The Irish at War [Mark Steyn Theater Review]

Steyn Online, originally The New Criterion ^ | April, 2003 | Mark Steyn

[NovemberCharlie]

It is a sad fact that, whatever its merits in other respects, Irish independence has been a disaster for Irish drama. Since casting off the shackles of their English oppressor, the auld sod’s playwrights have been mired in a mawkish parochialism from which they seem barely able to lift their eyes to the broader horizon before slumping back to the comforting emerald glow of stage Irishness. This can be very lucrative, of course, but it owes more to Tin Pan Alley’s synthetic shamrock ballads of a century ago (“Did Your Mother Come From Ireland?”, etc.) than to any living dramatic tradition, and at least those teary parlor songs could plead in mitigation that they were mostly written by pretend bog-trotters.

Two current New York productions make the point with alarming clarity: the Pearl Theatre Company’s Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw and Lincoln Center’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme by Frank McGuinness, one of the stars of the current generation, if one is to judge from the frequency with which his plays are staged internationally. I’ve seen both works on several previous occasions, but not since September 11 gave a topical resonance to their subject: the Great War. For all the Saddam = Hitler/UN = Munich/DeVillepin = Chamberlain stuff casually bandied about by the neocons, the First World War seems far more germane—not just because we’re dealing with unfinished business from the post-Ottoman Anglo-French invention of the “Middle East” but because September 10, 2001 has unsettling echoes of August 1914, the last Edwardian summer. Ours was not the first generation to enjoy a “holiday from history”. Here is Shaw’s preface:

Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the play was begun, not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded.

Now who does that sound like?

The dramatist was exaggerating his prescience: when the play was begun — on March 4, 1916—more than a few shots had been fired, and, more importantly, the first Zeppelin air raids on London were fifteen months old. The latter made more of an impression: the greatest empire the world had ever known could be struck not only in remote, primitive colonial outposts but also in the heart of its mighty capital. Shaw wrote much of the play in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Sussex garden, from which the gunfire across the Channel was clearly audible.

The illusion of invulnerability is but one of Shaw’s themes. The heartbreak house of the title is an English country home, whose inhabitants are absorbed in their own peculiar preoccupations, beginning with Captain Shotover’s wild and crazy quest for a mystical “seventh degree of concentration.” His daughters are aging temptresses, posh teases getting by on surface charm. The men, for all their nominal power in finance and world affairs, are in the end weaklings, unmanned by high-class women— or, if you prefer, castrated by Edwardian society. Shaw ventures into some truly lame Wildean epigram-peddling— ie, there are only two classes in England, the equestrian class and the neurotic class. That must have been a damp squib even eighty years ago, and, if I had to make a case for it to a latter-day cast, I’d look on it as a Shavian subversion of Wilde. This, after all, is the drawing-room comedy to end them all — the one where Shaw wraps up the show by blowing up the drawing room.

That’s the most important theme — history unraveling, the sense that this isn’t just a war but the smashing of the known order. Now that is prescient, whether written in August 1914 or March 1916. No one in that early phase foresaw that by 1919 three of the world’s great empires—Russia, Austria, and Turkey—would lie shattered. Shaw was writing a state-of-the-nation piece about England, but the play is suffused with a premonition of the totality of the outcome. His disenchantment with democracy would lead him in the decades after Heartbreak to fall for one charismatic nutter after another—Lenin, Mussolini, Sir Oswald Mosley, Hitler, Stalin; his observations on Soviet terror and the Holocaust are boggling in their heartlessness and frivolity. But none of that detracts from the eerie way he understood what was at stake as he wrote this half-earnest, half-satirical piece in those first months of the war.

That said, Heartbreak House, from its explicitly Chekhovian origins (a transplanted Cherry Orchard) to its incendiary finale, offers all kinds of other diversions for directors. Shaw’s stage directions call for a set that’s part drawing room, part ship’s poop. The play’s dominant figure is a retired seadog, Captain Shotover, and his country house is a metaphor for the ship of state - comfortable but completely adrift. But you don’t want to go, so to speak, overboard. A couple of years ago in Britain, I saw a Chichester Festival production whose set boasted a mast and gangplanks running from stage to stalls. “Symbolism ahoy!” bellowed a hearty theatergoer as we made our way in. And surely the point of Shaw’s metaphor is that there are no gangplanks, no moorings, no safe harbor in sight.

