by Susan Lever
Pulbished in Nick Enright: An Actor's Playwright edited with Anne Pender. Rodopi, Amsterdam/NY, 2008. pp.47-59.
Most of Nick Enright’s screenplays were adaptations from other texts, or the telling of other people’s stories, and he... more
Most of Nick Enright’s screenplays were adaptations from other texts, or the telling of other people’s stories, and he wrote the award-winning scripts for Lorenzo’s Oil and Come in Spinner in collaboration with other writers. Nevertheless, all of Enright’s screenplays function like morality plays, asking questions about individual responsibility and the values of contemporary society. Often the moral questions focus on the body, particularly of a woman or child. In Come in Spinner the women must deal with the implications of their sexual bodies; in Lorenzo’s Oil, the disintegrating body of Lorenzo Odone is central; in Blackrock the dead and raped body of the girl lies behind a boy’s guilt; in ‘Coral Island’ Martin confronts AIDS. In each case, physical decline or destruction presents some moral crisis, particularly a central male character’s sense of guilt. This paper examines the way that Enright allows these individual physical crises to reflect on the moral state of society. It gives particular attention to Lorenzo’s Oil and the complex way that Enright and Miller present conflicting aspects of attitudes to the body and the mind, the intellect and humanity.
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