‘Strangeness made sense’: reflections on being a non-Irish Irish playwright.⁷⁹²

Elizabeth Kuti

A few months after I had arrived in my new home of Dublin, a friend wrote me a letter from England (this was in 1993 when people still wrote letters), enclosing Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ and asking me if it struck a chord:

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,

Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,

Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:

Once that was recognised, we were in touch.⁷⁹³

Larkin’s feeling of being ‘separate, not unworkable’ in Ireland was indeed very resonant for me then; now it strikes me as an apt description of my adventures in Ireland, and in Irish theatre in particular. The poem expresses a feeling that is a familiar one to me, and perhaps to many people who find the dislocation of the ‘expat’ experience paradoxically more comfortable than attempting to fit in to what ought to be ‘home’. The final stanza of Larkin’s poem ironically compares ‘not home’ with ‘home’, revealing the deeper – or ‘more serious’ – loneliness of feeling like an outsider in one’s own country where there is no ‘excuse’ for it:

Living in England has no such excuse:

These are my customs and establishments

It would be much more serious to refuse.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

Many of the plays that I wrote in, and then, latterly, about Ireland, seem to me in retrospect to have allowed me to explore these very issues of home and exile, of belonging and not belonging: three of them, Treehouses (2000), The Sugar Wife (2005) and The Six-Days World (2007) I shall discuss here. Ireland gave me so much, so many blessings, in the eleven years I lived there: not the least of which was the chance to become an actor and a playwright in the Irish theatre. As it seems to have been for Larkin, my time in Ireland was an education for me in the ‘importance of elsewhere.’

The first full-length, original play I ever wrote came about as a result of a conversation with Karin McCully, who was then the Literary Manager at the Abbey Theatre. Karin had called me up for a chat in response to the three unsolicited scripts I had posted in to the Abbey’s Literary Department. She told me that the Abbey had some ‘Seedlings’ money – not a full commission but £1000 to offer to a handful of promising playwrights in whom they were interested, for a first draft of a play, with no commitment from either side to take it any further. She asked if I had a play that I wanted to write, and I (of course) said yes. When she asked what it was about, I told her that it was about a man building a treehouse for his daughter. I had an image in my mind of the opening scene where the girl was looking up and saying ‘I can see the moon’, and I thought that perhaps this idea might have some connection with my father’s family history in Europe and the story of how he survived the war and settled in England. But I wasn’t sure yet how all that came together; I just knew that they were connected. Karin seemed to be satisfied with this rather whimsical description, though, and to my utter joy and astonishment, sent me a contract and £1000: my first bit of genuine playwriting money. So I wrote Treehouses and it turned out in fact to be fairly close to the idea that I had told Karin about, even containing the line, ‘I can see the moon’ somewhere in the opening scene. It was an attempt, partly, to answer the question, where are you from?

When I first arrived in Ireland in 1993 that question was everywhere. Irish people seemed to ask it constantly, not just of me but of each other. And Irish people always had a really clear and satisfying answer – Kilkenny, Cork, Wexford, Derry. Irish people seemed always to know without a shadow of a doubt where they were from. I always stuttered and mumbled, ‘England … London … well, I grew up in Kent. My dad’s Hungarian. So … well, Kent really, I suppose’. None of it felt very secure.

It would be untrue to say that I ‘felt’ myself to be Hungarian in any way – my father had made no attempt to teach me the language – and I wasn’t raised with any sense of Jewishness, either. I was a Home Counties girl. But somehow there was something worrying away at that identity which made it feel like something of an act – something not quite to be relied upon. When I asked why I had been named Elizabeth, and not Ilona (which had been my parents’ second choice and the name of my father’s mother) I was told that my father felt that as Ilona, ‘no one would believe you were English’. Obviously identity was something that you had to persuade other people to believe in; and if they didn’t ‘believe’ you – what then? Some sense of threat or danger lurked in my father’s impulse to reject the name Ilona in favour of Elizabeth; giving me the name of the Queen of England was clearly something of a precaution. Looking back, I wonder if I grew up affected unconsciously by this sense of instability: the idea that identity, and nationality, was an act, a performance, that needed to be convincing to onlookers, where a flaw, or mark of difference of any kind, might give you away. I certainly had that anyway in the form of my ‘very unusual’ not to say unpronounceable surname.

