Two Interlocked Triads in Pat Kinevane’s Recent Plays: Self-Soul-Conscousness and Birth-Death-Rebirth
Two Interlocked Triads in Pat Kinevane’s Recent Plays: Self-Soul-Conscousness and Birth-Death-Rebirth

Summary/Abstract: Everyting conceivable, all that has ever been imagined, can be included in our minds and souls. As psyche means “breath”, “soul” and “mind”, it points to the relevance of psychology as a study of mental, emotional and spiritual processes involved in our identity make-up. One of the main organizers of our self and psychological experiences is our relationhip with death: our fear of abandonement and of being alone when conceiving our own death, the fear of the loss of the others, leading to the fear of attachment and emotional death. Pat Kinevane, a contemporary Irish playright, deals, in his 2005 play, Forgotten, with the idea of family and social abandonment of old people in nursing homes. The interconnected stories of Dora, Eucharia, Flor and Gustus, the characters in the play, aged 80-100 years old, living in separate retirement and care facilities around Ireland, reveal these fears. Mental illness in the current explosion of anxiety is also crucial to our identity. Another play by Kinevane, Silent (2010), ends with the word silent, which indicates the insanity, invisibility and ultimately the death of the protagonist, Tino McGoldring, a homeless man tormented by the suicide of his brother. His self after the loss of his brother, wife, family, job, mind is constructed in relation to the past and the imaginary world of the Italian-American icon of the film industry of the 1920s, Rudolph Valentino.

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