because, as a playwright born in and educated with Catholic
background, McGuinness depicts in his subject matter the mentality of Protestants in Northern Ireland. The play tells the story of eight Ulstermen volunteering to serve in the British army in the First World War under the leadership of Edward Carson, seven of whom are dead after the battle of Somme in France. The only surviving character is Pyper, who is not conforming to the military rituals in the beginning of the play and mocks patriarchal military culture by taking advantage of other soldiers’ homophobia.
When deriding the gender, sexual, and Protestant stereotypes in the barrack, Pyper’s initial inconformity as well as his homosexuality renders him the characteristics of a queer. After Pyper is rescued by one of his fellow soldiers, however, Pyper is
assimilated into the patriotic military camp. At the same time, Pyper’s initial distrust of Protestantism strikes a chord with the other soldiers, which leads to intimate male-male friendship in the barrack. The patriarchal construction of the military camp exemplifies the “respectability” found in modern nationalism, and meanwhile the burgeoning of very intimate male-male friendship and implicit homosexuality is what Sedgwick calls “homo-social desire.” Hetero-nomativity of nationalism is challenged by Pyper in the first half of the play, and in the second half, the ambivalent
relationship between homosexuality and nationalism is displayed. From the soldiers’
emotional transformation, the play presents the horrors of modern nationalism, which calls for the transgression over such fixated ideologies as modern nationalism.
In Observe the Sons, McGuinness assesses the dark side of nationalism without
making a narrow criticism on Ulster unionism, and he explores various forms of male friendship and male eros inflamed by chivalry, patriotism, heroism and unconditioned sacrifice. The characters in Observe the Sons join the army in a sense to fulfill the
“ideal of manliness” demanded by modern nationalism, but with the war going on and death impending, manliness and masculinity become a promise of something fatal rather than something glorious and heroic. McGuinness, by elegizing the death and memorizing the deeds of loyalists with humanistic compassions, reminds his audience that modern nationalism not simply privileges men by subordinating women but also victimizes men as well. In patriarchy, both men and women are victims, which
resonates with Allan G. Johnson’s definition of patriarchy as “a system: an it, not a he, a them, or an us” (27).
Probably because of the contrast between McGuinness’s Catholic background and the play’s Protestant topic, most critics and drama commentators evaluating
Observe the Sons often focus on how unionist psyche can be fairly tackled in depths
by a Catholic writer. Christopher Murray says that “Observe is neither condescending towards unionism nor a covert attack on its possibly jingoist elements. It is about transformation and change” (Twentieth-Century Irish Drama 205). Nicholas Grene also states that Observe the Sons “seeks an understanding of the psychological, spiritual and political ethos of Protestant unionism” (247). Moreover, the drama commentator of The Irish Times, Victoria White, cites eight critics to explain howObserve the Sons stands brilliantly as an exploration of “Northern Protestantism’s
central folk memories” (12).18 Critics noticing gender and sexual issues in the play are relatively few. Being one of the exceptions, Jordan mentions that Observe the Sons is “as much a reflection of a destructive masculinity as a celebration of comradeship, community, strength and defiance” (25). More significantly, David Creganaccentuates the importance of sexuality in this play, proffering that Observe the Sons
18 Victoria White published this article before the 1994 revival of McGuinness’s Observe the Sons in Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Quoting and summarizing earlier critical reviews about the play, White’s article on The Irish Times is to promote the revival.
“exploits the historic ‘defiance’ of homosexuality, using it as a dramaturgical device to puncture pressure points in Irish history and disseminate ideologies that have become congested and stagnant in the politics of both gender and sexuality” (“Irish Theatrical Celebrity” 672). Because national politics is interwoven with sexual
politics in Observe the Sons, it is possible to unearth some more unnoticed dimensions of the play by focusing on the nexus of modern nationalism and sexuality.