ABSTRACT
In the final moments of Martin McDonagh’s play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a cat named Wee Thomas saunters on stage. The audience gasps at this moment as it races to re-adjust its expectations and anticipate how the cat’s presence may re-shape a play very near its end. All of the play’s action emanates from a single premise: the death of this animal. The cat’s entrance is a startling moment, but also a strangely familiar one in Irish drama. Bringing presumably dead characters to life on stage has proved such a durable theatrical ploy for Irish playwrights that it has reached the level of dramatic trope. Even in 1913 Cornelius Weygandt referred to it as “a very old motive [motif ], and familiar in the meliorized form that made it known to the theatre in ‘Conn the Shaughraun’ (1875) [sic]. Before that, Crofton Croker had given it currency in ‘The Corpse Watches,’ among those outside of the circles in which it was a familiar folk-story” (Weygandt 168). Indeed, when Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun toured Australia, audiences were invited to “Come and see a real Irish wake.” Oscar Wilde brought Jack Worthing’s supposedly dead wicked brother Ernest on stage in Act Two of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Synge had the death-feigning Dan Burke sit up in his deathbed to confront the stranger his young wife invited into their home in In the Shadow of the Glen (1903). Four years later, the storied, bloodied but still very much alive father of Christy Mahon arrived at the O’Flaherty shebeen to undo the reputation of his son in The Playboy of the Western World (1907). The title of Thomas Kilroy’s The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche (1968) foretells a more recent iteration of this “very old motive.”
