Thomas Kilroy – Irish Modernist: a response to Nicholas Grene

Anthony Roche

It is a pleasure to respond to Nicholas Grene’s rich critical exploration of the plays of Thomas Kilroy, a body of work for which I have an unstinting admiration.³⁵² Like Nicky, I too missed the first production of Talbot’s Box at the Peacock in 1977. I was in the United States and was still (just) there when Field Day produced Double Cross in 1986. But I had been extremely fortunate that my theatre-going as a teenager in the late 1960s coincided with the emergence of Thomas Kilroy as a major force on the Irish stage.

My parents and I attended the premiere of The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche at the Olympia during the 1968 Dublin Theatre Festival, probably drawn in part by the curiosity of seeing our surname in the title. It featured, as Nicky has mentioned, the first overtly gay character on an Irish stage, the eponymous Mr Roche. Further, Mr Roche was described in the text as ‘the queen of Dunleary’,³⁵³ where we had always lived. During the interval at the bar, a friend of the family approached my father and said to him: ‘You kept it well hid, boy, wha’?’ I offer the story to indicate how ready the Irish audience was to confront this new and daring subject matter. I have no doubt that the play was better served in this respect by being premiered as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, where Irish plays were placed within the European and globalizing context of visiting productions and critics, than had it been put on first at the Abbey, where it had been submitted and rejected.³⁵⁴

Whetted by this encounter with an exciting new playwright, and given my own burgeoning interest in theatre, I made sure to seek out Kilroy’s The O’Neill when it was staged at the Peacock the following year. I would probably otherwise have avoided it, because it sounded like a product of the genre that flourished at the time, the deadly dramatization of periods of Irish history, often in the open air with the wind half-drowning out the pseudo-Shakespearean lines the actors were shouting as they strode around in Celtic panto costumes (this is my gloss on Nicky’s characterization of ‘clank clunk’ history drama). I’m not sure the Peacock production entirely avoided all these problems, but what registered even then was the centrality and the modernity of the relationship between Hugh O’Neill and Mabel Bagenal. It did so not only because of its sexual frankness; though it had that. All of Kilroy’s plays would reveal a bracing awareness of the key role played by sexuality in the construction of identity, and in this way have proved a refreshing alternative to most Irish theatre, which is verbally frank but sexually prudish. The modernizing relationship between Hugh and Mabel is best understood in the light of Brian Friel’s Making History (1988). In Friel’s play, when Archbishop Lombard insists on the marriage being virtually erased from the narrative history he is writing of the O’Neill, Hugh insists on its centrality to his public as well as his private history. Both Kilroy’s and Friel’s plays provide a deliberate counter strategy to the ineluctable historic tendency of Irish nationalism to write women out of the nationalist narrative: they write them back in and make them central to the power dynamics of the drama. Part of the deliberate transgressiveness of Kilroy’s version is the inter-marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant, still a concern in the late 1960s when Catholics were urged not to enter Trinity College by the hierarchy.

Back in Ireland for a few months in 1976, I had the opportunity to see Kilroy’s next play, Tea and Sex and Shakespeare, at the Abbey, directed by Max Stafford-Clark of the Royal Court (who had been a student at Trinity in the 1960s) and starring the great Donal McCann as the writer Brien. It was exhilarating to see the main stage of the national theatre subject to the zany, surrealistic theatrics of Kilroy’s play. It also provided a rare instance of the figure of the writer being represented directly, performing the act of cultural production that is writing, rather than being naturalized under the more usual guise/disguise of tramp or teacher. Brian Friel waited until 1997 to place a writer centre stage in Give Me Your Answer, Do!, but Friel’s writer is a novelist where Kilroy’s is unabashedly a playwright. This allows for a hitherto unprecedented degree of meta-theatricality. When at the height of the play’s action Brien is asked by his next-door neighbour how he is getting on with his play he replies: ‘I’m writing my play all the time, Sylvester. I’m writing my play just now, Sylvester, as I talk to you. Good morning! You see? Dialogue.’³⁵⁵

