2014-10-05, 10:36 PM Literary Encyclopedia | Stones in his Pockets Page 1 of 3 http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35210 Log Out Visit Your Account Advanced search Context Jones' Life Jones' Works Recommended Reading Reader Actions Add to Bookshelves Print (1404 words) Report an Error Dates: First Circulation/Publication: 01-08-1996 Places: United Kingdom, Northern Ireland (Country of Origin) United Kingdom (Publication/ performance) Genres and Modes: Play Contributor Actions Edit Related Articles Add Recommended Reading Marie Jones: Stones in his Pockets (1404 words) Amanda Clarke (McGill University) Tweet Tweet 1 In Marie Jones’s Stones in his Pockets,a Hollywood film crew travels to a rural village in Kerry in the south of Ireland to make an international blockbuster. The play follows Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn, two locals who are working as extras in a film about the Irish Land Wars of the nineteenth century. The film and its crew members posit a romantic vision of Ireland’s landscape and history, and much of the play’s comedy results from a satiric disruption of those conventional “Irish” tropes. The landscape that is so central to the melodrama plot of the film proves an annoyance for the English film director, Clem, as rain and lack of light continually hold up shooting. Rather than working with the natural elements, the crew constructs a bizarre pastiche of Ireland that undermines the goal of authentic location shooting and jars with the locals’ experience. Over the course of the filming, the crew members strip the actual Irish elements from scenes and replace them with imported goods. For a wedding scene, “fresh flowers shipped over from Holland” (63) replace the native flora and, even more preposterously, Simon reveals that the director objects to the local fauna’s lack of Irishness: “Clem’s not happy with the cows. The cows. He says they’re not Irish enough” (45). Similarly, the local townspeople are forced into roles as stereotypical peasants and “background bogm[e]n” (29), to act as an “authentic” backdrop for the American leads. As Jake notes, when the American film stars appear in the scene the locals are meant to fade out: “they’ll get a big shot of the Blaskets and the peasants, then Rory comes over the hill behind us like he is walking out of the sea. When he has his line, the lot of us disappear, even the Blasket Islands” (25). While the Americans’ “terrible bloody accent[s]” (23) and the locals’ baffled reactions to filmic Ireland are used to comic effect, the play proffers a deeper critique of how Irishness is marketed as a commodity. The film crew continually assures the actors that authenticity does not matter, since “Ireland is only one per cent of the market” (21). The result of treating Irishness in this way, however, is that the stereotypes fostered by the film industry inflect how the locals’ national identities are understood in reality. Jake and Charlie are alternately read as “simple, uncomplicated, contented” (24), as though they are in fact the stereotypical peasants that they play, or as potential I.R.A terrorists “out to kidnap” the lead actress (47). Thus, the play illuminates a pressing struggle to control the images by which the nation is represented in a globalized economy. The film industry’s exploitation of Ireland and its “natives” (67) leads to the tragedy of the play. Sean Harkin, a local teenager, has cherished the dream of escaping his village and becoming a film star for most of his life. As a child, Sean watched several other (seemingly similar films) being made in the village and attempted to procure roles in them in order to escape his circumstances. The continual frustration of his goal of being “the boy in the big picture” (68) led to his descent into a “virtual reality. That kept him going, drugs and movies” (74). When he is denied a role as an extra in the current film underway in Kerry, and thrown out of his neighbourhood pub at the request of the American actress, Caroline Giovanni, he decides to take his own life by placing stones in his pockets and wading into the sea at the end of Act 1. Act 2 dwells on the town’s attempts to come to terms with his death, and many begin to blame the film industry for filling Sean’s head with dreams. Jake indicates that the actress’s and the crew’s understanding of Ireland as an exploitable resource is at the centre of the tragedy: “…you come here and use us, use the place and then clear off and think of nothing you leave behind” (78). The tension between the Search Home About Subscribe Help Contact Us 0 Like Like