THE HETEROTOPIC PUB IN CONOR MCPHERSON’S THE WEIR

Conor McPherson makes use of a pub setting in his play entitled The Weir (1997), in which characters come together and begin telling stories to each other after the appearance of the only female character Valerie in the pub. The act of storytelling reveals the individual traumas of characters along with allusions to Irish folk culture and the collective troubles of the nation. The pub enacts a cultural space where characters are isolated from the outside world and contemplate personal and national problems. While the pub appears as a site of retreat for characters, it still remains a part of daily life. McPherson’s portrayal of the setting becomes heterotopic in the sense that the pub juxtaposes counter-sites but does not take on a utopic quality, since it is a common element of Irish culture. Moreover, the pub fulfils a function for characters in crisis, separates them from their course of life and sets old and new values side by side. These aspects of the pub sit with Michel Foucault’s dictum of heterotopia. This paper analyses the pub in The Weir as a heterotopic place where characters penetrate deeply into the stories teemed with cultural elements, uncovering individual and national troubles. In grounding the concept of heterotopia, this paper entails Foucault’s discussion of the term and extends beyond his principles to single out McPherson’s pub in the play.