I was given the opportunity to engage critically for the first time with Thomas Kilroy’s theatre in 1982 when Maurice Harmon of UCD invited me to give a paper on the writer at that year’s Triennial IASIL Conference. Taking the opportunity to read 1977’s Talbot’s Box, I proposed linking the play with Mr Roche through the idea of the felix culpa or fortunate fall; both had a death-and-resurrection motif which I thought served to point up the challenge Kilroy’s drama offered to the prevailing norms of Irish naturalism. This led me to describe the huge onstage coffin as Kilroy’s box of theatrical tricks, suggesting in turn ‘a coffin, a confession box, a witness stand, a wooden bulwark constructed by Talbot the carpenter against the encroaching chaos and Thomas Kilroy’s own box of theatrical tricks, the props and stratagems of the playwright’s trade openly on display.’³⁵⁶ What I would like to do at this point, especially in the light of Nicky’s comments, is to look at how the play engages with the theatrical career of Sean O’Casey. Matt Talbot was an inner-city working-class Dubliner living in the early twentieth century, so it was inevitable that Talbot’s Box would resonate with verbal and visual echoes of O’Casey (who wrote two plays about the Dublin Lock Out in which Talbot is involved). If, as Nicky has noted, there is a ‘talking back’ to the Captain Boyle of O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy, there is an even more subtle dialogue with the later stages of O’Casey’s career, which were marked by an increasingly explicit degree of theatrical (mainly Expressionist) experimentation, an increasingly tin ear with regard to Dublin speech and a life of exile from Ireland and the Abbey. Nicky mentions Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says No!, but that play was at least staged by the Gate when turned down by the Abbey. O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie (1929), on the other hand, received only two Abbey productions in the next forty years. I would note also that during the 1970s Thomas Kilroy edited a key critical volume, Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Sean O’Casey (1975), to which he contributed a trenchant introduction. In place of a critical essay, he supplies the creative offering of Talbot’s Box, a play which verbally moves with ease from accurate Dublin idiom to a more overtly poetic style without any of O’Casey’s over-writing, and brings O’Casey’s modernist experiment out of exile and back on to the stage of the Abbey Theatre.³⁵⁷

The debate between the creative and the critical increasingly began to characterize the writings of Thomas Kilroy. Or, rather, a piece of critical writing or an adaptation of a pre-existing dramatic text could metamorphose into an original work for the theatre – Chekhov’s The Seagull was transplanted to the West of Ireland, and more recently Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening was recast as Christ Deliver Us! At the Magill Summer School in Donegal in 2008 Kilroy spoke of how Double Cross, his play for the Field Day Theatre Company, began. He was visited by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea, Field Day’s co-founders, to discuss a contribution to the company. Kilroy had long been intrigued by the curious relationship he perceived between Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s Minister for Information during World War II, and William Joyce, who made Nazi broadcasts under the name of Lord Haw Haw. Both native-born Irish, these two men had gone to extraordinary lengths to distance themselves from their origins by theatrically constructing and performing alternative identities. Kilroy had originally intended to write a long essay for the Field Day series of cultural pamphlets. But as he talked with his fellow playwright and this most mercurial and gifted of Irish actors, the idea of Double Cross emerged, a play in which the lives of the two men consciously doubled and commented on each other. The two roles would be played by the same actor, in this case Rea. Historically, Bracken and Joyce never actually met; most of the scenes play out in either wartime London or Berlin. But, as Nicky rightly observes, technology – the use of a video screen – made it possible for the two characters simultaneously to occupy the same space. When Joyce is in prison awaiting execution for treason, Bracken appears on the video ‘as if behind bars or a grille of iron’ and calmly answers Joyce’s question by saying he is there because he is ‘searching for his brother’.³⁵⁸ When Brian Friel divided the one character into a Public and Private Gar in Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1964, two actors were required to play the role. More pertinently, six years earlier, Samuel Beckett had used what was then the advanced technology of the tape recorder to represent simultaneously on-stage a sixty-nine-year-old Krapp confronting his thirty-year-younger self through the medium of recorded sound.

In the past decade or so, official Ireland has begun to take account of the Irish who served as soldiers in two World Wars. But the playwrights, as usual, were in the vanguard. Frank McGuinness and Sebastian Barry have both examined the conflicted loyalties of Irish soldiers from north and south at the Somme. But it was Thomas Kilroy in his two plays for the Field Day Theatre Company, first in Double Cross and then in The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, who examined Ireland during the Second World War, exploring the complex situation beneath its studied mask of neutrality and the euphemistic term ‘the Emergency’. The second play moved from cities central to the theatre of war, London and Berlin, to Ireland. What is so unusual about the setting of Madame MacAdam is that it is rural, not urban, and that Kilroy for once adopts the recognizable small town setting of the traditional Abbey play. But what disrupts and blows apart the conventionality of the rural setting is its location close to the border. The play unfolds a few miles into the southern state, allowing us to observe the behaviour of Irish citizens towards the world conflict from which they were largely detached, but close enough to Northern Ireland and the German bombing it suffered for the ‘distant sound of a bomber’ to be the first sound that is heard.³⁵⁹ The theatrical travelling show and its English players maintain a certain studied indifference to their precise location throughout, concerned as they are with the eternal verities of dramatic art – Shakespeare, in short. But the troupe harbours a Jewish member, who draws the anti-Semitic wrath of the locals when he engages in an affair with a young Irish girl. The war is imported into the context of the play through the troubled personal history of this character, Rabe; but it is also given an Irish dimension by the manoeuvrings of the Local Defence Force, headed up by the town’s baker, Bun Bourke. When he changes costume and puts on his quasi-Nazi gear, Bun’s tones become more authoritarian, and the incipient fascism of an Ireland which stayed out of the war is now fully confronted and acknowledged. Jim Nolan’s production for Field Day had great fun with the theatrical antics of the visiting troupe, and the crossing of boundaries between onstage and offstage performativity, but it shied away from exploring the darker aspects of such transgressive border crossing in Kilroy’s text, and the play itself has yet to receive a definitive production.

