Beyond the Passion Machine: The Adigun-Doyle Playboy and Multiculturalism

Christopher Murray

In recent times, the question of immigrants in Ireland has pressed itself forward as a sociological and ethical issue deserving public debate and changes in Irish law. An issue of the Jesuit quarterly Studies was devoted to the topic in 2007, and the editorial concluded: ‘Immigration is inevitable. It has changed Ireland very dramatically in a very short time’.⁸⁸² The word ‘dramatically’ here has nothing to do with the theatre, however, and nowhere in this interesting issue of Studies is the literary representation of immigrants addressed, which, broadly speaking, is the context of this essay.

The specific object is to advance the recently successful Abbey Theatre version of The Playboy of the Western World as a means of exploring the arrival of multiculturalism at the Irish national theatre, and to consider what this might mean. The Adigun-Doyle Playboy opened at the Abbey on 29 September 2007 and ran to packed houses for two months; the following year it was revived, this time during the Christmas period, running from 16 December 2008 to 31 January 2009. It could readily be described as a major hit. Secondly, I want to view the style of this new version of the Playboy as in some measure derived from Passion Machine, a company founded in 1984 dedicated to attracting young people to a theatre occupied mainly with working-class Dublin experience, and thereby to question how far and in what idiom in this specific instance the local and the universal are conversing with each other via the medium of re-interpretation of a classic Irish play.

By way of introducing the first part it is necessary to say a few words about the recent relationship between Irish drama and multiculturalism. Such a relationship was not on the agenda until Donal O’Kelly put it there in 1994 with his play Asylum! Asylum!, first staged in the Peacock Theatre (within the Abbey) in that year. Besides being an inventive actor and writer, O’Kelly was co-founder of Calypso, ‘a Glasgow-Dublin production company specializing in dramas dealing with human rights issues’.⁸⁸³ Asylum! Asylum! is an issue play, concerning a fictional Ugandan, Joseph Omara, seeking asylum in Ireland, who falls foul of the EU legislation then being imposed. Having fallen in love with his free legal aid lawyer, Mary Gaughran, Joseph decides to make a run for it when the immigration officers arrive to remove him forcibly from the country. At first Mary tries laughingly to dissuade Joseph, who thinks he and she can simply disappear together in Ireland: ‘Who’ll ever think to look at us twice!? Joseph! You’re black! … You can’t hide here!’ (160). Then she goes with him. Thus the ending denotes the reverse of the ending of Synge’s Playboy, where the outsider is driven off at the close. In that regard it is an optimistic though subversive problem play. Reviewing its first production Fintan O’Toole said Asylum! Asylum! ‘not only deals bravely and passionately with an important public issue, it also challenges, in a way that a national theatre should do, some basic aspects of our self-perception as a people’.⁸⁸⁴

Its seriousness has not been matched in the Irish theatre since 1994, even though the play is now dated, since the legal procedures dealing with asylum seekers and naturalization have been modified. Asylum! Asylum! has been followed mainly by comic explorations of the multicultural issue, as in Jim O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock (2003), which ‘explores the tensions which rise to the surface during a traditional Christmas get-together’,⁸⁸⁵ when a young man brings home his Kenyan girlfriend from London and shocks his conservative Irish family by announcing his conversion to Buddhism. The title is a clear reference to the best-selling novel by Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), but as the play is written by a young Irish playwright who has written for British soaps such as Coronation Street, it is no surprise that The Buddhist of Castleknock was aimed at the general ear of Dublin middle-class theatre: aimed and hit the target, one may say, since the comedy proved very successful. There have, however, also been quite serious if tentative new ventures on RTÉ radio and the Dublin stage by ethnic companies struggling to air problems faced by African immigrants in Ireland (of which, more will be said below). But these have tended to be occasional and to date have made little or no impact. The Abbey’s multicultural version of Synge’s Playboy may therefore be viewed as a belated effort to address this vacuum in the professional Irish theatre.

