Delighted to see Mark Phelan has started a blog – and is kicking off with thoughts on Jimmy Fay’s production of Stewart Parker’s Pentecost.
Perhaps the greatest play to have been inspired by decades of political conflict here, Pentecost is much more than a mere “Troubles play”. It is a history play, but it’s a history play about the future. In almost all of Parker’s drama, history is embodied in the spectral form of phantasmal figures; ghosts, wraiths and revenants all wreathe his work and embody the ways in which the past remains present, especially in this benighted part of Ireland. European drama has long been haunted by ghosts, “what is this thing that appears night after night after night?” says a frighted entry of a certain someone’s father, but the spirits that appear in Pentecost in the form of Lilly – as well as the ghostly revenants of a generation of dead children- are not the vengeful shades of Hamlet, but hopeful harbingers of reconciliation, redemption and forgiveness. Pentecost dramatises breakdown; both…
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