On the other hand, the Pearl’s somewhat sparely furnished production, designed by Beowulf Boriet, substitutes its own bargain-basement idiocies, like the huge Union flag in which the set is draped. Presumably it’s supposed to underline the playwright’s larger theme for the benefit of an American audience, but it’s tonally wrong: the British ruling class have never been great flag flyers, and to shove it in an audience’s face is to misunderstand the nature of British identity. The proper place for the Union Jack is on Austin Powers’s nylon briefs.

The set’s deficiencies are a shame, because Gus Kaikkonen’s production is otherwise very clear-eyed about this messy play’s power to speak to a modern audience. The nonagenarian Captain Shotover is a sort of Learing self-portrait by the author, and George Morfogen captures both the character’s Shavian eloquence and the underlying sadness. The ladies’ roles can easily dwindle into stock types—the snobbish Lady Utterwood, the bohemian Mrs. Hushabye, the ingenue Ellie—but, as played by Robin Leslie Brown, Joanne Camp, and Rachel Botchan respectively, they seem freighted by impending obsolescence, almost as if they’re aware that the old roles and the old wiles won’t play in a post-war world with a pronounced lack of eligible suitors. On this, too, Shaw was prescient. We seem at times to be watching a West End playwright kissing off his own genre, raging against its own limitations.

Perhaps the surest evidence of that is Shaw’s finale. The play is more dependent than any other he’d written on sound effects — almost as if, writing in the Woolfs’ garden and hearing the gunfire from France, he decided to incorporate the disruption into the dramatic structure. “Stand by all hands for judgment!” says Captain Shotover in response to alarums off. “It is the hand of God!” In 1921, the first-night critics were unimpressed by the fireworks, adopting a tone of patrician disdain most reviewers reserve for the roller skaters in Starlight Express. “Does he expect (I cannot help writing as though I were shouting at him) us to be amused by this tomfoolery?” scoffed Desmond MacCarthy in The New Statesman. To James Agate, the incendiary curtain was “monstrous,” if not merely “a device for waking the audience up.” The Sunday Times’s Sydney Carroll was closer when he observed, “The piece did not seem concludable otherwise.” This is what Kaikkonen’s production suggests —that Shaw is, in essence, acknowledging the inadequacy of his form, that, in the unprecedented scale of what confronted him in 1916, the world had reached a point where words fail, where all the wit and insight of intellectual debate can be evaporated in one explosive instant.

This, too, seems relevant in our strange new world. Even the clunkier lines—“a soul is a very expensive thing to keep —much more than a motor car”—seen forgivable in the context of an up-ended society where urbane banter is no longer enough. Heartbreak House exists in two worlds, summed up by its title: there’s the house—the smart West End comedy— and the heartbreak— the brooding parable driven by Shaw’s own despair. American directors, in the most recent revivals, have chosen to play up the first in the hope that the second will just go away. I would assume this is a commercial calculation, derived from the fact that Shaw, to most people, means My Fair Lady. But it’s a calculation that can never work. If you try to play Heartbreak House for the wit and charm, it feels hollow and bitter. Kaikkonen walks the line much more sure footedly. The Misses Camp and Brown are stylish and amusing, and their élan makes the finale all the more powerful.