The Adigun-Doyle version was commissioned by Arambe Productions, founded in Dublin in 2003 by Bisi Adigun, a Nigerian immigrant, and officially launched by Roddy Doyle in February 2004. The main aim of the company is ‘to afford members of Ireland’s African communities the unique opportunity to express themselves through the art of theatre,’ and the means of doing this is to be ‘by producing classic and contemporary plays in the Irish canon’.⁸⁸⁶ Apart from the Playboy project the only other Irish play to be ‘reinterpreted’ by Arambe so far has been Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn Road, a play about Irish immigrants in London, newly staged with an all-African cast in Dublin in 2006, and again at Notre Dame University (Indiana) for a conference on ‘Race and Immigration in Ireland’ in October 2007. A more recent production by Arambe was a modernization by Bisi Adigun of Wole Soyinka’s 1963 play, The Trials of Brother Jero, staged at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, in February 2009, directed by Adigun himself. As one reviewer put it, the production was ‘daubed with playful local [Irish] and contemporary references’, including making Soyinka’s Brother Jeroboam a banker.⁸⁸⁷ But even that detail indicates how Adigun’s imagination inclines towards the recycling of a classic.

Leaving aside a controversy which has arisen over the revival of this Abbey version of the Playboy, related to author’s rights (excluding Synge’s in this case),⁸⁸⁸ the main significance of the jointly authored adaptation by Adigun and Doyle is that the hero or anti-hero and his father are both Nigerian. Adigun insists that this idea was his alone. Some grounds for the claim may be derived from an article he published in 2004, ‘An Irish Joke, a Nigerian Laughter’.⁸⁸⁹ Having arrived in Ireland from Nigeria in 1996, Adigun found himself unable to appreciate Irish humour, and consequently Irish comic drama. They were literally foreign to him, and little wonder: as O’Casey’s Seumas Shields says, in The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), ‘That’s the Irish People all over — they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke’.⁸⁹⁰ It takes getting used to. Adigun did nothing to help himself by viewing, in succession, Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985) and McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), as he could not understand why Irish audiences found them funny. Then he saw a student production of Synge’s Playboy around the year 2002 and he found that it ‘resonated with me on an entirely different emotional level as an outsider trying to come to terms with Irish culture’. Indeed Adigun saw Christy Mahon as ‘the epitome of a majority of immigrants constantly searching for who they are in a foreign land’ (81-2). As one among some 30,000 Nigerians living in the Irish Republic at this time, Adigun felt compelled to see ‘a parallel between Christy’s circumstances and the prevailing issue of asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland’. He concludes: ‘That is why I see The Playboy of the Western World as more of a prophecy than a comedy’ (82). He became all the more interested in this theme after he saw O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock and could not understand the audience’s laughter at the fate of a black woman whom a suburban son brings home from London to Castleknock for Christmas. Dermot Bolger’s programme note, however, helped him to observe ‘the thin veneer of unconscious racism within [Irish] people whose outwardly comfortable lives allowed them the luxury of never having to confront such prejudices before’ (cited Adigun, 84). But it was only when he saw Marie Jones’s A Night in November (1994) around the same time that Adigun understood that he need not, as he put it, ‘feel like an outsider watching an Irish play’ (86). He was now ready for the first time to insert a version of his own experience into an Irish text. By 2004 he had met Roddy Doyle, who had seen and admired the Nigerian play The Gods Are Not to Blame. At this point Adigun was already dreaming of a production of the Playboy with Christy to be played by the Nigerian actor Kunle Animasaun.⁸⁹¹

For his part, Roddy Doyle had become fascinated by Synge’s Playboy while teaching it for many years to teenagers before he became a full-time writer. He found that to his pupils, living in a deprived area of Dublin’s north-side, reading the Playboy aloud in class came as a delight. It was for them a ‘play about people on the edge of the rules, and the kids I taught knew that place … They knew [also] the power and fun of language; language was one of the things they owned’.⁸⁹² It only remained for Doyle to develop an interest in foreign nationals, beyond the outrageous cry in The Commitments (1988) that ‘the Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads’ to a more serious consideration of the race issue.⁸⁹³ He admired the start made by two Nigerian journalists living in Ireland who started a multicultural newspaper in April 2000 called Metro Eireann; Doyle met one of them and volunteered to write a story in instalments, subsequently published in his collection The Deportees (2007). Entitled ‘Guess Who’s Coming to the Dinner?’, with a nod towards the famous 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier, it concerned bringing a sophisticated Nigerian into a suburban working-class Irish home, where the joke lies in the very disjunction between the ignorance of the father-figure and the sophistication of the Nigerian accountant. As this is the very aporia Adigun had experienced himself in watching McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen and O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock, it is to be expected that it must reappear in the collaboration with Doyle over Synge’s Playboy. Yet there is a knowing line in Doyle’s story where an echo of Synge anticipates the style of the adaptation. The narrator says at one point, as the Nigerian eats a piece of cake eased onto his plate by his girlfriend and her mother in defiance of her ignorant father, ‘there in front of his nose, two fine women fought to the death’ on his – the Nigerian’s – behalf.⁸⁹⁴ Meantime, Doyle re-configured Guess Who’s Coming to the Dinner? as a successful play for the Dublin Theatre Festival, staged by Calypso.⁸⁹⁵