What binds together the more recent plays of Thomas Kilroy is their concentration on the figure of the artist. Some of them are well known, such as Oscar Wilde, William Blake; some of them are not, like Nell Jeffrey, the Irish sculptor at the heart of 2003’s The Shape of Metal. The plays are concerned to show the artist at work, that in Yeats’s words ‘we must labour to be beautiful’, most visually and hence dramatically through Nell’s physical labour as she wrests the recalcitrant metal into shape.³⁶⁰ The play has two time schemes, one when the artist is eighty-two and looks at her hands to remark that they ‘couldn’t even hold a bloody teacup now’; in other scenes, she is fifty-two and is shown at work welding.³⁶¹ But all of these recent artist-centred plays are at pains to convey the dramatic and human truth that artists do not live in romantic isolation, toiling at their masterpieces. There are human connections, and in particular family connections. In The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, so luminously directed at the Abbey in 1997 by Patrick Mason, Oscar Wilde was moved out of the dramatic limelight he so insisted on occupying both on and off the stage and instead dramatic centrality was accorded to his wife, Constance, and their two children. In ‘Blake’, the space of the artist is shared by his wife Catherine, who provokes him to a self-scrutiny that one senses he is anxious to avoid.³⁶² It may have seemed to some that Kilroy was according artistic agency to the male, and that women were being demoted to the roles of helpmeet or muse. But social position and dramatic position do not and should not always be automatically equated. Much of the legacy of Ibsen’s modernism has been to confer dramatic centrality on a character who is socially confined to playing a subordinate role – quintessentially, Nora in A Doll’s House – and to explore and to articulate what she suffers by such suppression. Constance Wilde’s dramatic importance cannot and should not be contained and confined within the roles of wife and mother. As Nicky remarks, she protests particularly against the imprisoning role of the ‘good woman’.³⁶³ And with The Shape of Metal Kilroy creates an impressive and credible woman sculptor in Nell Jeffrey, one who can hold her own in the company (personal and, it is suggested, artistic) of Beckett and Giacometti. Yet her children are no better treated than the families of the male artists. This is particularly the case with Grace, the daughter who has vanished from the ‘present’ of the play, and so remains the twenty-five-year-old of the flashbacks. Her sister Judith, Nell’s other daughter, returns as a woman in her forties to interrogate her mother about their family past and its betrayals. But a second image of Grace does appear in The Shape of Metal, not at a particular and different age, but ageless, timeless, as a head sculpted in metal when she was twenty-five. The medium is effaced to show Nell working directly on her daughter’s head as her ‘busy fingers [are] pressing and shaping, lump of stuff, stone or metal to be transformed into Grace finally at peace, head still and quiet, no terrible dread anymore, no mad panics’.³⁶⁴

These late plays are full of the dramatic and damaging encounters between parents and children, not just the fathers and sons of traditional Irish drama, but mothers and daughters, as here. And all three of the characters in The Secret Fall – Constance, Oscar and Bosie – have suffered from an oppressive and, to varying degrees, abusive father. If this is the concern of so much Irish drama past and present, Kilroy departs radically from this tradition. Constance Wilde’s father is represented by a giant male puppet dressed in Victorian clothes, an all-too-true ogre; her children by puppets manipulated onstage by attendant, anonymous figures. Nell Jeffrey’s work as a sculptor and her treatment of her vulnerable daughter are represented by a metallic talking head.

Thomas Kilroy is therefore a modernist writer in an overtly theatrical and self-conscious way. But unlike Beckett, a figure whose art his own resembles and has drawn upon, his theatre does not operate in a deliberately constructed vacuum, a space from which all personal and cultural objects have been removed, torn down or scraped away (even if their traces persist). As Nicky has so persuasively shown, Kilroy’s theatre is both theatrically experimental while being ‘specifically concerned with the social and political realities of the Ireland in which he writes’. I did not read Kilroy’s essay ‘Synge and Modernism’ when it was first published in 1972. I was still an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, and, while profoundly influenced by Synge’s centenary, my own PhD on J.M. Synge still lay some years in the future. Much of my writing has been about the contemporary Irish stage and Thomas Kilroy’s many critical essays on that subject have had a profound impact on my thinking. When much later I read his essay ‘Synge the Modernist’ I found much to agree with and admire, some of which has been quoted by Nicky. But I was disappointed that, despite the promise of his title, Kilroy instead seemed to view Synge as turning his back on and rejecting ‘what is central to European drama of the same period’.³⁶⁵ This conference and Nicky’s paper have led me to re-read the Synge essay more attentively and realize how subtle is its argument. Kilroy shows how Synge appears much more modernist when his plays are not shoehorned within the narrow confines of the early Irish Dramatic Movement. I would agree with that and say further that Synge’s plays embody a kind of Irish Modernism which can more readily be seen as an alternative to, rather than a rejection of, the European model. Kilroy’s comments in this early essay are most fascinating when they are applied not to Synge’s tragically truncated career but to his own achievement of the past forty-plus years. Kilroy has reversed the emphasis: he is a modernist first and Irish second, following on from his great Irish predecessors, explicitly and unequivocally opening up Irish society to the full impact of a European range of sensibility and representation.

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