The Modernity of Thomas Kilroy

Nicholas Grene

In 1972 I read an essay on ‘Synge and Modernism’ by Thomas Kilroy that he had given as a lecture at the Synge Centenary conference the previous year. I was in the final stages of writing my doctoral dissertation on Synge, in that dreadful state of anxious aggressiveness where I felt obliged to dismiss or quarrel with everyone else who wrote about my man. With Kilroy’s essay, however, I could not quarrel, because he placed Synge in a perspective quite unlike that of previous critics. He brought to the subject a new breadth of vision, a critical intelligence and authority which I could only envy and admire. He started by observing how the ‘exuberant, determined provincialism’ of the early Irish dramatic movement seemed to involve a ‘rejection of what is central to European drama of the same period’.³³⁰ He then went on to identify the special position of Synge in this: ‘he cannot be simply accommodated within the early Abbey Theatre Movement and left there’. Kilroy maintained that Synge’s work could be associated with some of the characteristics of European modernism. He summed up Synge’s sensibility as ‘private, intensely preoccupied with the nature of human freedom […] secular but committed to the essential spirituality of human action, subversive of the main, middle culture of which Modernism is the counter-culture’.³³¹ That still seems to me an astonishingly penetrating analysis of Synge’s vision. But it was Kilroy’s ability to look at Synge within the broad context of modernism, to take him out of that often retold story of the early Abbey – ‘Give up Paris […] Go to the Aran Islands’ and all that – which was to me so very exciting.

Synge in this essay is re-imagined not as the ‘last Romantic’ but as a forerunner of the modern Irish theatre that Thomas Kilroy has done so much to conceive, energize and create. His 1959 Studies essay ‘Groundwork for an Irish Theatre’ is now generally recognized as a key manifesto for the extraordinary renewal that was to come in the next decade. In that essay, he appeals to models being established in the British theatre of the time, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop that had launched the career of Behan, and the English Stage Company at the Royal Court that had pioneered the work of Osborne and Wesker. He looks to an ethos that will bring the writer back into the theatre. The essay ends with a rhetorical flourish centring on the new Abbey then being re-built: ‘Very shortly a building will rise from the rubble in Marlborough Street. Is it fanciful to imagine that in this building there will be found two, three, or five years hence, a group of young Irish dramatists forging in splendid co-operation with their fellow artists the uncreated conscience of their race?’³³² It was to be seven more years before that building was completed, but well before that the young Irish dramatists had begun to appear: Hugh Leonard, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Eugene McCabe and of course Thomas Kilroy himself. They were not all immediately welcomed in the Abbey, and the Ernest Blythe era had still some time to run before imaginative directors such as Tomás Mac Anna would be given their heads. But the Irish theatre that Kilroy forecast in 1959, innovative in its dramaturgy and capable of representing adequately the realities of a modernizing Ireland, the 1960s version of the Joycean ‘uncreated conscience’ of the race, was burgeoning by the end of the decade.

In choosing ‘The Modernity of Thomas Kilroy’ for my title I had in mind two central features of Kilroy’s achievement. He is one of the great modernizers of the Irish theatre, in his critical reflections but most importantly in his own creative practice. He has found all sorts of exciting ways of liberating us from what had become the deadly model of the Abbey play with its recognizable small town setting, its surface realism, its predictable shape and structure. From his first written play The O’Neill through the brilliant conception of Talbot’s Box and Double Cross to the radical dramaturgy of The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, he has transformed the nature of theatrical representation within our tradition. At the same time, he has reached out to the major classics of European drama – Chekhov’s Seagull, Pirandello’s Six Characters, Wedekind’s Spring Awakening – and adapted them to an Irish idiom and an Irish situation. This is where his modernizing theatrical practice overlaps with the other dimension of his work which I want to discuss, his critical awareness of the social and political life of modern Ireland. The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche is obviously a landmark play here, with its evocation of the subterranean repressed male sexuality of its time. But many of Kilroy’s plays that are not set in the contemporary period use the prism of history to force audiences to reflect upon their own present. Talbot’s Box mediates always between the early twentieth century of its protagonist and the 1970s when it was written and staged. Both his Field Day plays, Double Cross and The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, illuminate the 1980s by their evocation of figures from earlier periods. Secret Fall and Christ Deliver Us! do not represent directly the horrors of the abuse of children that have so haunted our society in the last twenty years, but in their own way they speak powerfully to that knowledge. I want, therefore, to talk about Kilroy as a modernizer of Irish theatre and a dramatic witness to the emerging modernity of Ireland.