Not speaking Hungarian, lunch at my grandparents’ house in Croydon (they had all fled Hungary in 1956) meant people breaking into a percussive, staccato language I couldn’t understand; strange, angry arguments about Communism and the Soviet Union that I didn’t understand; and black-and-white photographs of unknown family members. When I asked who these people were, I was given uneasy, evasive answers that (as I know now, and perhaps, unconsciously knew then too) weren’t the whole truth. I don’t blame anyone in the least; there’s never going to be an easy moment to explain to a seven-year-old what Auschwitz was. But there was mystery and subterfuge everywhere, and always a feeling of secrets, and of being protected from some truth that was too awful to be mentioned. I think this pervasive sense of a subtext that I barely understood and from which I had somehow to be ‘protected’, was perhaps the provocation that made me start writing, and writing drama in particular. Drama ignites where the subtext exerts an intolerable pressure on the surface of things; where the spoken clashes with the unspoken; where words and deeds diverge. And what’s more, as Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ What you knew, it seemed to me, or rather, what you thought you knew, was slippery and subject to endless revision and change. I thought my name was ‘really’ Kuti; it turned out in fact to be ‘Kunzlinger’, ‘Kuti’ being a post-war invention of my grandfather’s. That type of revision of the past was constantly taking place for me. What I thought I knew and understood turned out to be not what it seemed; the simplest piece of knowledge that ought to have been reliable, set in stone, was liable to crumble into dust when poked or prodded.

Imagination, however, seemed paradoxically to offer more stability than knowledge. In making plays one could choose, determine and possess every facet of the world being created. There was no lie because it was all invented. That seemed oddly secure. Your feet were on solid ground not shifting sands. And yet drama is – must be – inevitably about uncovering the truth. ‘For the subject of drama is The Lie’, David Mamet writes. ‘At the end of the drama, THE TRUTH – which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied – prevails. And that is how we know the drama is done.’⁷⁹⁴ Through writing plays – making it all up – it seemed one might perhaps, paradoxically, edge closer to truth, to wholeness of some kind.

I think Treehouses was an attempt to make something whole out of the scraps of what I knew of my origins. It was a rendering of what you might term a ‘personal mythology’, and as such perhaps the classic ‘first play’ or ‘first novel’ that the beginning writer sets out to write – sometimes, possibly, to his or her own detriment as a writer. I remember a conversation at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig with the wonderfully insightful Graham Whybrow, for many years the Literary Manager at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where he spoke with a tinge of weariness of how the first-time playwright in his view so often ended up ‘blowing their personal mythology’ on their first play. That key story, the one novel that they say everyone has in them, the writer’s own, unique narrative of origins, then gets thrown away on a less than competent piece of work. Whereas, Graham implied, if only they had waited for play number three, four, or five, how many more good plays, and playwrights, might we have?

So I committed the classic wrong move of the beginning playwright and blew my personal mythology on my very first play. However, at first, it seemed that perhaps I’d got away with it. The Abbey Literary Manager, who was now Judy Friel, told me that ‘the Building’ liked the first draft sufficiently to transform my ‘Seedlings’ commission into a full commission, and to develop the script towards a full production. It was unbelievably exciting and unexpected.

What gradually happened, however, with the production was that I progressively lost my nerve and backed away from what I’d written. This is a syndrome that I now regularly detect in myself. Writing a draft can be private, fearless, you can dare yourself to say the unsayable, you can write to please yourself. You are making a map to a solitary place, an uninhabited island, with yourself the only castaway. The thrill of writing is the departure from the everyday and the plunge into the ocean of the unconscious and the imagination – to experience whatever sharks, coral-reefs, islands of paradise or cannibals that the journey may reveal.

It’s quite another thing to put this stuff on public display with your name plastered all over it, and the reputations of other people – actors, designers, directors – pinned to it. Then the fear sets in; repression sets in. In truth, what I had written was indeed what the classifiers-of-plays would probably call a ‘Holocaust play.’ The play moved between three zones of time and place: one strand of the play followed the story of a young woman called Eva in 2000, on the day of her father’s funeral. A second story strand, also set in 2000 and on the same day, follows the story of Magda, an elderly woman, a refugee from somewhere in Europe, talking to a care-worker in a care home. Old Magda reminisces about the summer during the war when she hid a runaway boy in the hayloft of the barn on her father’s farm. A third story strand shows Magda’s young self during the 1940s in an unnamed European country, during which she risks her life by hiding a persecuted Boy, and then has to choose whether to flee with him, or to stay and marry her childhood sweetheart, Stephen. Magda chooses Stephen; but the end of the play reveals that ‘the Boy’ was in fact Eva’s father. From this we realise that the Boy escaped, survived and lived a full and interesting life in exile. Thus Eva’s and Magda’s stories are brought together.

