Ourselves Alone by Anne Devlin - Case Study Example

Your full April 11, “Ourselves Alone” by Anne Devlin Written by Anne Devlin, the play “Ourselves Alone” is a wonderful play set in Northern Ireland. It shows the period of mid 1980s when there were many tensions between the Protestant and the Catholic, and Ireland was in trouble. Devlin’s play depicts her own experiences at Belfast during this Protestant-Catholic tension, when a lot of kind people were forced to enter dilemmas on daily basis. The play consists of no fewer than 15 scenes, and the title of the play has been plainly translated from “Sinn Fein”. The setting of the play is generally around Andersonstown, West Belfast, with succinct side tracks to South Belfast and Dublin. The play has been produced, directed, and enacted manifold times. One presentation is by Crash Box Players and Lost Angels, directed by Steven Friedland, and produced by Kathleen Dunn, Laura Niemi and Elise Robertson. The cast of the play includes Jake Alston (as Danny/Second Soldier), Kelly Boulware (as Cathal/First Soldier), Ed Cunningham (as John McDermot), Kathleen Dunn (as Donna), Darrel Guilbeau (as Gabriel/Policeman), David Lane (as musician), Jack Mungovan (as Liam/Musician), Laura Niemi (as Frieda), Elise Robertson (as Josie), Joel Stoffer (as Joe Conran), and Joseph Whipp (as Malachy). The cast is very talented, giving extra beauty to the theme of the play. The play made its appearance in London during 1985-86. Anne Devlin, the daughter of a controversial labor leader in Belfast, Paddy Devlin, has attempted to accomplish a surmountable job telling the story of the Belfast when it was seeing some of the worst days of its history, through weaving of the story related to three Catholic women, whose lives underwent many changes brought about by the ongoing incidents and happenings in Belfast. Anne Devlin shows, in the play, how men reveal their macho by converting the society into a war zone. These men also included those who were struggling for the Irish independence, who were unknowingly converting the community into a zone of never-ending siege. Culture was being ignored. Family lives were suffering. “…where women suffer a double oppression--subjugated as much by their brothers, fathers, husbands, and lovers as by the Brits. Ourselves Alone tries to expose the ugliness of the Belfast blood knot”, writes Adler (para.2). It was hard to decide where Belfast was heading to. The storyline revolves around three ordinary Catholic women, including two Andersonstown sisters, Donna and Josie McCoy, and their brother’s wife, Frieda, who has been a Long Kesh prisoner, as shown in the play’s early scenes. Donna is kind of superficial, Josie possesses a strange hidden agenda, and Frieda is shown struggling with life in order to bring up her infant alone, when her husband is in prison. Frieda’s pro-IRA father has disowned her, and she wants to be a singer but her father sends her into the arms of a Workers Party organizer and anti-IRA zealot. All three of the Catholic women wish and struggle to escape the political peril that is affecting their lives, but they cannot take a step because they are bound to the family loyalties residing in their hearts. Their complex relationships with men are also a hurdle. Donna waits for her lover for five years who is in prison, but when he comes out of the jail, she finds that he is not the kind of man who was worth waiting for. Josie has been a courier when rebellion against the British was going on, and has interest in politics of the trouble going in the Ireland; yet, she is trapped inside her wish for a romantic relationship. She fancies the men in her life, who are there to subjugate her. She is in love with an IRA leader, but is also in a relationship. She gets pregnant with her partner. What is interesting about the play is that Devlin’s Catholic women are not the rebellious heroines of the Ireland. Instead, they are making victims of themselves by not reacting against the harsh circumstances, keeping themselves trapped in the conventional responsibilities, and being incapable of recognizing and making recognized their unique identities. The effort for Irish independence makes men struggle and women wait. During this journey, they live their lives as clerks, couriers, mothers, wives, and mistresses. Women act as supplementary, and not essential, parts of men’s lives. However, Frieda frees herself from the bondage that she shares with the other two women. She is apolitical, preferring to write and sing her second class songs than expressing her feelings against the political scenario that is going on. She leaves Ireland, and goes to settle down in London. She is the one who goes in search for her identity. Critics claim that her character seems to be lightly favored by Devlin even when she lacked that communal dedication that Josie and Donna possessed. The other two women look like suffering from the unavoidability of the burden of being Irish, thus, promoting an idea of “confused feminism” (Carlson 332). By the end of the play, the playwright has shown the women beginning to acknowledge the fact that their true identities lie within the boundaries of their very own selves. This also proves from the title of the play, “Ourselves Alone”, which shows that the women are alone even in the multitude of oppressive males in their lives. On one hand, the play depicts women as the waiting gender, with poetic lines; but on the other, it reflects men as the one stereotyped gender, with no poetic beauty in their lines, and prosaic touch to their dialogues. However, this difference in the male and female characters of the original play has undergone different variations in different productions that came up afterwards. For example, in Les Waterss production at the Arena Stage, this disparity in the male and female dialogues and character stereotypes has been underscored. The original play was a winner of the 1985 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and was a more satisfying piece of art. The later versions of the production of the play in theaters have little variations, according to the demands of time and technology, and hence, the original version remains the only gratifying version, portraying the struggle for independence by the men, and struggle for search of identities by the women. O’Toole, Furay and O’Hanlon (55) write in their book that, “It gradually becomes clear that this is a play which could just as easily be set in Hampstead, about the problems that women have with men only here flavored with the thrilling tang of terrorism. It is well-written, beautifully produced, beautifully acted, and utterly false.” Summing it up together, “Ourselves Alone” by Anne Devlin is a beautiful play, depicting the lives of men and women during the Protestant-Catholic clashes in the Ireland in the mid 1980s. Men are shown struggling for freedom, but converting the communities into an ultimate siege. Women are shown as being limited by their loyalty to families, and keeping within their boundaries, wishing for independence but not struggling for it. They are in search of their identities, but do not strive hard to recognize themselves and their potential. They are bound by the limitations set for them by men of their lives, who are subjugating and unfaithful to them. Women wait for things to settle down, while playing roles of working women, mothers, wives, and mistresses. In short, the play is a true depiction of how the women suffered from their not being able to avoid being Irish, and bound to stay loyal to their families, yet desiring for romance and happiness. Works Cited Adler, Anthony. “Ourselves Alone.” Theater. CL Chicago Inc., 1988. Web. 11 Apr 2012. . Carlson, Susan. Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition. USA: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Devlin, Anne. Ourselves Alone. USA: Dramatists Play Service, 1999. O’Toole, Fintan, Furay, Julia, and Redmond O’Hanlon. “Ourselves Alone.” Critical Moments: Fintan OToole on Modern Irish Theatre. USA: Peter Lang, 2003. Read More