Hana, Taraie-Wood; (2018) Buried politics: The Ferryman, the Troubles, and the Disappeared. Moveable Type , 10 , Article 5. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.084.

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Abstract

In the first academic article on the play, I will argue that The Ferryman is a modern tragedy that uses the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland – and specifically, the stories of the Disappeared – to explore the pathology of silence, as repressed truths transform into tragic power. The Ferryman’s title conjures the image of Charon in the underworld of Virgil’s The Aeneid, a literary link which gestures towards the national epic. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Aeneid Book VI describes the underworld as a space for unveiling silenced truths buried beneath the earth. The Ferryman adopts this chthonic structure, as personal, familial, and national politics buried within the Carney family and the wider political discourse resurface as memory, confession, and ghosts, driving the characters’ tragic actions. The play’s setting in the borderland of County Armagh roots rebellion in the soil, as its silenced politics finally rise in rumours, rhetoric, and radicalism. Sean Carney argues that modern tragedies unearth ‘aspects of humanity that have been repressed or disavowed, “buried”, so to speak, within the public discourse; in a sense they are public acts of mourning, with an understanding that public mourning is a political act’.7 In its final act, The Ferryman enacts justice onstage and creates a dramatic space in which a silenced part of history can be exhumed, debated, and publically mourned, playing out the politics of revenge that remains unchallengeable in the public sphere.

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