The text of the Playboy collaboration, the main focus point for this essay, is both modernized in setting and inflected with a contemporary racial issue. The setting is a public bar in Dublin’s drug-land, light years away from Synge’s shebeen in rural Mayo. Michael James Flaherty is into drugs and crime, while Philly O’Cullen and Jimmy Farrell his two minders, still comic, though in a key different from Synge, hint a certain menace behind the drunken joviality. Pegeen is a tough and rather foul-mouthed manager of the bar and the Widow Quin did not, in this version, kill her man, who was instead shot down by Michael James’s gang in a drugs dispute. For his part, Christopher — as he is called throughout — wins his heroic spurs not in any pastoral sporting contests but as security man by fighting off the leader of a rival gang rejoicing under the name of The Rattler. The young girls capture Christopher’s bravery on their mobile phones for admiration on-stage, in lieu of his reported prowess at sport in Synge’s original. Appropriately, in the final scenes of the adaptation Michael James has plans for Philly and Jimmy to drive both Christopher and his father up the Dublin mountains to dump their bodies, after they have been shot, of course. The modernization is accompanied by up-to-date Dublin speech, including the regulation obscenities used by all except the two strangers. There may also be a joyous sense of retrieval here of Synge’s play from the clutches of Druid, for that company had recently virtually stamped all of Synge’s plays as ‘made in Galway’.⁸⁹⁶ The Playboy, of course, was written for the Abbey Theatre.

The racial issue reflects the reverse discrimination one would expect from Adigun as Nigerian exponent of the rights of black people in a white society. This concern results in a certain amount of overload. Christopher Malomo is introduced as a bourgeois figure, well educated, with an MBA and a cultivated, if slightly stilted way of speaking. Yet the loneliness of Synge’s character is well replicated, for example in the lines in Act II when he is about to go away thinking his story is in the newspapers:

PEGEEN. Are the jails nice in Nigeria, Christopher?

CHRISTOPHER. You’ve made your point. (Finding his shoes; putting them on) If I am not safe here, then it would be best if I continue my wandering. Like Cain. ‘Cursed be thou by the earth which has opened its mouth and drunk the blood of thy brother’. PEGEEN (beginning to play with him). Jesus, did you kill your brother as well?

CHRISTOPHER (looking up as he ties his shoes). You can laugh? This is amusement for you? (Showing her a shoe; holding it up) Look. I have walked hundreds of kilometres. See? I thought it was over, but now I must start again. (Puts his foot in the shoe; it’s obviously uncomfortable)

PEGEEN. Where are you going?

CHRISTOPHER (packing as he talks). I pray it never happens to you. Looking over your shoulder all the time. Only desperate strangers as your companions — a lonely and terrible experience. Crossing the desert, for days, burnt, scorched, dehydrated and famished. Guarding your neck and your wallet. Agony is the word. You cannot believe how I felt when I finally got on the plane. I slept throughout. And to this city, where everybody stares at me but, truly, I do not exist. I have become simply a feeling. Sheer and utter loneliness.⁸⁹⁷

When Christopher’s father (always called Malomo in the play) arrives, he too is characterized as notably dignified. Far from Synge’s representation of a grotesque wreck, an alcoholic madman, this is a polished, ennobled figure who when pressed to have a drink calls for a glass of Merlot. According to the stage direction, ‘He wears a traditional attire; agbada (flowing gown), complete with cap. There is a pair of reading glasses around his neck. He carries a small business case, and holds a diary. He also has a walking stick. He speaks with an educated Nigerian accent’ (42). Widow Quin is vastly amused at his appearance, and finds it easy to get him to set off on a false trail to find the Belfast train (rather than across the sands to Belmullet!), on which he will probably travel first-class. Malomo and his son stand out in the play in contrast to the skittish and deceitful Irish. Assuming that Doyle wrote the dialogue for the Irish, for it is in his style, it is interesting that his introduction of racial matters is always provocative. For example, in the interrogation when Christopher first enters the pub we hear this line of questioning, strikingly different from Synge’s text:

MICHAEL. So, you’re some sort of a refugee or asylum seeker, yeah?

