"Watch your back." "Turn your back on them." Those are idiomatic expressions. It's an uncomfortable thing to always be looking over your shoulder. You hope someone has "got your back".

In the play Riders to The Sea, there are a couple of instances when there is talk about "keeping your back to the door" (or audience) just as the twig-bearers do in historical Norse funeral rites.

Talking together like magpies, Cathleen tells Nora to conceal the bundle from Maurya, saying, "Keep your back to the door the way the light'll not be on you." She means it is a dark secret, a covert matter, or maybe she means that what they are about to discuss "won't stand the light of day". Christianity was known as "The Way", so perhaps the light of the faith would not reach whatever it was they were concealing, indicating the transitional time when supposedly Christianized people still clung to their forbidden pagan practices in secret.

We also read this stage direction, (Nora sits down at the chimney corner, with her back to the door). What significance is there in Norah sitting with her back to the door? Does the modern reader know where the door is on the set in relation to the play's audience?

After Maurya sees her vision of her sons on horseback, she behaves in this way according to stage directions: "Maurya begins to keen softly, without turning round." Keening is an old custom of loud crying and mourning. Is she keeping her back to the door still?

At the conclusion of the play, the stage directions describe the physical action of the mourners, the women who enter the cottage:

"The old women begin to come in, crossing themselves on the threshold and kneeling down in front of the stage with their backs to the people, and the white waist bands of the red petticoats they wear on their heads just seen from behind".

There is something unsettling, even sinister, about this scene, something lurking beneath the surface. Red petticoats were distinctive dress were worn by the women of the Aran Islands, but in other contexts this may indicate another meaning.

Like the daughter-waves of Lir, these women mourners convey the idea that there is more here than simply meets the eye. The play ends in the same manner as the previously described funeral rites, with backs to the people.

Is there something going on behind their backs? Of course.