Modernism

The O’Neill was not staged until 1969, the year after The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche, but it seems that it was written first, and was turned down for production very regretfully by Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre in 1964 on the grounds that he could not afford to stage such a large scale play. The play is concerned with the figure of Hugh O’Neill, leader of the Irish in the Nine Years War, the last major rebellion against British colonial control at the end of the sixteenth century. His story is a dramatic one, encompassing an English upbringing, his double position as the Earl of Tyrone and as The O’Neill, the Gaelic leader of his clan, his marriage to Mabel Bagenal, sister of one of the English generals he fought against, his success in uniting Ireland against the Crown, followed by the catastrophe of the Battle of Kinsale and his eventual enforced flight from Ireland. It was to provide Brian Friel with the subject for his fine play Making History, staged by Field Day in 1988 and was also the subject of an amateur student play in which I had a part in Trinity in 1966. I played The O’Donnell, the other earl of the Flight of the Earls, and as I remember my main function was to die of a fever in Rome in the second act, feverishly declaiming nostalgic memories of my native Donegal. ‘Tons of buttermilk’ is the only phrase I can recall of my lines. What none of us realized at the time was that Kilroy had already made this clank clunk sort of historical drama obsolete with his way of telling the story.

In The O’Neill each of the two acts starts at the same moment, the Battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598, the high point of success for the Irish in the Nine Years War. In both cases the triumph of O’Neill is framed by a conversation between Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, and Mountjoy, the Lord Deputy who was eventually to defeat O’Neill. In the first act, this involves a recreation of O’Neill’s backstory, including his relationship with Mabel and its disastrous ending when she is unable to tolerate life among the O’Neill clan; in the second it takes us on to Kinsale and the surrender of O’Neill to the English at Mellifont. The presence on stage of Cecil and Mountjoy makes us always aware of the ultimate historical outcome, the inevitable final crushing of Irish resistance by the superior forces of the English, but Kilroy uses a fluid and flexible dramaturgy to render the complex figure of O’Neill and the conflicting factors in the historical situation that confronts him. It is no simple nationalist drama of Ireland versus England. To start with, there is the constant warring between and within the Irish clans. There is a grisly recollection by Mabel of fellow clansmen hacking Phelim Mac Turlach O’Neill to death and drowning his young son, while she and O’Neill stood by and watched. There is the English Master Mountfort, who sees the Irish rebellion only in terms of the pan-European Catholic cause of the Counter-Reformation. O’Neill throughout is the reluctant hero, initially resistant to the passionate love of Mabel, resistant to the more hot-headed of his own followers, doubtful of the vision of Mountfort, always disposed to temporize in the interest of a longer term game that no-one will allow him to play his way.

What is distinctive about the play is the fact that at no point is the audience meant to be under the illusion that these events of the past are being played out in reality on stage. When Cecil and Mountjoy in the opening scene decide they need to go over O’Neill’s past, O’Neill himself is made part of that rehearsal. At a gesture from O’Neill, his followers ‘disassemble the set’ of the Yellow Ford battlefield and leave the stage empty.³³³ Much of the action from then on is seen from the viewpoint of three Irish spies, Thadie Mahon, Patrick M’Art Moyle and Gillaboy O’Flannigan. They speak in a clownishly colloquial style set off against the more standard prose in which most of the dialogue is written. They are recurrently present to provide a sharply satiric distancing device, counterpointing the high seriousness of the history play. It is possible that they might have been suggested by the four knights in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, who after their killing of Thomas à Becket disconcertingly step out of their historical roles to address the audience directly. But where Eliot confines himself to this one metatheatrical shock tactic, it is part of Kilroy’s strategy throughout the play to break down the illusionist principle of theatrical representation. The O’Neill brings Irish historical drama up to date with an improvisatory, quick-change, non-linear narrative in place of the standard beginning and middle to end dramatic structure.