SEAN. Mr Flaherty?

MICHAEL. Yeah?

SEAN. He can’t be a refugee. He just arrived, like.

MICHAEL. What?

SEAN. He has to go through the asylum process first, like. And if he is granted, then he can —

MICHAEL. Good man, Sean. (To CHRISTOPHER) So. You’re an asylum seeker. Am I technically correct there, Sean?

SEAN. Yeah.

MICHAEL. Great. That’s established, so. You’re an asylum seeker.

CHRISTOPHER. You may say so, sir.

MICHAEL. I may say so, sir? Are you messing with me, son?

CHRISTOPHER. No, sir.

JIMMY. I think he is, Michael.

PEGEEN. Leave him alone.

MICHAEL. Look it, so. Stop acting the bollix. Just tell us.

CHRISTOPHER. I am here to seek refuge, in Ireland … My life isn’t safe at home. (11)

The interrogation continues, as Michael and the others in the pub suggest various reasons why it might not be safe in Nigeria at present: tribal warfare, a young woman, religious strife, persecution … none of their suggestions meets with Christopher’s agreement. Then Michael asks ignorantly if it might not be ‘the genital mutilation’. Pegeen points out that Christopher is male. This allows the punch-line, ‘Oh, is that right? Did no one ever get a kick in the balls in Nigeria?’ (11). Crude though the joke is (to cover Michael’s own absurdity) it does at least introduce a topical and controversial issue related to asylum seekers in Ireland.⁸⁹⁸

Although the race question is not explored in any detail in the play, nor is a debate initiated by the issue; this is because Synge’s form and conventions are conservatively retained. The spirit in which they are retained is that of the Passion Machine production style, as inherited by Roddy Doyle from his early days as a writer. Passion Machine was founded in 1984 by Paul Mercier and others with a specific agenda in mind, to create new work related primarily to the experience of young, mainly working-class lives. It was community theatre in the sense that it was located specifically on Dublin’s north-side, with the SFX Centre in Sherrard Street as venue, but it did not interest itself in overtly political issues. Indeed John Sutton, then producer for Passion Machine, former Community Enterprise Worker, and latterly Roddy Doyle’s agent, stated: ‘we actually abhor didactic or agitprop work. We believe that you must entertain first and make your point second’.⁸⁹⁹ This says little about the Passion Machine style which was characterized by on the one hand high-energy movement, virtually non-stop action, and on the other by demotic Dublin speech larded with the usual post-Behan obscenities. Mercier’s own plays of the 1980s, Drowning (1984), Wasters (1985), Studs (1986, then filmed in 2006) set the pattern. Doyle saw these, admired the work enormously and wrote two plays for Passion Machine as a result, Brownbread (1987) and War (1989), one concerned with the kidnapping of a bishop by young fellows with no clear motive in mind, and the other a play about pub quizzes.⁹⁰⁰ Both were major successes, transferring to the downtown Olympia Theatre to prove it. The actor Brendan Gleeson, at this time a member of the company, also wrote and directed a play called Breaking Up (1988), a rite-of-passage play about teenagers celebrating the end of their school years. The opening stage direction perhaps says it all: ‘Lads all around bursting themselves laughing drunkenly’.⁹⁰¹

Yet it has to be said that even if Doyle carried with him lessons in holding a young audience learned from his days with Passion Machine — as he certainly did — the version of the Playboy at the Abbey both falls short of that style and transcends it. It falls short in that the Abbey space is not the SFX Centre, a bit of a barn of a place and a venue for rock bands, so that Christopher’s offstage fight with the Rattler, the gangland figure, is made to stand in for the antics a Passion Machine production would probably have choreographed to make Christy’s physical derring-do the highlight of the play. Passion Machine was largely a counterpart to the Dublin Youth Theatre; many of the actors came from that source, whereas the Abbey, of course, has quite a different remit.⁹⁰² In this instance, Jimmy Fay, who was first director of the Dublin Fringe Festival in 1995-96, was actually acting Literary Director of the Abbey when this Adigun-Doyle version of the Playboy was accepted and Fay directed it. Indebted to the Passion Machine though it was for its outrageousness, Fay’s production was never naïve.

