ABSTRACT
Yeats’s poetic and profoundly oedipal drama, Purgatory is an extreme theatrical illustration of the maxim, “On the stage, it is always now”. Purgatory brings off the feat of making present, of “re-presenting”, simultaneously with the present of the play, events from even before the conception of the two initially alive protagonists: an Old Man and his sixteen-year-old son. Thanks to the central conceit of the play, both become witnesses to the original parental coupling between the Old Man’s father and mother, who are thus the grandparents of the young boy. The Old Man, having himself knifed his mother’s husband fifty years ago, is still welded to and tormented by the fantasy that each repetition of the ghostly sexual act nevertheless involves a renewal of sexual pleasure. Diseased fantasy displaces dreaming and imagination in the central character: the Old Man, with his adhesion to the sins, figures and deeds of the past and to the “dreaming” of his dead mother.
