Presenting Bloody Sunday Through Metatheatre

In the second half of the 20^th century,with the outbreak of the Northern Ireland Conflict,Ireland fell into a 30-year-long chaos.Irish theatre responded to this special period with unique characteristics.Irish playwrights began to reflect on national history and identity.Their works focused on the formation of historical memory,the confusion of identity,and the healing of national trauma.Theatrical forms also demonstrated rich metatheatrical characteristics.With the power of art,Irish playwrights aimed to inspire the audience to transcend political or religious opposition,to embrace multiple cultures and identities,and to heal the historical wounds.Metatheatre originates from the playwrights’self-consciousness,and its essence is to lead the audience to“see double”.The playwright tends to endows his main character with self-consciousness,and by allowing such a character to dramatize himself and people around,the playwright aims to break the audience’s illusion of the stage and urge them to see the illusion and absurdity of real life,thus changing their ideas and behaviors.Typical metatheatrical techniques include play-within-the-play,role-playing of characters,etc.It should also be noted that metatheatre is not immutable.Playwrights’self-consciousness keeps changing all the time,that’s why metatheatre tends to demonstrate different characteristics.Interpreting Irish theatre from the perspective of metatheatre would lead to a better understanding of how Irish theater responded to the Northern Ireland Conflict,and how different Irish playwrights engaged in Ireland’s culture and historical process.Under the guidance of Abel and Hornby’s metatheatre theory,this paper attempts to interpret Brian Friel’s The Freedom of The City and Frank McGuiness’s Carthaginians.The paper mainly focuses on the metatheatrical structures as well as the“self-conscious”characters of the two plays.Different metatheatrical effects achieved by the playwrights and their purposes will also be discussed.Chapter I is an introduction,which mainly reviews the historical background of the Northern Ireland Conflict,and the general characteristics of Irish theatre in this specific period.The development of metatheatre theory will also be introduced.Chapter II would analyze the unique metatheatrical structures of the two plays,which are the multiple narratives in The Freedom of The City and play-within-the-play in Carthaginian.The purpose of this chapter is to show that in the specific historical period of the Northern Ireland Conflict,Irish theatre presents the characteristics of"discretion","discontinuity"and"fragmentation"in structure,which is a reflection of the turbulent reality.And by adopting different metatheatrical structures,Friel and McGuiness show different motivations for participating in the process of national development.Chapter III conducts a detailed analysis of Skinner and Dido,two main characters with"fluid"identity and"playwright’s consciousness".The creation of self-dramatizing characters is a common strategy of Friel and McGuiness to fight against the rigid grand narrative and narrow identity.However,compared with Skinner’s ridicule and disdain for power discourse,Dido exhibits stronger rebellious spirit because he attempts to find out the source of the trauma and violence,and engage in the rewriting of national narrative and identity.Friel and McGuiness’s different characterization reveals different efforts they made in leading their nation out of hard times.Chapter IV is the conclusion.This chapter gives an overall examination of the two plays in the context of Ireland’s transition from the post-colonial period to the era of globalization.As the successor of the Yeatisian generation,Friel is the first to discover the unreliability of national narrative and memory.By attacking grand narratives,he attempts to bring attention to the common humanity that has been neglected.Since then on,more and more Irish playwrights began to join the movement.Inspired by his predecessors,Frank McGuinness paid more attention to healing national wounds.By rewriting national identity,he aimed to bring Ireland a diverse future.In sum,both the playwrights employed metatheatrical strategies in their works to motivate the audience to assume the role of participator and reformer instead of spectator and puppet.