Spectrality in Dermot Bolger’s The Townlands of Brazil and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

The essay offers a juxtaposition of selected readings of the concepts of spectrality in two contemporary Irish plays: Quietly (2012) by Owen McCafferty and The Townlands of Brazil (2006) by Dermot Bolger. The former apparently depicts a political ghost-like encounter in a Belfast pub. The latter deals with hardships and dilemmas experienced by those who have lived in Ballymun, a Dublin residential area developed to solve the problem of poverty in the city. Both plays have already gained critical acclaim and both feature Poles whose spectrality lends itself to postcolonial, gendered, and geo-dramatic hermeneutics. However, the processes of “haunting” and “being haunted” discernible in the plays can be interpreted in other dimensions of the spectral experiences shared by Polish and Irish characters, and these will be addressed in the article.