Mutabilitie

by Frank McGuinness

Set in Ireland in the sixteenth century, Mutabilitie explores the area where myth meets and transforms reality and where the harshness of life is transmuted into hope by the chance meeting of a poet and a playwright.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Irish Literature

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2011

About the author

Frank McGuinness is Professor of Creative Writing in University College Dublin. A world-renowned playwright, his first great stage hit was the highly acclaimed ‘Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme’. He is also a highly skilled adapter of plays by writers such as Ibsen, Sophocles, Brecht, and writer of several film scripts, including Dancing at Lughnasa, and he has published several anthologies of poetry.

Reviews

[Joe Savage · Rating 2 out of 5]

Getting too old for these postmodern shakespeare readings man

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do love this play, and I can't wait to get my hands on the rest of his plays (especially because he's a professor in my university!) I just can't give it more than 3 stars because it's such a complex and interesting play, with SO much in it, that it's not exactly an enjoyable read as a thought-provoking text for a student or lit lover.

I adore the metatheatre of this play and I hope one day to direct or stage it myself, should I ever become a director. This is a very challenging play to stage and direct because of it's substance and 'non-representational dramaturgy' (as Joan Fitzpatrick Dean stated)

[Colin Cloutus · Rating 3 out of 5]

What redeemed Mutabilitie was the core group of characters, who were charged with, perhaps overly sentimental, emotion. McGuinness' use of quotation and literary allusion was also surprisingly good - usually this kind of consistent referencing can come off rather corny.
Edmund Spenser's depiction as a delirious royalist, and rather benevolent towards the Gaelic people is a welcome change to the (ironically) quite racist witch hunt against him in recent years for his own racism in his prose work on Ireland.

Ultimately this play was a muddle, with what seemed to be a rigid list of archetype b-characters who didn't seem to rise to that mythical grandeur hoped for, and an extremely unfocused narrative. Prophecies, magic, not-sure-if-its-a-dream scene, incest, 'queer-baiting,' murder out of nowhere, weird lesbian-tinged dog roleplay - it's all shoved in here with seemingly little order and bearing little fruit.

But I still enjoyed Mutabilitie somehow —McGuinness builds up scenes with huge crescendos that work well on paper and do propel the meandering plot quite well for small lengths of time, sometimes successfully harnessing an energy that lives between national-racial turmoil and bare bones 'caveman drama,' a phrase used by Ted Hughes, and whose voice I can hear echoes of in this play. A couple scenes here have a structure that is several alternating spot lights containing characters, talking over each other and echoing one another's words —it's artistic effect is appreciated but it frankly does not work well on paper, and the aforementioned crescendos of tension would be aided by performance in these scenes.

I'm caught in one of those weird reactions where the experience of this play has been quite enjoyable, but my objective judgement understands the flaws in place, and it seems others have too.

[Fionnuala · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very disappointing. Did not capture the feel of Spenser as a poet/government lackey or the late sixteenth century. The characters were stock, the situation predictable and the writing childish. Scenes that had the potential for great pathos - the old queen asking her children to kill her and her mad husband to end their misery - were not given the language they needed. Apparently McGuinness's Sons of Ulster is a great play. Mutabilitie alas isn't.