Before 9/11, many directors credited Shaw with a more generalized apocalyptic vision—that, in the menace of the Zeppelin overhead, the playwright had managed to foresee the more comprehensive terrors of the nuclear age. Ah-ha, they say, couple Shotover’s misanthropy with the pile of dynamite he’s sitting on, and it’s obvious what Shaw’s really going on about. That was, more or less, the subtext of Trevor Nunn’s London production a decade ago. Even in 1992, Nunn’s staging—very starry, with Paul Scofield, Vanessa Redgrave, Daniel Massey— had a faintly musty feel. The alleged nuclear sensibility of the western world —its urge to lob warheads at the enemy until there’s nothing to left to fight over but a toxic desert—is not the temper of Shaw’s play. He’s concerned with something more debilitating: a society too settled, too self-absorbed to rouse itself. “The captain is in his bunk drinking oiled ditchwater, and the crew is gambling in the forecastle,” roars Shotover. “She will strike and sink and split. Do you think God’s laws will be suspended in favor of England be cause you were born in it?” That’s a wonderful line, and a direct challenge to the enfeebled state of much of the western world today in the face of a new enemy: do you think God’s laws will be suspended in favor of America—or Canada, or France, or Germany—because you were born in it? In the end, the Zeppelins come and the effete poseur Hector orders the house to be lit up and, even after the explosions, the ladies hope the airships and the bombs will return, and destroy what’s left. In this England, says Shaw, the elite have a death wish. Ring any bells? You can argue other interpretations of this awkward, rambling play, but in a cheap and cheerful production Gus Kaikkonen has homed in on those ideas that speak to today.

Shaw was sixty when he started work on Heartbreak House. He’d seen a good deal of the world, and he did not look at it narrowly. If you want his view as an Irishman on the Great War, the quickest way is to pull O’Flaherty, VC off the bookshelf and turn to  the preface. This play was written just before Heartbreak House and its title is another adroit distillation: “VC” is the Victoria Cross, and the reference is to those Irish men who fought gallantly for a King and Country they did not believe in. (Many southern Irishmen also volunteered for the Second World War, but by then they were part of the Irish Free State, the only British Dominion to remain neutral in the struggle against the Nazis. The Free State was a very different country from the Ireland of 1914, and the signature image of that second conflict is not the brave Irishmen who journeyed to Ulster and England to enlist but Eamonn De Valera going to the German Embassy to sign the book of condolences after Hitler’s death. Even Chirac won’t be doing that with Saddam.)

If this piece is, as described, “a recruiting poster in disguise,” Shaw is scathing of the Government’s recruiting posters proper, such as “Remember Belgium,” with which the walls of Dublin Castle were plastered— His Majesty’s guarantees to that country being the formal trigger for British entry into the war. The author is not persuaded:

The folly of asking an Irishman to remember anything when asking him to fight for England was apparent to everyone outside the Castle. Remembering Belgium and its broken treaty led Irishmen to remember Limerick and its broken treaty; and the recruiting ended in a rebellion, in suppressing which the British artillery quite unnecessarily reduced the centre of Dublin to ruins, and the British commanders killed their leading prisoners of war in cold blood morning after morning with an effect of long-drawn-out ferocity Really it was only the usual childish petulance in which John Bull does things in a week that disgrace him for a century, though he soon recovers his good humour, and can not understand why the survivors of his wrath do not feel as jolly with him as he does with them.

So much for England. Now for the Irish. Shaw continues:

I knew from my personal experience and observation… that all an Irishman’s hopes and ambitions turn on his opportunities of getting out of Ireland. Stimulate his loyalty, and he will stay in Ireland and die for her… Appeal to his discontent, his deadly boredom, his thwarted curiosity and desire for change and adventure, and, to escape from Ireland, he will go abroad to risk his life for France, for the Papal States, for secession in America, and even, if no better may be, for England….

There was another consideration. . . . No one will ever know how many men joined the army in 1914 and 1915 to escape from tyrants and taskmasters, termagants and shrews, none of whom are any the less irksome when they happen by ill-luck to be also our fathers, our mothers, our wives and our children. Even at their amiablest, a holiday from them may be a tempting change for all parties. That is why I did not endow O’Flaherty, V.C. with an ideal Irish colleen for his sweetheart, and gave him for his mother a Volumnia of the potato patch rather than an affectionate parent from whom he could not so easily have torn himself away.

Lovely stuff. In a couple of paragraphs, Shaw has skewered both of John Bull’s islands. I thought of O’Flaherty, VC a lot during Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, lavishly staged at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theatre in a production that would fund a dozen Pearl Theatre Shaw revivals. This is the belated New York premiere of a play that London saw in 1985 and which has been much revived since. McGuinness has taken a date that still resonates in Northern Irish history—July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, in which the Ulster Division was slaughtered. So were many others, but July 1 is also the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when King Billy’s boys defeated the Papist James II. Thus, for the Ulster Protestant, past and present combined: two blood sacrifices co-mingled.