On the other hand, the addition of the race issue would never have been part of the Passion Machine agenda. It was always the local issues and never the universal with Passion Machine.⁹⁰³ It may be tentative rather than radical, but the race issue is certainly and obviously rendered part of the discourse in the Adigun-Doyle modernization of the Playboy. Significantly, the roles of Christopher and his father were played by black actors, Giels Terera and Chuk Iwuji from London playing Christopher in 2007 and 2008, Olu Jacobs and George Seremba, from Nigeria and Uganda respectively, playing Malomo (i.e., Old Mahon). The younger actors playing Christopher did not in their biographies in the Abbey programme indicate a country of origin, but both of the older actors determinedly did and the difference is of interest. It may be that for the younger black actors, more secure of their place in the English theatre, the issues of national identity and history are less important. In contrast, Olu Jacobs described himself in the Abbey programme as ‘one of Nigeria’s foremost actors’, having worked with the National Theatre of Nigeria. He had also, however, worked in Dublin in the 1970s, appearing in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Murderous Angels (a play about the Congo), in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1971; in the posthumous premiere of Brendan Behan’s Richard’s Cork Leg, compiled by Alan Simpson out of Behan’s papers, at the Peacock in 1972; and in Desmond Forristal’s Black Man’s Country, set in the Nigerian missions 1967-70, which premiered at the Gate Theatre in 1974.⁹⁰⁴ Behan’s play apart, these were early multicultural Irish plays, and Jacobs provides a valuable link between them and the current use of Nigerians in the Playboy.

George Seremba, who played Malomo on the 2008 revival, is a Ugandan-Canadian actor, who stated in his programme bio that he was forced to flee from Obote’s military regime in 1980, moved to Kenya to write and thence to Toronto, where he had a successful career in the theatre before he arrived in Dublin. Here he has made a name as playwright and actor, especially in Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys (2004), another fine Calypso production. In 2008, Seremba appeared as narrator in Jimmy Fay’s magnificent production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Abbey.

With talent like that of Seremba and Jacobs, one can conclude that director and authors of the Playboy adaptation were serious about the casting of black actors for the show. Indeed, the seriousness threatened at times to overbalance the farcical qualities of this glib and street-wise Dublin relocation, what one might call the Passion Machine element of the production.

That said, the ending of the Adigun-Doyle Playboy nevertheless makes its critique neatly enough. When the resurrected Malomo re-enters towards the close of Act III to ask why his son is tied up, Christopher replies: ‘They are going to kill me, because I killed you’. Malomo asks, ‘Jungle justice?’ and Christopher replies, ‘On the ball, Dad’. Then, as he makes his exit it is the ‘villainy of Ireland’ (66) and not just Synge’s ‘villainy of Mayo’⁹⁰⁵ that Malomo finally denounces. To which one can only add, ‘touché’. Ireland has taught the Nigerian Christopher an important lesson in achieving modernity: ‘You have transformed me into a hard man. From now and forever more, I am master of my own destiny’ (66-7, surprising emphasis in original). Pegeen’s sobs as the lights go down, after she has told her father to ‘fuck off’ when he promises to set up the match with Sean again, might be contemporary Ireland feminized and debased coming to consciousness of its racism, and recognizing the loss incurred in adhering to parochial values.⁹⁰⁶

If this is so, it is clear that the Playboy, always a subversive play arising from Synge’s detestation of Irish moral complacency, has now been successfully restyled to show up the contemporary faultlines between Irish self-deception over ethnicity and Nigerian migrants’ deeper understanding of the ethical and sociological issues involved in upholding identity in a foreign land. In a contribution to the issue of Studies on immigration referred to above, Theophilus Ejorh points out that ‘a new African Diaspora has emerged in Ireland’, and argues that ‘it is mostly individuals from affluent and middle class backgrounds who can afford the high costs of international migrations compared to those in the lowest rungs of society’.⁹⁰⁷ This means that Christopher Malomo represents the new Nigerian immigrant, who is less a threat than many Irish nationals may think. The irony lies in a former missionary culture’s being represented as so incapable of rising to embrace the products of its historical missionary success that it drives them away in disillusionment. The comic tone of the adaptation of the Playboy probably threatens to overwhelm this irony; the vehicle may be too light to carry the weight of its collaborators’ political sensibility. It may now be time to take such issues away from adaptations of classics and into new forms of drama to initiate afresh the debate on multiculturalism, still but an embryo within the Irish theatre.

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

Cross Reference: Adaptation, Synge

See Also: Synge and His Influences – Centenary Essays from the Synge Summer School, edited by Patrick Lonergan and Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama by Anthony Roche