Purgatory is a drama

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...

 by the Irish

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 writer William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

. It was first presented in at the Abbey Theatre

Abbey Theatre

The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...

, Dublin, on 19 August 1938, a few months before Yeats' death.

Story

It tells of a family saga of decline and fall through its two remaining members: an Old Man (the father) and a Boy (his sixteen year old son). It is set outside the former family home, which the Old Man's father had drunkenly burned down, leading him to kill his father as the building perished. The Boy is skeptical about tales of his family's former grandeur, and is repelled by the Old Man's story of losing his own mother as she gave birth to him, and the decline subsequent events wrought on the family. Tonight, the Old Man tells the Boy, is the anniversary of his mother's wedding night. This was the night on which he was conceived after a bout of drunken carousing by his father, and thus when his mother's fate was sealed. At this point a ghostly figure appears illuminated in a window of the wrecked house. In an attempt to wrest his mother's soul from purgatory

Purgatory

Purgatory is the condition or process of purification or temporary punishment in which, it is believed, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for Heaven...

, he suddenly stabs and kills the Boy. However it appears to be in vain: approaching hoof beats of his ghostly father returning to the bridal bed signal that no spirits have left the place, and the grim cycle begins again.

Background

Yeats had been strongly influenced by Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese Noh

Noh

, or - derived from the Sino-Japanese word for "skill" or "talent" - is a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Many characters are masked, with men playing male and female roles. Traditionally, a Noh "performance day" lasts all day and...

 theatre in the later years of his life (via Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

), and Yeats' use of the spirits of the Old Man's parents as a metaphor for the family's decline and of death and rebirth is Noh's clearest influence on the drama. Similarly, the sparseness of the setting, the use of only two characters and the play's relative brevity (conventionally lasting well under an hour) are more immediate influences. However the story itself affected Yeats even more profoundly. As he wrote Purgatory he admitted in a letter that the scenario troubled him:

I have a one-act play in my head, a scene of tragic intensity... I am so afraid of that dream. My recent work has greater strangeness and I think greater intensity than anything I have done. I never remember the dream so deep.

Critical reception

Always seen as a grim tale, Purgatory received (and continues to receive) mixed responses. Several critics ignore the Noh influence and see in the Old Man's murder of the Boy an exercise in eugenics

Eugenics

Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...

 and as such perceive the conclusion as somewhat tendentious. T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 took a similar line, attacking the play's title from a Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 perspective, arguing that murder does not sit with any notion of purgation.

Opera

The English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 composer Gordon Crosse

Gordon Crosse

Gordon Crosse is an English composer.-Biography:Crosse was born in Bury, Lancashire and in 1961 graduated from St Edmund Hall, Oxford with a first class honours degree in Music. He then undertook two years of postgraduate research on early fifteenth-century music before beginning an academic...

 set Yeats' drama as a one-act opera. Premièred at the 1966 Cheltenham International Festival, it includes virtually all of Yeats' original text. It also retains the minimalism

Minimalism

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...

 of the play, and the spiritual element, but Crosse avoids using Japanese musical motifs associated with Noh, unlike Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...

, whose contemporaneous parable

Parable

A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...

s beginning with Curlew River

Curlew River

Curlew River — A Parable for Church Performance is the first of three Church Parables by Benjamin Britten. The work is based on the Japanese noh play Sumidagawa of Juro Motomasa , which Britten saw during a visit to Japan and the Far East in early 1956...

are more obviously musically inspired by Noh. Two additional operatic settings include one by Hugo Weisgall

Hugo Weisgall

Hugo David Weisgall was an American composer and conductor, known chiefly for his opera and vocal music compositions...

 written in 1958, and Mark Lanz Weiser's setting (1990) premièring at the Peabody Institute

Peabody Institute

The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University is a renowned conservatory and preparatory school located in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Charles and Monument Streets at Mount Vernon Place.-History:...

 in Baltimore

Baltimore

Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...

in 1991.