Play: Purgatory

Overview
William Butler Yeats’s Purgatory (1938) is a stark, one-act tragedy that compresses family history, national decline, and metaphysical dread into a night scene at the ruins of a once-grand house. Written in Yeats’s late, spare style and influenced by Japanese Noh drama, the play strips theater to essentials, two figures, a scorched setting, and the voices of the dead, to probe whether guilt can be purged and whether blood and history bind the living to an inescapable fate.

Setting and Premise
On a desolate road beside the charred shell of a “Big House,” an Old Man and his teenage son, known only as the Boy, halt for the night. The ruin belonged to the Old Man’s ancestors. He tells his son that his mother was a beautiful heiress who married beneath her station, taking as husband a groom who squandered her fortune, brought ruin on the estate, and destroyed the house. The Old Man insists that on the anniversary of the catastrophe the past returns, the mother’s spirit trapped in purgatory, compelled to relive her fatal night.

Plot
As darkness settles, the Old Man recounts a lineage of shame. His father, brutal and profligate, killed the mother and left the house in flames; the Old Man claims he later killed that father, believing the act would ease his mother’s suffering. He watches the black window of the ruin, convinced that the ghostly wedding and murder replay themselves: riders arriving, music unheard yet sensed, the bridal room reanimated. The Boy, impatient and skeptical, thinks only of the small money he has saved and the horse he plans to sell at dawn.

The Old Man reads the night as a ritual reenactment and the Boy as a continuation of the corrupted line. Whether from zeal, delusion, or a terrible certainty, he decides that only severing the bloodline can free the mother’s soul. In a sudden act of violence, he stabs the Boy. The stage darkens around the ruin and the Old Man listens for a sign that the dead are appeased. The sounds of the past seem to fade and then return, leaving him uncertain whether he has accomplished redemption or merely repeated the crime that damned the family. The play closes on ambiguity: the purgatorial cycle may be unbroken.

Characters
The Old Man is a figure of obsessive memory and fatalism, convinced that sin passes through blood and that violence can purify what violence defiled. He is both penitent and executioner, driven by filial piety warped into fanaticism. The Boy is practical and defiant, shaped by poverty and neglect, resistant to his father’s metaphysics, and tragically caught in a history he does not accept or fully understand.

Themes and Symbols
Yeats fuses personal guilt with the decline of the Anglo-Irish “Big House,” making the ruin a symbol of a spent class and a nation’s fractured past. Purgatory is not only a Catholic afterlife but a worldly condition where memories and wrongs recur. The window of the house frames the past as spectacle and prison; the night wind and imagined hoofbeats give the dead a voice. The play interrogates heredity, class transgression, and the futility of blood sacrifice, asking whether spiritual debts can be paid by human hands or whether attempts at purgation only reinscribe the original sin.

Style and Significance
Written in austere, rhythmic prose and verse, with ritualized gesture and minimal props, Purgatory exemplifies Yeats’s late theater: concentrated action, visionary atmosphere, and a cold flame of moral intensity. Its brevity belies its weight, standing as a bleak summation of Yeats’s lifelong concerns, history’s cycles, the tyranny of lineage, and the thin wall between the living and the dead.