Tragedy and transitional justice : Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy

First performed in 1989 under the aegis of the Field Day Theatre company, The Cure at Troy is Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Written on the cusp of the peace process, the play anticipates a series of debates that would, in subsequent decades, come to define the social and political landscape of Northern Ireland; these include confronting the past, the tension between notions of remembering and forgetting and the broader challenges of achieving transitional justice in the aftermath of political conflict. The play embodies the claim by Northern Irish novelist Glenn Patterson that, “Politics often lag behind ideas that have begun to take hold in the public imagination. Artists rarely initiate these ideas, though they may pick up on and amplify them.”