Death and the Playwright:Chris Lee’s The Electrocution of Children (1998) and The Map Maker’s Sorrow (1999)

Abstract

The award-winning Irish playwright Chris Lee’s The Electrocution of Children (1998) was produced at the Peacock Theatre in 1998 while The Map Maker’s Sorrow became the Abbey entry in the 1999 Dublin Theatre Festival. The Electrocution of Children, an intellectually ambitious play depicts a world in which people have forgotten how precious the gift of life is, and how fragile human beings are. Characters in the play squander opportunities to be creative, turn their backs on relationships, fail in their attempts to communicate, and prey upon one another. Like the characters in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), those in Lee’s play often appear to be wayward children who fail utterly to follow any rules of logic or propriety. The play itself moves sequentially through a series of scenes drawn from the debris of lives and the isolation of relationships. In contrast, The Map Maker’s Sorrow begins abruptly and confusingly with the suicide of a character the audience has not met and, therefore, does not know and then proceeds through no clear development to a harmonious end. (The play’s structure reflects Lee’s use of a map’s “simultaneous spatial logic” [40]). At the very beginning of the play, the audience finds itself in a position similar to that of the bereaved family in the play or that of any survivors who find a member of their family dead by his or her own hand. Suicide, like Lee’s opening scene, declares the strangeness of the other that the play then explores.