Political violence and re-victimization in The Ferryman

Abstract

Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017) is a play about the Carney family living in 1980s Ireland during the period of insurgency of the Irish Republican Army (IRA – also known as the Provisional IRA) and its efforts to end British rule in Northern Ireland, a period known as “the Troubles”. This paper focuses on Jez Butterworth, one of the most distinctive voices of the contemporary British theatre scene and a typical representative of the 1990s cultural trend, and his tragedy The Ferryman, which portrays the struggle and conflicts between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists in Northern Ireland in the last decades of the 20th century. The second major point of the study is that the power of the Irish Republican Party has a heavy impact on the play. The paper also discovers how Sean Carney and other members of his family both embody and apply the story of Eugene Simons and other members of “the Disappeared”. Like other young men, Seamus Carney became a victim during the Troubles and the campaign of political violence. The discovery of his body symbolizes how political violence created the Disappeared and shows that re-victimization and re-traumatisation continue in the aftermath of the Troubles.