Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Bertha, Csilla: Distortions of Character in John B. Keane's Peasant Plays

- 54being archetypal, embodying some deep-down drives of human nature. Comedy is introduced into the tragic plot mainly through langusage - a language that has been the greatest luxury of even the most miserable Irishmen, that has also been their compensation for hardships and their weapon against the nothingness their fate would impose on them. The villagers use this language in The Fiel

d as a weapon against the investigation of the police and the priest; their verbosity is a source of a lot of comedy but their skill is impressive. For outsiders - such as the policeman and the priest actually are - there is no way to get behind this language. With the disappearence of this old style of life in rural Ireland, certainly the folk or peasant plays will disappear, too. The best of them, however, can survive, not only as documents (although Keane's plays would serve very well as that), but as powerful visions of certain forms of human behaviour, including distortions of feelings and relationships, which often turn up in other circumstances or in different disguises, but which always remain possible within human situations and processes come to life; great passions or cool reason destroy their victims, values clash, past and present collide. In this world reality and fantasy penetrate into each other in such a way that the fantastic achieves reality and reality is given a fantastic, larger-than-life quality. BIBLIOGRAPHY BUSHRUI

, Suhail B.(ed.) (1972) Sunshine and the Moon's Delight, A Centenary Tribute to John M. Synge 1871 — 1909, Beirut, Lebanon CLARKE, Brenna Katz (1982) The Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play at the Abbey Theatre, Ann Arbor, MI CZINE, Mihály (1979) Móricz Zsigmond, Budapest