Kilroy rarely uses the naturalist convention of the fourth wall, the pretence that an audience is looking in at a realistic room from which the fourth wall has been removed. But one of the most radical challenges to that convention in his work came with Talbot’s Box, directed by Patrick Mason at the Peacock in 1977. At the start of the play, ‘the lights reveal a huge box occupying virtually the whole stage, its front closed to the audience. The effect should be that of a primitive, enclosed space, part prison, part sanctuary, part acting space’.³³⁴ There is no pretence that the box is other than an acting space; when it is opened outwards, all the actors, costumes and props are already in place. We begin with the corpse of Matt Talbot in the morgue in 1925, but the four actors that surround him play a variety of parts, including a Priest Figure (taken by a woman actor) giving a pious sermon on the extraordinary devotion of Talbot, the reformed drunkard who lived so many years with chains beneath his clothes as a penance of mortification. The tone is satiric and parodic. But then there is an extraordinary moment, as the dead body

rises on the trolley and flings both arms out in the shape of crucifixion. As he does so, blinding beams of light shoot through the walls of the box, pooling about him and leaving the rest of the stage in darkness. The other four figures shrink away, the women screaming. A high-pitched wailing cry rises, scarcely human but representing human beings in great agony. As it reaches its crescendo it is of physical discomfort to the audience. The four figures race about, hands aloft, to block the lights.³³⁵

The theatre as a box, an empty space, is not only a place of make-believe but a place of revelation.

To some extent, it seems to me, Talbot’s Box can be related to German expressionism, the forms used by Kaiser and Toller in the 1920s where a phantasmagoric journey of the protagonist allows for an investigation of the society around him. It is the model used by Denis Johnston in The Old Lady Says No! (1929). In the case of Talbot, the society evoked is that of his own time, when he was reviled as a scab for working through the 1913 Dublin lockout, and the 1970s, when the movement for his canonization was at its height: in 1975 Pope Paul VI declared him Venerable Matt Talbot. Within this structure Kilroy manages also to talk back to earlier Irish drama. For instance, at the beginning of the second act of the play, there is the O’Caseyan figure resembling Captain Boyle, whom we hear screaming with irritation at Talbot’s hymn-singing. This transmutes into Talbot’s memories of his own alcoholic wife-beating father, simultaneously providing a reproof of O’Casey’s comic version of the bad marriage and a way into the psychological conditioning of Talbot’s childhood. The distinctive achievement of the play, however, is its refusal to offer a reductive view of Talbot as a mere psychopathological phenomenon. The genuine strangeness of his vision is treated with imaginative respect, all the more so because of Talbot’s inability ever fully to communicate it. For him God is a darkness within, unrelated to the charade-like forms of worship of the church. The paradox that the play brings out is the fundamental aloneness of the mystic who is taken by the Christian community as exemplary, but who can only achieve that state by a denial of communal attachment and connection.

Kilroy uses all the available resources of the theatre inventively and imaginatively. Take the case of mediated images in Double Cross. The striking design of the play is to match the stories of Brendan Bracken, British superpatriot, Churchill’s Minister for Information during the Second World War, and William Joyce, supertraitor, the infamous Lord Haw Haw of German propaganda broadcasts. Both were Irishmen with simulated identities, overcompensating (as Kilroy sees it) for the traumas of their Irish childhoods. The drama is divided into a ‘Bracken play’ set in London and a ‘Joyce play’ set in Berlin. But in both parts the conflict between the two is sharpened by the presence on video screen of the absent antagonist, jeering and insulting. By this point in the twenty-first century the use of video projections has become practically a required part of any live theatre production, often a fussily obtrusive and unnecessary intrusion. In the case of Double Cross they work as part of the fundamental fabric of the play, which is all about constructed images. And the virtual presences on screen and radio broadcast only help to accentuate the virtuoso performance on stage of both Bracken and Joyce by the same actor. No-one who saw Stephen Rea metamorphose from Bracken to Joyce without leaving the stage will ever forget it. The sheer skill of the living actor who can so transform himself before us, counterpointed with recorded versions of face and voice, made for a supremely theatrical way of dramatizing the constructed nature of human personality.

