Pastoral Exhibits: Narrating Authenticities in Conor Mcpherson's the Weir‪.‬

With the international successes of Irish theatre since 1990 there has been a specific cycle of accomplishment that needs to be astutely interrogated, in order to account for these triumphs, from Martin McDonagh's Leenane trilogy, especially, The Lonesome West (1997) and The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) to Marie Jones's Stones in his Pockets (1999), from Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) to Conor McPherson's The Weir (1997), the play that will be my principal concern here. To group these dramas in any totalizing fashion would be incorrect, as they are all so radically different. But what all four writers provide are competing, commodified, and marketable versions of the pastoral. Different forms of Ireland's 'west', from north-west to southwest are shepherded in and there is both a surrender to and sundering of these pastoral idylls. Terry Gifford calls attention to Roger Sales's claims that the pastoral represents 'refuge, reflection, rescue, requiem, and reconstruction'. (1) According to Gifford, Sales's view is that the pastoral 'is essentially escapist in seeking refuge in the country and often also in the past: that it is a selective "reflection" on past country life in which old settled values are "rescued" by the text; and that all this functions as a simplified "reconstruction" of what is, in fact, a more complex reality.' (2) My aspiration is to test these categories and to propose that the pastoral can be less limiting and conservative, and indeed more challenging and original than suggested by Sales, especially when applied to The Weir. Particularly, I shall argue that McPherson's play is best understood as meta-pastoral. In general terms, Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford reminds us that the pastoral exists across the range of Irish literature: 'Even though de Valera's ideal of frugal self-sufficiency was the product of wartime necessity, it resonates ideologically with the image of Yeats raising his beans and gathering honey in a "small cabin" on an isolated island. Seamus Heaney has also dug into the rich peat of the Irish pastoral although (like de Valera but unlike Yeats) his roots have real earth on them.' (3) Commenting on the notion of the west in both Irish and American cultures, Luke Gibbons argues that both western worlds 'concern themselves centrally with sites of cultural survival, the sole remaining enclaves of traditional values in a world corrupted by progress and industrialization'. (4) This is a helpful, if incomplete, starting point.