This is one of those moments that should make a brilliant play. As Churchill put it in 1922, despairing of the Irish and their in tractably provincial concerns:

Then came the Great War: Every institution, almost, in the world was strained. Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have en countered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world.

But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.

But who can blame the Irish for clinging to the “integrity of their quarrel” when, even in the midst of the great sweeping cataclysm, fate finds a way to bind them anew to the past? Once you’ve stumbled on the idea, you’d think it hardly possible to go wrong, but McGuinness does, badly, and not all Nicholas Martin’s skilful staging can obscure the shallowness and provincialism of the playwright’s take on history. In this play we follow the fortunes of eight Ulstermen, from the enthusiasm of enlistment to the disillusion of the trenches — or, as Lincoln Center’s press guys put it, from “simple-minded glory mongers to spiritually anguished realists.” Does that sound familiar? Does it not, indeed, sound like every war movie you’ve ever seen? But McGuinness is Irish, and for him Irishness is all. If you’re Oirish, come into the playhouse, take all the clichés you can find and dunk ‘em in an industrial strength version of McDonald’s famous Shamrock Shakes.

The platoon that’s a carefully selected assortment of stock types? Got it. The lone survivor? Check. The toff who doesn’t fit in with the working-class boys? You bet. Go back to Shaw’s preface to O’Flaherty, VC: he knows the clichés and he knows how to avoid them. McGuinness seems incapable of thinking beyond, and his one variation on the formula is almost laughably meretricious: instead of the romance with the “ideal Irish colleen” we have two gay guys.

Meanwhile, the affairs of the world are barely mentioned, and McGuinness even manages to blow the bloody, primal link to King Billy’s great victory by crassly inserting a scene in which the lads re-enact the Battle of the Boyne as a sort of pre-Somme warm up exercise. What a comprehensive botch job this play is. McGuinness is a nationalist Catholic and, though the Ulster Protestants must take their share of the blame for their status as the Ethnic Group Most Unloved by Western Progressives with the Exception of Afrikaaners and White Rhodesians, one can’t but feel the author hasn’t exactly gone to a lot of trouble to tap into their mindset. Their conversation is relentlessly blinkered: they’re fighting not to defeat the Germans but to save Ulster from the Fenians. That may be how some thought, but Ulstermen settled across the globe in service of the Empire, and they weren’t all sunk in the bog of strictly local obsessions. His antipathy may arise from the period in which the play was written — the early Eighties, when “peace” in Northern Ireland seemed further away than ever and the memory of Bobby Sands and the other dead hunger strikers was still fresh in nationalist minds, Seeing Observe again after some years, I was struck by how anachronistic it seemed—1916 as filtered through 1985.

In a talented ensemble, Rod MacLachlan stands out: the pillar of strength to a mate on the verge of crack-up, he then cracks up himself. But, even as you’re moved by the breakdown, it doesn’t feel organic. McGuinness has swiped a very particular historical episode and shoehorned it into the conventions of generic war drama. What a withered shrunken horizon the contemporary Irish dramatist prowls. And don’t get me started on Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol at the Atlantic.

[NovemberCharlie]

This was the first Steyn Theater review I read, and the reason I read the others.

Best line (Shaw's, not Steyn's): " Do you think God’s laws will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”

[NovemberCharlie]

Ping to the Steyn List, and to your list.

[jocon307]

Very interesting post. I will be sending it along to a friend who is a great Shaw fan. Hopefully it will make her a great Steyn fan, if she isn't already.

And you are right "Do you think God’s laws will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”
is a great line, and we can certainly think of many who can be accused of thinking this same, stupid, way today.

[happygrl]

Or how about this one:

though the Ulster Protestants must take their share of the blame for their status as the Ethnic Group Most Unloved by Western Progressives with the Exception of Afrikaaners and White Rhodesians,..