There is no one template for a Kilroy play; he uses the techniques, the forms and the playing styles that fit the subject in hand. So for The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde it was puppets and puppetry that provided the idiom for a play about assumed roles both voluntary and involuntary. The Japanese tradition of bunraku seems to have been the initial inspiration, bunraku in which onstage puppetmaster manipulators are deemed invisible because clothed all in black. Kilroy’s puppeteers or ‘attendant figures’ are very different, however. This is how the play opens: ‘A dark stage. The attendant figures, mute, emerge out of the darkness: white, faceless masks, bowler hats, chequered pants, white gloves, a cross between Victorian toffs and street theatre performers, stage-hands and puppeteers, dressers, waiters and Figures of Fate’.³³⁶ They roll out on to the stage a ‘great white disk’, which becomes the acting space on which Constance, Oscar and Alfred Douglas play out their tortured drama. It is a memory play in so far as the action begins after Wilde’s imprisonment and release, as he pleads to be allowed to see his children and rages against Constance’s refusal to allow him to do so. From there, it moves back through the history of the Wildes’ marriage, their first meeting in Merrion Square, Oscar’s love affair with Douglas, and all the terrible consequences of that relationship. In some sense, it resembles Yeats’s concept of ‘dreaming back’, the compulsive re-living by the dead of the traumatic events of their lives: both Constance and Oscar are in fact close to death. But the onstage puppeteers embody an added sense of the performative nature of the roles the three principals play. They are locked into the parts of their shared emotional drama; at the same time the Victorian-costumed manipulators emphasize how far those parts are shaped and conditioned by the society in which they live.

Wilde subtitled Lady Windermere’s Fan, his first society comedy, ‘A Play About A Good Woman’, hinting at the play’s denouement in which Mrs Erlynne, the scandalous blackmailing vamp, rather than her high-principled puritanical daughter, is revealed as the ‘good woman’. Kilroy’s strategy is to reverse that process. Oscar in frustrated anger in the first scene rails against his wife’s morality: ‘Constance, you positively drip with goodness’.³³⁷ Constance, however, is resistant to this image of herself: ‘Never again will I be invented as the good woman’.³³⁸ The play makes Constance Wilde the dramatic centre of attention, where in the standard version of her story she is merely the good and loyal wife betrayed by her histrionic husband and his irresponsible lover. That stereotype, we are made to feel, is simply a way of denying to her any inner life of her own. As Kilroy re-imagines the marriage of the Wildes, they are brought together initially by the reactions of both against their fathers, what Oscar refers to as ‘a mutual interest in patricide’.³³⁹ The psychological consequences of the bad father are pursued in Kilroy’s companion play My Scandalous Life, dramatizing Alfred Douglas in later life. What is never fully revealed until the end of Secret Fall is Constance’s sexual abuse by her father, the ‘secret fall’ that has made her feel contaminated with evil, anything but the ‘good woman’ she is called.

What gives this play its extraordinary impact is the way in which the inner psychological dramas of the three central figures are played out in theatrically embodied images. The Wilde children are represented by miniature manikins worked by the attendants. There is a heartbreaking moment when they scamper away from Constance on the beach, and she, painfully crippled from her – literal – fall on the staircase, cannot run after them. The shape-changing nature of beauty to which Wilde is attracted is revealed in the various metamorphoses of Douglas, appearing as a Christ-like priest figure to Wilde in prison before finally standing naked as the ideal of the Androgyne. Puppetry makes visible a mental landscape in which the miniaturized children are counterpointed with a figure more than life size. Gordon Craig wanted to reduce the live actor to an Űber-marionette, but Kilroy instead figures the horror of the father’s sexual abuse acted out in Constance’s memory as a ‘gigantic puppet: Victorian gentleman, red cheeks, black moustache, bowler hat, umbrella, frock coat’.³⁴⁰ The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde is a dazzling display of what theatre is and can do, at once beautiful ritual performance, searing human drama and the deepest projections of the psyche.

