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

vitality of his dialogue's. But Synge's Ireland is a disappearing world and his successors aie often concerned as much with the backwardness and contradictions of life untouched for centuries as with changes from bad to worse and the juxtaposition of the old and the new. These playwrights either present the passing of a civilization with brooding melancholy and nostalgia, like Michael J. Molloy, or "transmute old Ireland into fantasy", like, for instance George Fitzmaurice, while others, such as John B. Keane, "show it grappling with the modern world". (BUSHRUI, 1972: 273) By the time Keane entered the literary, or rather the theatrical world, the genre of peasant drama had more or less lust its vigour. His first play, Sive (1959), created a real sensation: "the rediscovery by the urbanized Ireland of the rural background from whence it had sprung was quite traumatic in the age which saw the establishment of Shannon Hew Town, the first jumbo jets carrying ttie Irish insignia, Use inauguration of the television service, and the first Programme for Economic Expansion." (FITZ-SIMON, 19B3:191) Keane has his greatest strength in revitalizing the peasant drama, although his later plays break away from this traditional line. In his plays depicting the past and the changing present of his region (county Kerry, in the South-West of Ireland, a long way away from Dublin), where life is "larger than life" and is truer and richer than in Dublin (HÜGAN, 1967: 208), Sue excels in his vigorous realism of character, situation and language,, based on observation of, and indeed, participation in, country life. A realism that does not refrain from inherent brutality and violence but is often nievnted through some imaginative theatrical scene, giving Die ordinary a touch of the mythic or the ritual. The world of the Irish peasant play is a strange one with its own laws and values, showing deep kinship in reality and in literature with many aspects of Hungarian peasant life. The cruel and savage rules directing this hal if-pagan, Kwlf-Lhristian life are partly necessary for survival, but under this necessity human life often becomes distorted into some tiling wild and inhuman. The plays of Synge already border on this wildness and inhumanity but the author's understanding sympathy softens the sharpness of his criticism and irony. Keane

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