The play itself as a text was in fact already rather shy about its origins, and I deliberately left the settings open and ambiguous. In my head, Eva and Old Magda were both living in England. But, as I knew I was writing for the Peacock in Dublin, I felt the need to cover the tracks a little. So it is never specified exactly where either of them are: Old Magda, who has clearly left her country of origin and taken up a new life in a new country, talks of coming to ‘this island’. She speaks of the sea, and how her room overlooks the sea. In my head, this aspect of Magda was suggested by my Hungarian Great-Aunt Irmus who had a room in a care home in Dover, close to the sea. For audiences at the Peacock though, it could perhaps be Killiney or Howth; my guess is that audiences of other productions, such as at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter in 2001, would assume that the care home and Eva’s home were both in England. I avoided specifically naming any towns, cities, or even countries. Old Magda chats with one of the care assistants in the home, whose name is Ger and who is clearly Irish; but such a person might easily be found in a British setting as well as in Ireland. Young Magda’s European home is also unspecified, though a snatch of a song in Hungarian is a clue for those who know their Magyar from their Polish. The Boy describes trains leaving the city’s stations at night-time, taking people away for ‘re-settlement’ in the east. The words Jew or Jewish, ghetto, Nazi, Holocaust and so on never appear in the play.

In some ways this lack of specificity was part of the aesthetic of the play. The visual images I had in mind, and had stuck above my desk to remind me of the mood I wished to create, were some wood-cuts, which showed very simple, almost Biblical scenes of sowing and harvesting in clear, simple black outlines. Another influence was the dream-like, magical quality of Marc Chagall’s paintings: a violinist, a man and woman flying through the sky over little houses and woods. The intention with the play, therefore, was not to be historically realistic nor photographically naturalistic, but to give the play a simple, fable-like quality: to create a mood of lyricism, the sense of the seasons passing, and the presence of death and danger and other unspoken dangers in the midst of sensuous childhood elation, so that the play might have the simple, universal feeling of a nursery rhyme or of the Bible.

By avoiding specific labels, the aim was perhaps to tell the story in such a way that the Boy’s persecution, and the choices faced by Magda, retained some openness, and could resonate with other conflicts and with contemporary events. Perhaps in this way I hoped to sidestep the problem that an Irish audience’s relationship with the Second World War is necessarily different from the British one. As an Irish friend said to me, ‘We didn’t have a war, we had an Emergency.’ The ‘war’, in which Ireland had been neutral, had not even been named as such in Ireland. For British people born in the twentieth or even twenty-first century, the Second World War is both personal and family history, and also a key piece of national mythology. For Jewish people, it is of course another mythology, and a terrible legacy that casts a long shadow over past, present, and future. For most Europeans, surely, that war – what happened at Dachau, Birkenau, Auschwitz, what happened in cities right across our continent, the slaughter committed by all of us, inflicted on all of us – is a scar that fifty or sixty years on, has faded, but still retains its power to provoke – if not such profound guilt or despair as perhaps was the case in the immediate post-war period – then at least serious reflection.

But for an Irish audience the weight and meaning, the very naming of the Second World War, is specific and different. The emotion at the heart of Treehouses is a struggle with guilt, essentially in relation to the horror of the Holocaust. Magda laments a failure that is not hers alone but a collective human failure: ‘Not even one. I couldn’t even save one little boy … I lacked courage. I promised – and I broke my promise’.⁷⁹⁵ The last speech of the play is a plea for the chance to make some kind of reparation or to replay history: ‘I will bring a bowl of salt and water to bathe your feet. I will save you from the fire. I will make an ark and set it among the rushes for some Pharaoh’s daughter to find’ (81). The play shows Magda’s personal story, but the guilt she expresses goes beyond the personal.

However, it seemed in the late 1990s that this theme was obscure or irrelevant to Irish audiences. When the playwright Thomas Kilroy commented on the play in an open public workshop at the Peacock Theatre, the word ‘Holocaust’ was, I think, never mentioned. Tom described it throughout the two days as a ‘memory play’, and that seemed a category that Irish theatre, and Irish audiences, were much more comfortable and familiar with. This was a play about the past, about memory and about secrets: and this was how the play ended up being described and interpreted to audiences. The Holocaust issue was not merely downplayed; it was entirely unmentioned. The image on the flyer for the Peacock production was ghostly and atmospheric, but ambiguous, with nothing to indicate the play’s setting or content; and the copy on the back was equally non-specific, describing the play as ‘a magical tale of refuge, treachery, and of love lost and found’.

Not that I didn’t comply with, in fact even encourage, this vagueness; it was probably largely my own fault. I remember talking to the Press Office at the Abbey and discussing the copy for the flyer, and anxiously suggesting that the Holocaust or World War Two should not be mentioned. The director, Jason Byrne, and the Press Office, seemed to be very much in agreement that we shouldn’t stress the Holocaust angle – so that I am not sure now how much it was their decision, how much my own, or whether I had picked up on the rather ambivalent and lukewarm signals in response to the play’s depiction of the war and the Holocaust (theatre productions come about in such a collaborative way that these matters are often confused). By avoiding specifics I think I hoped that contemporary resonances with other conflicts in Europe might more easily emerge. Parallels with refugees fleeing from ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and so forth, might, I hoped, engage Irish audiences more perhaps than a play specifically depicting the Holocaust. After all, persecution and genocide, flight, migration and emigration were pretty big issues throughout the 1990s, and even Ireland was changing as Bosnians, Rwandans and others made their way here in increasing numbers.