Kilroy is a modernist playwright who has assimilated the dramaturgy of his great European predecessors, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht. As one of the epigraphs to his 1977 essay on Yeats and Beckett he uses a quotation from Artaud, mad prophet of the theatrical avant-garde: ‘I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak’.³⁴¹ That essay remains one of the most piercingly intelligent analyses of Yeats and Beckett. The two playwrights are placed within a ‘modern dramatic tradition […] that subscribes to the integrity, the wholeness, the autonomy of stage-practice, one which undermines the idea of humanist imitation which has long dominated the European theatre’.³⁴² Yeats and Beckett are seen as exemplary in their privileging of a theatrical idiom of image and movement, Artaud’s ‘concrete language’, over a representational drama of speech. In the works of both dramatists, as Kilroy sees it, the stage is an autonomous domain, not dependent on its evocation of any extra-theatrical reality. The two stand out, implicitly, against the traditional view of Irish drama as dominated by language, the ‘sovereignty of words’, and Kilroy is evidently with them on this. His too is a self-reflexive theatre, not one of illusionist representation or realistic dialogue. But there is a major difference between Kilroy’s practice and that of Yeats or Beckett. He is specifically concerned with the social and political realities of the Ireland in which he writes, and these are the direct or indirect subject of many of his plays. This takes me on to the matter of Kilroy’s rendering of Irish modernity.

Modernity

How do we define the modern, and where does it start? The re-titling of what we used to call the Renaissance period as ‘early modern’ pushes the start date back to the sixteenth century; others would see the nineteenth century as the crucial period. R.F. Foster’s influential history Modern Ireland (1988) runs from 1600 to 1972, while Joseph Lee’s The Modernisation of Irish Society (1973) covers the period 1848 to 1918. However historians may see modernity in the broadest terms as changes in the organization of the state or economic practices, one crucial shift in Ireland came midway through the twentieth century when a predominantly rural and agricultural country started to become increasingly urbanized. The publication of T.K. Whitaker’s government white paper on Economic Development in 1958 is often taken as the point at which the inward-looking, protectionist Ireland of de Valera was brought to an end. Certainly, looking back to the small village in Co Wicklow where I grew up in the 1950s, it seems more than a lifetime away from the commuter-belt appendage of Dublin it has all but become now. One part of Kilroy’s achievement has been to dramatize that time of transitional modernization during the 1950s and 1960s. Beyond that, however, he has returned repeatedly to earlier periods to stage the repressions that have returned upon us in our own time.

The key play here is The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche, first staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1968. This is often seen as a breakthrough work, because it was the first play with an overtly gay central character on the Irish stage, but there is much more to it than that. It is an extraordinary evocation of a particular moment in Irish cultural history. As always in Kilroy, the stage setting is important: ‘KELLY’s basement flat in a Dublin Georgian house and the street outside. The main acting area is the flat itself, well downstage. It is approached first by a fine Georgian door in outline against the backdrop of night or street’.³⁴³ This is a postcolonial Ireland of underground Dublin men: celibate, homo-social, misogynist. There is the owner of the flat, Kelly, a low level civil servant with repressed gay tendencies, as it finally emerges, and Seamus his married schoolteacher friend; along with them we find Myles, the would-be car salesman, and the character known only as the Medical Student, who in fact never passed his exams and works as a morgue attendant. Joining the late night Saturday party after the pubs close are the homosexual Mr Roche and his young friend Kevin, extremely unwelcome guests from Kelly’s point of view.

Kelly and Seamus are representative of a whole generation, sons of farmers, small shopkeepers and Guards from down the country, the first in their family to make it to the city and white-collar employment. In their late night cups they remember their country childhoods with a mixture of nostalgia and intense relief at having escaped. Kelly sentimentally imagines an alternative life back home:

You know, there’s something in that – about working on the land, I mean. It’s what I’d prefer if I was given the free choice. But the only people who can get land in this country are the bloody Germans. I’d like land. You know, Seamus, you know when you pull a turnip from a wet drill what it’s like, with the roots black and wet, lovely to the touch, like silk. That’s the land, like food itself. You can’t transplant that in concrete, ha?

