6 - Living on

Summary

The plays in the previous chapter were concerned with reactions to revolution by those disenchanted with its outcome, disillusioned with its failure to deliver a promised metamorphosis, with its protracted aftermath of violence. The viewpoint of the plays was of those who might have hoped for a revolution capable of transforming lives in need of transformation, who saw with dismay the fragmented shards of a nation in place of a dreamed-of unity. But what of the people who had nothing to gain, everything to lose from revolution, the colonial class of past dispossessors who stood to be themselves dispossessed? How did the Ascendancy look when it was no longer in the ascendant, the minority Protestant community in a time when power had been ceded to a Catholic nationalist majority? Yeats's Purgatory, Beckett's All that Fall, provide two very different dramatic versions of that situation. They are both in the most literal sense postcolonial plays, concerned with the period after Independence and the outcome for those who had held power and position before 1922. Purgatory, written in 1938 in Yeats's mood of extreme revulsion from contemporary Irish society, broods on the ruined house that stands for the lost class of the landed Anglo-Irish. In All that Fall, nearly twenty years later, Beckett recreates the suburban Foxrock which he recalled from the 1920s, where a general atmosphere of entropy and decay is associated with the dwindling condition of shabby-genteel Protestantism in an Irish Free State.