Dead men talking: Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2004 by Tom Herron

In a tiny stone church On the desolate headland A lost tribe is singing "Abide With Me." (1)

PYPER: Again. As always, again. Why does this persist? What more have we to tell each other? I remember nothing today. Absolutely nothing. (Silence.) (2)

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PROVOKED INTO SPEECH AGAIN, impelled to remember again, an old man begins again. Darkness gives way to a spot-lit bed in which Pyper wakes, in which an actor playing Pyper acts out awakening. He has been here before. He is, and always will be, here at the opening of the play. What becomes of him between performances? What becomes of him, for that matter, during performances? The opening scene of the play marks only a new circuit of repetition for Pyper who once again returns to some nightmare ground and the moment of annihilation of his companions: "Those I belonged to, those I have not forgotten, the irreplaceable ones" (9). He dwells in, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, "homogeneous, empty time," returning at the beginning of the play to the site of catastrophe itself and also to countless repetitions enacted ever since. And this condition of past-present, in equal parts monotonous and urgent, is projected onto a future that has as much to do with time past as with time to come: "There would be, and there will be no surrender. The sons of Ulster will rise and lay their enemy low, as they did at the Boyne, as they did at the Somme" (10). This could be a scene out of Samuel Beckett: an old man disjointedly in, outside, across time--soliloquizing into the dark--unwillingly but ineluctably in speech--bound to repeat the same old story--up against it--amongst the ruins--alone. Not entirely alone as we shall see. He is being watched, observed, and not only by us, the audience. We too are being watched, and not only by him. But where exactly is he? When is or was he? Who is he? He is one who returns: a revenant!

We discover soon enough that the nightmare ground is the Battle of the Somme; that his lost comrades are the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division; that his time and his place are, to keep things straightforward for the moment, present-day "Ulster": "We discourage visitors. Security. Men my age have been burned in their beds. Fenian cowards" (11). And to be sure, McGuinness's play is "about" the condition of present-day Ulster, "about" the unloved and unwanted community called loyalist or unionist, and "about" the sense of betrayal voiced most eloquently by Ian Paisley and Frank McCusker. (3) It is "about" all these, and more. But this "about"--if we take the word as a sign of semantic plenitude--should not for a moment distract us from the play's devastating staging of insubstantiality, of meagerness. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme is--as much as anything produced by Beckett, almost--a theater of attenuation: it is "about" what happens when (you think) everything is taken away from you, when (you think) everything is destroyed. The parentheses indicate caution, because in fact the sky hasn't fallen in yet. Pyper, the last of the sons of Ulster, doesn't realize that. He sees no further than the ruins. And because of this inability to imagine a future anything other than incarcerated by the past, his predicament and that of the community he stands (in) for are in fact much closer to minor farce than the tragic conditions he imagines both himself and that community to be enduring.

And just to complicate matters, Observe the Sons of Ulster is a theater of ghosts. From the opening to the closing moments we are in the company of ghosts, and it is with the implications of this that my essay is chiefly concerned. In various ways I ask the question: what happens when a community is figured as spectral, when even the most substantial elements of a culture are rendered phantasmagoric? It is an obvious question, but yet it has not been asked before--at least not by the many critics of a play that has come to assume a central place in Irish theater. Like the political entity of Ulster itself, the play is a kind of impossibility; it is a performance that hardly exists at all. The stage is peopled by ghosts. The world is a barracks, a trench, a ruined temple. In ways analogous to the uncanny realization when watching or reading Brian Friel's Translations that what is there on stage or on the page is in fact the carcass of a language and a culture (so dead is the "indigenous" language that it requires translation into English in order to communicate anxiety about the threat to it from English), (4) Observe the Sons carries out a similarly uncanny coup de theatre. Everything we see--the men of the 36th, their cause, their spirit, their identity as men and as Protestants--exists now only as abandoned remains--"Ulster lies in rubble at our feet. The temple of the Lord is in darkness. He has ransacked his dwelling" (12)--only as ghosts, neither finally dead nor fully alive. What Observe the Sons rehearses is the realization that what McGuinness calls "the spirit of identity that there is in the Ulster Protestant community" (5) has led that community as a political entity to the edge of extinction. That "spirit" which provided sustenance and cohesion in times of emergency was in fact a desperate, phantasmatic performance: the rituals, the parades, the commemorations, the bonfires and the burning of effigies, all that maintained the trappings of power produced for that community what were no more than the substantializing effects of "spirit," "superiority," "destiny," and "community" itself. The whole show took place over an abyss. As Tom Paulin puts it in "The Defenestration of Hillsborough": "All our victories / were defeats really." (6) And the ultimate threat to that community, which over the years was forced to live itself out in a grotesque performance of stereotype, comes not so much from the hated Fenians as from those other even more intractable enemies: the impossibilities embedded within its own sense of history and destiny. The soldiers' sense of themselves as members of the elect, as true sons of Ulster--"It is we the Protestant people who have always stood alone ... and triumphed, for we are God's chosen" (10)--provides no defense against military and subsequent political defeat. In the final moments of the play, in an astounding anachrony, the Protestant community is dealt two calamitous and near-simultaneous blows: annihilation at the Somme and defeat by the political enemies of Ulster. It seems there is no way back from the darkness that descends on the ruins of Ulster at the close. But as the ending, which is not an ending, folds back into the play's beginning we realize that the drama will inevitably be repeated again ... and again. In this way the demand embodied in the play's title is, to an extent, enacted: we observe the men marching to the Somme and to their death, and then we see it again, and then again. This is the vision of the play: men marching toward the Somme in homogeneous, empty time: they marched, they are marching, they will march.