Furthermore, the themes of ‘home’ and of ‘exile’ in the play had wider relevance – not just in the sense of homeland or nation, but in a wider sense of the ‘home’ of our first family, which changes and is dismantled by the passage of time, as children grow up, and parents die. The constant re-grouping of ‘home’ was a thread going through the play, and it is the thematic thread which connects Eva’s narrative with that of Magda and the Boy. Eva’s is an Oedipal drama in which she describes feeling ‘exiled’ from her home through her father’s second marriage to her stepmother:

today this garden his garden this day of all days it is so full of that summer the summer I was twelve that last summer when everything I saw from my nest in the tree belonged to us to me and him, before it all ended, before I had to share it, before I stopped being the one and only and became one of three and everything stopped being mine and his and became something he shared with someone else and I was no longer queen but minion in some occupied territory. (17)

Through telling their stories in parallel, the play connects the childhood psychological drama of Eva, dispossessed by her father’s re-marriage, with the displacement and dispossession that her father himself went through as a Jewish child in the Second World War. Connecting these two stories was a problem for some critics, who saw Eva’s story as far too minor a trauma to be compared in any way to that of the Boy. However, this pairing and comparison was central to my conception of the play and its imagery. The temporary nature and impermanence of ‘home’ was expressed in my very first visual image of the ‘treehouse’ which I had told Karin about right at the very beginning; the treehouse is a makeshift, easily-dismantled, temporary structure, belonging to childhood only: just as one’s childhood ‘home’ is dismantled by the passage of time, as children grow up and leave or are ejected from it to form new family structures. The instability of all homes and refuges is a key theme as all the characters are ejected in some way or another from a ‘home’ to which they can never return. So the play was concerned with nationality and exile; but it was about ‘home’ and homeland on other metaphorical, psychological levels too.

Downplaying the Holocaust aspect, especially in terms of the way in which the play was described and marketed, did, however, I think probably result in the play becoming more perplexing for Irish audiences rather than less. Some over-cutting of the text which made the pay-off at the end of the play less than clear, and the general ‘wrongness’ of the Irish setting for Old Magda and Eva, meant that the play was robbed of its true identity, and was shoehorned into an identity that didn’t really fit. Perhaps it was this that audiences perceived, even if unconsciously, and that made the evening unsatisfying. It was noticeable to me that American and English audience members were the most positive in their responses to the play, and seemed to enjoy it more. The play had been sent out as it were in an Irish costume and with an Irish accent and its true nature was therefore disguised and obscured.

The contrast between the marketing of the Peacock production with that of the first production of the play in the UK, at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, was very marked. The flyer and poster for the Northcott’s production was resolutely literal and unambiguous, showing a 1940s steam-train emblazoned with a Nazi swastika against the background of an Autumnal forest.

Audiences in Devon knew exactly where they were and it all made sense. The move towards clear historical specificity was also reflected in the set – a much more solid affair than Johanna Connor’s beautiful, delicate, abstract design for the Peacock. I liked the subtlety of the choices for the Peacock production in terms of visually realising the play; however, the robustness of the Northcott’s refusal to shy away from making it very firmly a ‘Holocaust play’ certainly lent clarity to the evening. Interestingly, it was a reviewer of the Northcott production who pointed out the contemporary parallels that had received no mention or comment in Dublin at all. A reviewer for the Plymouth Extra (22 March 2001) wrote a positive review and commented that this current production of the play had particular resonance now, ‘at a time when history seems to be repeating itself, when the victims of war are again seeking asylum in our country, having been displaced from their own’. Perhaps the lesson of this is that if you attend carefully to the particulars, then the universals will emerge.

Strangely this play, despite its rather lukewarm reception at its premiere in Dublin, has probably been my most successful play to date, in terms of the number of productions it has received, and the distance it has travelled. A production at the Oregon State University in the United States chose for its poster a sombre but beautiful painting in dark tones of a bird in flight heading into a cloudily lit sky (a reference to the song in the play, ‘Repülj madár, repülj’, which means ‘Fly bird, fly away’). A tag-line on the poster itself promised, with crystal clarity, ‘a story of World War II Hungary, memory, love, lost and found’. Another production in London chose an eerily empty snow-filled landscape with the tag-line, ‘Courage or kindness – which is the greatest virtue?’ which sums up the emotional and moral dilemma facing Magda at the climactic moment of choice that the play is balanced upon. The tightrope walk between how much to reveal and how much to conceal, the line between delicate ambiguity and obfuscating evasion is one that the playwright negotiates at every word, line, scene, and act of the play; and it is negotiated again by designers, directors and even by the way that the play is marketed and explained to its prospective audience. Both clarity and ambiguity are essential qualities for an evening of good theatre. The poster image and the wording chosen to publicize a production may seem like a relatively minor matter, but it is the face your play wears to the world. It sends strong signals to your audience and shapes their expectations. It sets your audience up for satisfaction or disappointment. Furthermore, like the image formed for the eye by a Rorschach inkspot, it is a hugely revealing insight into the director’s ‘take’ on the play: a kind of shorthand symbol for the entire interpretive angle that a particular production will pursue.