Seamus, however, is there to counter with the reality: ‘Oh, indeed if you were given a parcel of it in the morning you wouldn’t take it. It’s like everything else – nice at a distance’.³⁴⁴ These are men who have made the transition from rural to urban, but like the rest of those in the drinking group have failed to get themselves a life. The books that litter Kelly’s flat are no longer read; Seamus’s marriage, it eventually appears, he feels to be a miserable trap. In the background to the Saturday night debauch is the standard conservative Ireland. Myles lives with his mother; on Sunday morning all of them are off to Mass in a church of the Carmelites, significantly an enclosed order ‘beside the Royal Hospital for the Incurables’.³⁴⁵

The action of the play takes the form of a carnival celebration that turns into nightmare. The superficial high spirits of the group are expressed in Kelly’s songs and recitations of popular American ballads, but aggression builds against Mr Roche as the scapegoat for all their resentments and frustrations. In spite of his known claustrophobia, Roche is bundled down into the ‘holy-hole’, the tiny cellar in Kelly’s flat, where he appears to die. The underground space even deeper within the subterranean home is where active sexual energy must be buried. Yet as the title of the play indicates, Roche is dead but won’t stay down. Mr Roche’s ‘resurrection’ is played in a style deliberately marked off from the near naturalism of the rest of the action. When he tells of watching the sunrise, ‘the tone’, the stage direction tells us, ‘should shift radically from all that has gone before’, and Mr Roche speaks ‘rising ecstatically, priest-like, with arms outstretched, very slowly with menace’: ‘And-it-came! Like the beginning of life again. A great white egg at the foot of the sky. Breaking up into light. Breaking up into life’.³⁴⁶ In a letter to Christopher Murray, Kilroy confessed that in the play ‘I did have a certain private academic fun in trying to write an ironic version of the old resurrection-fertility comedy’.³⁴⁷ A part of the irony is that the fertility god here takes the form of a non-reproductive homosexual male. This is the repressed sexuality that is bound to return in Ireland’s ignorant and frustrated, culturally starved society. Among the books that Kelly no longer reads are Nietzsche, Rilke and – appropriately enough – Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, from which he in fact quotes: ‘I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man’.³⁴⁸ Ireland has still a long way to go before it can reach the liberating defiance of a Nietzsche, the transcendentalism of a Rilke, or even the theorized metaphysical underground life of a Dostoevsky.

Modernity came late to Ireland. We did not have the industrial revolution that catapulted other countries into the modernized world of capitalism. Colonial rule and a conservative Catholic Church both made for social retardation. A key feature of Irish modernity has been the felt need to understand our past history, to work out how we came to be where we are now. To this effort Kilroy’s plays have made an important contribution. If you take the long view of modernity, then The O’Neill can be seen in this light, a dramatization, without illusions, of the end of pre-modern Gaelic Ireland and the forces that brought about this end. His Second World War plays, Double Cross and The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, both help to reveal the political and psychological deformations of the past. With Madame MacAdam we are confronted with the fascistic tendencies just below the surface of Emergency Ireland. In the case of Double Cross what haunts Brendan Bracken, the self-created British imperialist, is the memory of a rabidly republican father who despised him as a ‘Mammy’s pet’. Inadequate sons haunted by nightmarishly threatening fathers are familiar enough across a range of fiction and drama but take on a special significance within the mental landscape of long colonized Ireland, the spectre of authority elsewhere against which there can never be a wholly successful revolt.

Perhaps Kilroy’s most powerful indictment to date of the Ireland that preceded our own time is Christ Deliver Us!, staged at the Abbey in 2010. It is of course an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, written originally in the 1890s. And it is a measure of Ireland’s cultural belatedness that a play that reflected the repressive atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Germany should transfer so convincingly to an Irish setting in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Wedekind’s ironically entitled Spring Awakening is a study of the horrors and dangers of adolescent sexuality. Kilroy follows the original quite closely in the main lines of the plot: the contrast between the freethinking Michael and the anxious Mossy, which ends in Mossy’s suicide and Michael’s incarceration in an industrial school for having tried to enlighten his friend about sex; the tragic death of the fifteen-year-old Winnie whom Michael has made pregnant; the dynamics of the male and female groups of schoolchildren, including the discovery by two of the boys of their gay sexuality. The specifics, however, are made convincingly Irish.

