Evacuating the Museum: the Crisis of Playwriting in Ulster

Abstract

When the current spate of ‘Troubles’ began in Northern Ireland over a decade ago. it was fashionable to lament the lack of plays about the political and military situation there. Now there is no shortage of plays, but a persistent worry – here articulated by Philomena Muinzer – that most of them do little to analyze the events. let alone to suggest a resolution of a crisis which is coming to be accepted as somehow endemic and inevitable. This fatalism, she suggests, is because the plays either fit all too easily into old forms which sanctify antiquated assumptions, or mould no less constricting new ‘conventions’ – thus creating a dramaturgical vicious circle which perpetuates the political. Taking a cross-section of recent plays about Ulster, she thus suggests how they share a body of themes and concerns which ‘become part of an inherited dramatic fabric, which then prejudices new political analysis and new creative thinking alike’. Philomena Muinzer herself grew up in Northern Ireland, and subsequently attended the Universities of Princeton. Essex, and Yale. In 1982 she received an Arts Council bursary on the strength of her play Together Against Him. and she is currently working on a new play about the Troubles.