Stories beyond the script: The theatre of Seamus Heaney

On the cusp of the millennium, Seamus Heaney reflected “We can’t keep on writing elegies.” Four years after receiving the Nobel Prize, the 60-year-old Irish poet was being interviewed by Channel 4’s Jon Snow in his home in Blackrock, Dublin. Snow asks him what kind of story is to be created out of the newfound but volatile peace in Ireland. Heaney responds that it is less his familiar Epic Poetry, with its armed heroes and war, but rather a Shakespeare history play. A story where some form of morality is wrestled out of the chaos and new possibilities are discovered within the state. Enter The Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes. Heaney’s adaptations of two Sophocles plays, Philoctetes and Antigone, sit in a liminal space within his literary canon. They are the only two-verse plays he ever wrote. The question arises. Why would a writer, whose poetic voice was so distinct and powerful, wish to bring his language to life on stage?

Finding the hope and the horror in these works of antiquity, Heaney pushes through their artistic and social potential

The Cure at Troy revisits the tale of the exiled Philoctetes. Trapped on the Lemnos Island with a wounded foot, the drama concerns Neoptolemus and Odysseus’s reluctant task of bringing Philoctetes back to the ravaged Troy and end the war. The Burial at Thebes revolves around the drama of Antigone. Rageful mourning fuels her attempt to bury the body of her brother, violating the laws imposed by her despotic uncle, the new Theban ruler Creon. Written in 1990 and 2005 respectively, these verse adaptations serve a fuller purpose than just translation: Heaney was a writer intensely connected to the natural world. His ability to capture the spirit and feeling of lands and seas made his career as a poet. Feeling for the physical world is present in these plays and woven together by a precise focus on troubled people and the troubled society that they strive in. 1990 and 2005 were years that whispered the future. They were times ripe for such bold works. For Heaney, the release of Nelson Mandela and the abomination of the Iraq war were the prime catalysts for his theatrical experiments. For one, A strident old man, holding his wife’s hand, waving a proud fist and marching the crowd behind him to a new place. The other, a war that shattered the new century’s pristine image before it even began. And so, two of the most consequential events in recent history are interwoven into Heaney’s drama. Take for instance Philoctetes’s first monologue, in which he scorns to Neoptolemus “They’ve let my name and my story be wiped out.” and pains that his “whole life has been / Just one long parody”. Being forgotten, Philoctetes’ insecurity that he has fossilised into insignificance, mirrors Mandela’s 20-year plight on Robben Island.

If theatre is supposed to bring light to a dark place, whether it be a canary in the coal mine or a collective breath of relief, Heaney’s two ventures in the theatre both aspire and achieve to this discipline

Finding the hope and the horror in these works of antiquity, Heaney pushes through their artistic and social potential. Adapting a Trojan history play in the early 90s, and then an Athenian tragedy in the early 2000s, was no easy feat and could have easily led to opaque works that mumbled its key messages under thick layers of verse. Finding clarity and a whirling pace, these two plays show that such specific poetic language can, if used for a specific story and purpose, break open the old possibilities of metrical rhythm in the theatre. The plays stick out because they answered the situation with something different. In times of political hope and turmoil, war and peace, Heaney elevated his poetry to theatrical form. The Burial at Thebes shouts at the hypocrisy and false morality of the ‘War on Terror’ era. Creon is styled as smug and self-obsessed, using and abusing his position of power towards spiteful aims. Antigone can be seen as representation of the Anti-War movement. Her hardnosed morality, declaring to the cowardly Ismene at the start of the play “What are Creon’s rights / When it come to me and mine?”. On the stage, Heaney’s clear voice hits to head and heart: time and space are never wasted. Even with the sparce stage directions, Heaney creates a comprehensible setting for his poetry to move within. The Cure at Troy with its “full thunderclap and eruption effects” occurring at vital moments in the narrative.

If theatre is supposed to bring light to a dark place, whether it be a canary in the coal mine or a collective breath of relief, Heaney’s two ventures in the theatre both aspire and achieve to this discipline. One is a burial, a solemn act of defiance. The other a cure, a coming to terms with the impossible, thereby making everything possible. From The Cure at Troy to The Burial at Thebes, a wounded soldier brings peace, and a crooked king destroys his own people. Pride is the main theme that Heaney keeps coming back to. In The Cure at Troy, pride is spread to “Our individual mortal lives.” It becomes democratised by Philoctetes’s selflessness. The Chorus dictates to him to “sail at last / Out of the bad dream of your past” and he follows. Mandela would three years later, declare a ‘Rainbow Nation’ where everybody’s differences should be respected, bringing those who imprisoned him and his people, into the political process. In The Burial at Thebes, pride is hoarded and makes men rotten, makes way for “the king of wrong” with Creon’s requiem in the last scene “Everything I’ve touched, I have destroyed.” We may look back at the post 2000s and see Heaney in 2005, warning that the ignorance and militarism of the Iraq war is a cautionary tale that should never be repeated, and sigh knowing that these evils have, if anything, grown fatter and more acidic in the world. And yet the theatre of Seamus Heaney is, by the end of both these plays, a theatre of hope. Hope that “a crippled trust might walk”, that broken men can drag themselves from bitter despair and that brave sisters can defy evil kings to simply bury their brothers. If we look for a line that encapsulates Heaney’s theatre, it is the famous resolve that “Once in a lifetime / the long for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.”