We first see the boys in the Diocesan School superintended by its authoritarian cane wielding priests. We are made aware of the class differences of the likes of Michael, from a well-to-do middle-class home, and Mossy, well down the social scale, whose father is in the army. When the scandal breaks after Mossy’s suicide, with Michael’s attempts at sex education traced back to him, his father insists that Michael be sent to St Joseph’s Industrial School run by the Christian Brothers as a ‘good, sharp shock to the system’.³⁴⁹ Michael’s father is sufficiently influential to overawe the relatively humane Canon, principal of the Diocesan School, with threats of political intervention. Inside the Industrial School, the stage direction makes clear, the ‘boys are different from the college boys, shaven and bruised heads, black eyes, one or two with dirty bandages’.³⁵⁰ This is the brutalized bottom of the heap of Irish society, a place of physical abuse and futile attempted brainwashing, of vicious catch-as-catch-can aggression among the inmates. The death of Winnie in Kilroy’s play also recalls all too uncomfortably Ireland’s unreconstructed past. Where in Wedekind the equivalent girl is killed by a botched abortion, Winnie dies alone in an unassisted childbirth which, for those of my generation or older, is a terrible reminder of Anne Lovett of Granard, the fifteen-year-old who came to an exactly similar end in 1984.

Christ Deliver Us! is a frightening dramatization of a terrible time in Ireland, a time of sexual ignorance and repression, of authoritarian exploitation and abuse. That did not stop it from being theatrically exhilarating in Wayne Jordan’s fine Abbey production, with the energy of the opening choreographed hurling scene, the beauty of the dance and embrace of the two gay boys later on. The play also has something like an upbeat ending. The final scene of Spring Awakening poses real problems for a contemporary adaptation. Wedekind shows Melchior – equivalent to Kilroy’s Michael – escaped from the reformatory, finding himself in a cemetery where his lover is buried, inveigled by his dead friend to join him in death. From this he is rescued by a mysterious Masked Man who lures him back towards life. For the Masked Man Kilroy substitutes Fr Seamus, the one fully enlightened priest from the Diocesan School, the only teacher sufficiently cultured to recognize the pictures of naked men and women Michael has given Mossy as reproductions of the old master paintings of Cranach. In the earlier school scene, Fr Seamus, asphyxiating from lack of air, has suffered from a severe speech impediment. In the cemetery, apparently laicized, he no longer stutters and his message to Michael is clear:

Listen to what the temple of your body is saying to you in secret. Attend to its whispers of hope and desire, streaming through your flesh and blood. […] Be true to your own nature. That’s all there is, finding one’s manhood, finding one’s womanhood, and being true to it, no matter what form it takes. That’s what salvation is…³⁵¹

This is the voice of modern Ireland that enables Michael to walk away from the ghosts of Mossy and Winnie.

Thomas Kilroy is a modernist playwright who shows human behaviour as constructed and performative. We play the roles that we have been taught to play, creatures of our parents, our society, our cultural and class milieu. The theatre, however, does not merely reproduce this sort of socially induced role play; it is its own place with its own forms of action and meaning. In Kilroy we are never allowed to forget that we are sharing in that special experience. His drama is anti-illusionist and metatheatrical. We are not witnessing sixteenth-century Irish history enacted in The O’Neill, we are watching a contemporary play upon themes from that history. Talbot’s box is the stage space itself as well as the mind of Matt Talbot and the communal memory of him; the secret fall of Constance Wilde takes place in public superintended and directed by theatrical puppeteers. Kilroy’s theatre is secular and materialist in so far as it seeks to analyse and demystify human action. And the modern Ireland which his plays so powerfully evoke has stood in much need of such demystification. Yet Kilroy is never a reductive rationalist, never prepared to deny the existence of mystery beyond demystification – hence his sympathetic treatment of a figure such as Talbot or the visionary Blake. I quoted at the beginning his definition of the sensibility of Synge: ‘private, intensely preoccupied with the nature of human freedom […] secular but committed to the essential spirituality of human action’. It is a fine interpretation of Synge but might also stand as an illuminating insight into the extraordinary drama of Thomas Kilroy.

Extract From: Across the Boundaries: Talking about Thomas Kilroy, edited by Guy Woodward (2014)

Cross Reference: Field Day, Friel, Murphy, Kilroy essay in Part Two

See Also: Irish Theatre in England, Second in the series: Irish Theatrical Diaspora, edited by Richard Cave and Ben Levitas and the Kilroy interview in Theatre Talk.