Despite the kind assurances I had received prior to its production from the Abbey’s Literary Department that the script of Treehouses was indeed ‘Irish’ enough in its themes and concerns, as I have tried to convey above, my hunch remained that the play had not in fact been ‘Irish’ enough, and I felt strongly that my next play would need an unambiguously Irish setting and Irish concerns. At this point I had a commission for a new play for Rough Magic Theatre Company, and I was facing the same problem all over again: all the material that a playwright needs to draw on – experience of family life, of growing up, relatives, the kind of cultural concerns and reference points that you take in with your mother’s milk and are hardly aware of – none of these were available to me in an Irish context. So the solution seemed to be the past – an Irish past, but so distant that it had slipped from the reach of living memory. ‘The past is another country’, as L.P. Hartley puts it, and this past would be my country, my own creation, and its authenticity would come from my own imagination. The Quaker community in Dublin just after the Famine offered me a setting that was very resonant for me: an immigrant household, so the characters would have an outsider’s perspective (like my own), but as citizens living and working in Dublin they were insiders too. After all these years in Dublin I wanted to write something about the city I loved: Dublin itself was important to this play, and Bewley’s Oriental Tea-houses in particular. The sign out on the pavement, ‘Bewley’s, established 1845’ (now sadly to be seen no more) was my starting-point. Like many Quaker businesses – Cadbury’s, Rowntree’s, Jacob’s biscuits – Bewley’s was a highly successful and long-lasting one, and like many Quaker businesses, sugar was central to its trade. The paradox of its simultaneous involvement in philanthropic work as well as the campaign for the abolition of slavery whilst also having trading interests in sugar, a crop so central to slavery, seemed very ripe for dramatic exploration. These kinds of paradoxes are increasingly being explored by Quaker historians: Coalbrookdale (the real-life model for Slatebeck) had indeed been involved in the manufacture of guns and other goods used in the slave trade, and had also pursued philanthropic activities, including the charitable shipping of soup urns to Ireland during the Famine. In an Irish context these ironies were particularly striking. Bewley’s was established during the same decade as the Famine; the Quaker contribution to Famine relief has been widely acknowledged. The transatlantic coffin-ships carrying thousands of dispossessed Irish people were a grim echo of the slave-ships that had sailed for America from Africa, bringing enslaved Africans to work on sugar plantations.

The parallels and paradoxes were enticing but the play refused to take shape for many drafts, as the ideas and research refused to knit together into the right story. To my rescue again came Graham Whybrow who at Annaghmakerrig gave me perhaps the most helpful advice I’ve ever been given. I had made Bewley’s into the fictional ‘Tewkley’s’, but I still felt the need to get everything as right and historically accurate as I could, and this was scuppering my ability to write the play; I couldn’t get hold of the story whilst trying to honour historical accuracy. ‘Why don’t you just make it up?’ said Graham. Along with Loughlin Deegan’s advice on rewriting (‘Just don’t make it worse’), this ranks as my number one favourite piece of playwriting advice. This is a play, not history; I can make this up – and with that liberating thought the play started to come alive. Yes, it’s a roman (or pièce de théâtre, if you like) à clef: Sarah Worth is a version of Sarah Parker Redmond, a former slave who gave a lecture tour in Dublin; the D.L.A.S.S. (Dublin Ladies Anti-Slavery Society) existed. But everything in the play is invented; it is a parallel, if you like, but utterly imagined, fictional universe.

So with complete authority over this imagined universe I felt at ease to write without fetters. Every character in The Sugar Wife is a stranger and an outsider, who has either chosen or had exile of some sort forced upon them. Hannah and Samuel Tewkley are Irish but members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), and as such are descended from members of a dissenting seventeenth-century sect who fled from persecution in England and settled in America, especially Pennsylvania, but also in Germany and Ireland. Alfred Darby is an English Quaker who has turned his back on his family, religion, and country of birth; Sarah Worth is a freed slave, now American citizen, of African descent. Martha Ryan is the only Catholic Irish character, and, as a working-class woman, is a marginalized and exploited figure with an outsider’s perspective. The views in the mid-nineteenth century on Ireland that I came across as I read more – Harriet Jacobs’ Diary of a Slave-girl and Asenath Nicholson’s Annals of the Famine in Ireland – provided more and more startling perspectives on Ireland, viewed from the ‘outside’. Where before Ireland and its history had either seemed a fiercely-guarded Irish possession, or else a closed dialogue locked solely into its colonial/post-colonial relationship with Britain, these outsider perspectives from the nineteenth century slowly helped me see Ireland and its history on a world stage, connected to worldwide patterns of refuge, exile, justice and injustice.

