Field Day Theatre Company
Signature is presenting Sam Shepard’s A Particle of Dread
the collective imagination. And of course, A Particle of
(Oedipus Variations) with Field Day, a renowned theatre
Dread is about collective guilt. The thing is that everybody
and publishing company that was founded in 1980 in the
has that sense of guilt, even the noncombatants. You’re in
then war-torn city of Derry, Northern Ireland, by Academy
kind of an emotional shutdown during times of conflict,
Award Nominee Stephen Rea and Tony Award-winning
because it’s impossible to be engaged all the time with it,
with so many terrible, terrible things happening.
playwright Brian Friel for the purposes of staging Friel’s
play Translations. Following the huge success of that play,
Field Day quickly grew to incorporate Irish intellectuals of
international stature and outlook, including the late poet
and Nobel Prize Winner Seamus Heaney, author and critic
Seamus Deane, poet Tom Paulin, musician and filmmaker
Davy Hammond, and playwright Tom Kilroy. Field Day
sought to make a cultural intervention into the political and
cultural discourse in Ireland and was particularly motivated
by the breakdown of the society in Northern Ireland, which,
since 1969, had descended into a seemingly unbreakable
pattern of rebellion and repression, a pattern that lasted
until the mid-1990s. In 1979, Friel had stated in an interview:
“I think that out of [a] cultural state, a possibility of a political
state follows. That is always the sequence.” He also declared
that political conflict is “all about language.” Thus, from the
outset, and for over thirty years, Field Day has sought to
present an alternative analysis of Irish cultural history that
highlights the shortcomings of the official narrative.
The company has maintained a two-pronged approach to
its cultural redefinition of Ireland, comprising
Signature: Field Day has done two other
Greek adaptations, The Cure at Troy and
The Riot Act, making this your third. What do
you think draws you to these ancient stories?
SR: These stories have lasted because they
deal with human and political situations that
recur throughout history. What the Greeks
do is to elevate the discourse to a very high
level where you’re not talking only about
parochial little squabbles, and offer us the
questions that we need to ask of ourselves
in these awful situations. Our recourse to
Greek plays is not just a theatrical action, but
theatre and publishing. It is a mission without
end, and though the focus is on Ireland, the
implication is global. As the schoolmaster
Hugh says in Friel’s Translations:
“It is not the literal past,
the facts of history,
that shape us, but images
of the past embodied
in language...we must
never cease renewing
those images; because
once we do, we fossilize.”
a deep need to understand what has happened to us.
Field Day has been concerned not to tie itself to any ideological
This was a revelation to me when I was working in theatre in
mast. Dismantling stereotypes through art and analysis has
the 1980s—that in a world of distorted languages, we were
been a key objective, alongside the conviction that theatre in
able to ask complex questions in this shared space, and that’s
Ireland—or indeed anywhere—can originate outside the
what theatre does so well. And that’s why we need theatre,
metropolis. Every Field Day play has premiered in the small
particularly in these conflict and post-conflict situations.
regional city of Derry, and the repertoire contains versions of the
ancient classics adapted for local audiences, including Heaney’s
Signature: Has playing Oedipus given you a
different perspective?
SR: In the aftermath of something like the Troubles, you’re
constantly questioning. Some deaths upset you more than
others. Why should that be? I think it’s extraordinarily
painful to live like that, and to defend a position in it.
It’s also very hard to change it. We just need to keep
offering language. Brian Friel said, “It’s all about lan-
The Cure at Troy—a version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, and Tom
Paulin’s The Riot Act—a version of Sophocles’s Antigone.
In common with previous Field Day plays, A Particle of Dread
explores a core idea: that understanding language is the essence
of understanding competing histories. Whether read in ancient
Greek, or in the contemporary American and Irish vernaculars of
Shepard’s new version, the Oedipus story addresses the idea of
collective guilt arising from unresolved historical trauma—
it’s an idea that particularly resonated with the original Derry
guage.” I said, “What, theatre?” And he said, “No, the
audience in 2013, though the message is timeless and universal.
whole thing. The whole thing. It’s all about language.” n
– Ciarán Deane, Field Day n
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