Bernard Klein, a German academic writing about history plays in the Irish theatre, has commented that, ‘Public acts of memory define us, not them’ – that is, such acts are about the rememberers, not the remembered. Klein cites the widespread theory of memory that, ‘… “cultural memory” (as opposed to “personal memory”, most influentially discussed by Freud) is shaped not diachronically in relation to events of the past, but synchronically in relation to the social contexts of the present’.⁷⁹⁶ Thus The Sugar Wife was a play in many ways ‘about’ Dublin of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century that I was living in: it was inspired by the climactic roar of the Celtic Tiger that had produced pockets of astonishing affluence in the city of Dublin, right next to pockets of extreme poverty and deprivation. Irish emigration had long had a voice in the culture and the national narrative; immigration into Ireland from the outside was a relatively new phenomenon, one that had barely existed when I arrived in 1993. By 2005, Dublin had become an ethnically diverse society, and the idea of strangers coming to these shores as immigrants was becoming a part of Irish experience, even if it was not (yet) expressed in Irish culture.

Interestingly, the image chosen for Rough Magic’s production of the play, and for the cover of the published play-text, was another delicate and oblique image: a detail from an Oriental design, showing two cranes flying upwards against a red background.

It did not give much away about the play’s content, though it recalled the Chinese silk robe embroidered with kingfishers that features in the play, and that Hannah wears to have her photograph taken by Alfred Darby, in her pose as ‘Maid of the Orient’. It is an attractive, lyrical image, with the flight of the two birds also suggesting love, and perhaps the (failed) elopement of the lovers. But it is ambiguous and does not signal the harsher aspects of the play. Perhaps this choice of a rather oblique image revealed something of the same tentativeness with which Treehouses had been promoted. A first production of a new play is a risky and nerve-wracking time for all involved. No one, not even (perhaps especially) the playwright, knows yet what kind of animal the play is, having never seen it in front of its audience; and so it is hard to get it right in terms of introducing it to the public. When Rough Magic’s production at the Cube at the Project Arts Centre had received a warm response from critics and audiences, and had been invited by the Soho Theatre in London to transfer there for a run in January 2006, everyone’s confidence was much higher. When the Soho requested a different image to publicize the play, we discussed various options and it is interesting that the one chosen (in agreement as far as I recall with Soho, myself and with Lynne Parker and Rough Magic’s team) was a much more literal image (see fig. 4), which shows a black woman in a white muslin dress and head-scarf photographed from behind (on the flip side of the flyer the image was reversed and shown in a ghostly negative, so that it appears to be a white woman in black clothing, thus foregrounding the idea of photography and enclosing Hannah Tewkley as well as Sarah Worth in the ‘sugar wife’ of the title).

The image on the flyer for the Soho signals very clearly that the play is concerned with race and slavery, and the centrality of a female figure might also suggest that the play is imbued with a feminist perspective. Again, the production of this play aimed at a British audience was promoted via a very upfront, literal image which made the themes crystal clear; while the production aimed at the Irish audience seemed to be given a more lyrical, understated, open image, which side-stepped the obvious ‘issues’ and sent ambiguous signals.

I couldn’t on the evidence say whether this delicate ambiguity versus upfront literalism is a widespread and observable national difference in the marketing of plays in Ireland versus the UK; I can only make the obvious point that in my experience the same script – even the same production – is treated very differently depending on where the production is taking place, and that the process, anecdotally at least, appears to reveal national differences and concerns in an interesting way. For example when The Sugar Wife was translated as Die Zuckerfrau and produced in Stuttgart, the production demonstrated the greater control exercised by the director in Germany over the script than is the case either in Ireland or the UK. The actress playing Sarah Worth was made into a kind of narrator or ringmaster for the whole play, and in the first minutes of the play she delivered an opening prologue in her native language of Portuguese (with German subtitles) explaining that she – the actress – came from Mozambique, and therefore spoke the language of the European colonial power that had appropriated her country; for the rest of the play she would speak, as her character Sarah Worth, in English with German surtitles, while the other characters replied to her in English. The rest of this Brechtian framing prologue drew attention to the strange mixture of influences at work in this ‘Irish’ play by an English author translated by a German for the audience in Stuttgart. For the first ten minutes of the performance, I wondered if I was in the right theatre … but it is this process of transformation and metamorphosis, through the sharing of ideas that is the joy of writing plays. I feel very honoured to have had some very interesting responses from people in Germany, where this play has seemed to strike a chord and find favour. I received this email from a student in Bremen, whose lecturer had included The Sugar Wife as a text on one of her courses:

My friends and I feel that the topic of your play is not out of date at all. It is set in the 1850s; however, we can easily draw comparisons to the world we live in today, in 2009. We mean all the richness in Western societies, and that of course includes the privileged life we are enjoying in Germany, are based on the suffering and poorness of others (we just have to think of China, massive cheap labour, India, child labour, the clothes made by children, being successfully sold in Europe … etc this could be an endless list). Necessarily there comes the guilt question. We grew up with all that plenteousness so naturally, that it does seduce us at times to forget that this is everything else but a worldwide standard life, and even worse that we solely have this privilege, because it is denied to others – just because it happened that they were born by coincidences as well, into this world that has already followed the mechanisms of exploitation long before we could even have actively contributed to those mechanisms; are we then automatically born with guilt – a guilt that already adheres to us before we could even make the first step or form a conscious thought?⁷⁹⁷

This German student interestingly saw the play’s central question as ‘Are we then automatically born with guilt?’ Given, as she argues, that we are born purely by coincidence into a nation which ‘has already followed the mechanisms of exploitation long before we could have actively contributed to those mechanisms’, to what extent do the crimes – if that is the right word – committed by our forefathers and mothers rest on our shoulders? And though this student is talking here about economic guilt, perhaps there are other subtexts to her words. As a British person in Ireland, as a German child born long after the end of the Second World War, as an American born centuries after the end of slavery, the question of the extent of our responsibility for oppressive systems set in place ‘long before we could have actively contributed to those mechanisms’ remains an urgent one. I am grateful for, and touched by, this eloquent response to the play from Isabella Steiner. Finding that The Sugar Wife could travel from Ireland to England to Germany to the U.S. and still resonate there for readers or audience members was a wonderful and very heartening experience.

By the time The Sugar Wife was being produced in 2005-6, I had already accepted a job in England and had made the poignant but seemingly necessary leap back across the water – to England and to Essex. A play that had been brewing for several years suddenly demanded to be written and tumbled out in a matter of weeks in 2007. It was set at Christmas and was in part a play about England, fuelled by my experience of ‘elsewhere’ after my eleven-year sojourn in Ireland. In particular it was about the absence of all religious belief in England, and what results when a society has nothing to believe in beyond the literal concrete everyday world. There was a feeling I wanted to get at, which was something to do with asking the question: Are we simply working and shopping to survive in an utterly empty universe? – in a world the gaudiness of which increases in inverse proportion to the shrinking of any kind of collective belief in a spiritual dimension to life? And can that possibly be enough? The play’s title, The Six-Days World, came from a line from George Herbert’s sonnet, Prayer, where he finds a series of images for prayer, seeing it as a powerful force, ascending from man to God:

Engine against the almighty, sinners towre,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-daies world transposing in an houre.

The ‘six-days world’ meant to me the ‘Monday to Saturday’ grind, the working bit of the week: the bit unleavened by any sense of otherness or transcendence. In the play Ireland functions as a sort of mirror for England, in which England’s spiritual emptiness is contrasted with Irish traditions of faith and belief. Eddie, the play’s central character, is an Englishman, a musician in his thirties living a sort of extended adolescence in Ireland with his girlfriend Cat, to whom he is unable to commit fully. The play is set in his parental home over Christmas when he and Cat arrive to stay for a short visit. Eddie’s rage about some of the repressed sadness in his parental home takes the form of diatribes against England as a spiritual wasteland in contrast to an Irish spirituality:

This fucked-up culture, this English thing, this miserable, tight-arsed, joyless fucking culture – I’m even too afraid to say the word love. That’s what this is about – it’s about an absence – a lacuna – a deep-seated fundamental lack of love! It’s a yearning fucking gaping chasm in all our hearts! And it’s everywhere! It’s hollowing us out! Perfect example – why is it called Boxing Day? I don’t know! I bet no one in this room knows! It’s just another fucking example! In Ireland they call it St Stephen’s Day after the first Christian martyr so that simply by saying the name of the day you engage with the insane but beautiful notion that people throughout history have died in the name of Christ, have actually died by piercing and stoning and wounding and crucifixion for what they think is the glory of God and mad as the entire enterprise is at least it’s not gift solutions and two-for-fucking one at Boots and value Christmas at Tesco’s and the whole performance we get dragged through year after bloody year; at least in Ireland they know why the day has the name it has! And there’s blood and loss and sacrifice in it!⁷⁹⁸

Eddie’s rants against England and the ‘epidural of our non-culture’ are partly explained by his personal circumstances and are an expression of his own pain and alienation; they are meant to raise a smile or at least to be taken with a pinch of salt. But there was also a kernel of something real that I wanted to express; a disillusion with the values of an entirely secular and de-culturized country, where no one sings at weddings, and no one has the words to express grief at funerals; where pop music and widescreen TVs and shopping have replaced real connection and communication. It’s an impossibly naïve view, of course, the idea of ‘holy Ireland’: I lived in Ireland long enough to know how that kind of misty-eyed romanticization of Irishness is derided, regarded accurately as a fiction promoted by Bord Fáilte to fleece German and American tourists. But nonetheless something still persists in Ireland which you could argue has disappeared from the repressed England of The Six-Days World. Even if it only exists in a particular kind of joy in story-telling or in the ‘noble call’ of singing during the small hours of a lock-in: there is something which both Eddie and his father Ralph crave, and which is to do with non-material nourishment; with connection; with community, with the soul, if that word is allowed. In a wholly secular world there can be no respite from the six-days world of shopping and material production. If you take away symbolism and ritual and heightened language and replace it only with consumerism, there will be little help for pain for any of us, when death and disaster strikes. Eddie’s anguish was meant to convey something of this idea; while Ralph’s memory of pilgrims climbing Croagh Patrick represents a ritual act for which he has no equivalent. With his son’s apparent suicide weighing on his conscience, and no recourse to acts of faith, he can see no end to his own spiritual suffering:

I shouted after him, Go, you bloody fool – go, you fool, you want to waste your life, then go, I wash my hands. I wash my hands.

He had this orange coat and I saw just one bright flash of it – I saw him running. Out towards the marsh. The railway. The crossing.

And that moment has been visited on me –

I have paid for that moment ten thousand times. Ten thousand times. All the suffering of hell.

How much blood would I have to shed for that? How many times would I have to climb Croagh Patrick for that? (58)

The Six-Days World was a meditation on England and on Ireland, and strangely it had its roots in an odd piece of factual misinterpretation. The 1993 census revealed a sharp drop in the number of young men under the age of 35 living in England. The statistics revealed apparently that hordes of disenchanted young men, like my brother who left at around that time too, had taken flight from Thatcher’s Britain and fled the country. This became a standard interpretation of the figures, that England was driving its young men away. It was an idea that interested me and became part of my thinking as the play took shape in my mind. However it was later revealed that this was an inaccurate narrative imposed upon the census results that had somehow taken hold of the imagination, and had been widely reported in the quality press. It was however a misinterpretation of the figures, and a story that was later discredited and corrected when the figures were looked at again less emotively. So-called facts, even those as seemingly black and white as the results of a census, are slippery creatures and not to be trusted. Much safer to avoid them and stick to the avowed fictions of the imagination.

In conclusion, then, I am honoured to be a non-Irish Irish playwright and I am probably more proud of my tiny entry in Volume 4 of the Field Day Anthology than perhaps anything else in the world, bar my children. I have overcome my terror that I have violated the rule that you must only write about your own backyard -- or as Sebastian Barry put it sternly in the Trinity College Writers’ Workshop, that writers must only write about their own field, and mustn’t go around taking someone else’s. This seemed a rather frightening rebuke at the time – that by attempting to write plays set in or about a country that is not your birthplace, you might somehow be stealing someone else’s field: committing the literary equivalent of an act of colonial misappropriation. But perhaps I took his words over-literally, or as a British interloper in Irish theatre, I was overly sensitive to the connotations of the ‘field’ metaphor! Now I am not so sure. I think the fences between our fields are more permeable and flexible than we thought. We set up our homes in each other’s dreams. And anyway, as Virginia Woolf said, ‘As a woman I have no country … as a woman, my country is the world’.⁷⁹⁹ Where are you from? The true answer to the question will not be found in the census statistics. The theatre gives us time-travel, it gives us dream-space, it allows us to see the past walking into the present moment. It is always an education in the importance of elsewhere.

Productions

Treehouses. Peacock Theatre, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. April 2000 Directed by Jason Byrne; designed by Johanna Connor.

Treehouses. Northcott Theatre, Exeter. March 2001. Directed by Ben Crocker; designed by Kit Surrey.

Treehouses. Oregon State University, April 2005. Directed by Charlotte J. Headrick; designed by George Caldwell.

The Sugar Wife. Rough Magic Production at the Cube, Project Arts Centre, April 2005. Directed by Lynne Parker; designed by Paul Keogan.

The Sugar Wife. Rough Magic Production, transferred to the Soho Theatre, London; January-February, 2006.

The Six-Days World. First reading at National Theatre Studio, July 2007. Produced at Finborough Theatre, London, November-December 2007. Directed by Jamie Harper.

Publications

Treehouses. (London: Methuen, 2000).

The Sugar Wife (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005)

The Six-Days World (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007).

Extract From: Irish Drama: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan (2012)

Cross Reference: Rough Magic, Audiences, Reception

See Also: Literary and Cultural Relations: Ireland, Hungary, and Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mária Kurdi