The Non-Stop Connolly Show was first performed in Dublin on the evening of 29 March 1975, Easter Saturday. Many people attended this vigil, not just socialists and Republicans but young people who had long tired of trying to make something out of their history. Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden had shaped a spectacle from the life and times of James Connolly, Irish socialist leader; they also helped produce it and took part in it. The show, six parts in all, was supposed to last twenty-four hours. That was legendary. It finished appropriately about seven in the morning on the stage of Liberty Hall, Dublin, amid a swish of flags, orange and green. The irony was unmistakable. It was at Easter weekend 1916 that men marched from Liberty Hall, Dublin, Connolly among others, to occupy the GPO among other places, to add to the perennial catalogue of rebellions in Irish history.
For those of us who took part in the show it was a night we’d been working towards for virtually three months. Actors, young and old, playwrights, socialists, musicians. Arden and D’Arcy had picked at random from around Dublin and like Pied Pipers had collected people who couldn’t have been more different in background, politics or commitment. There were film shows between acts, songs. One heard a girl’s lament in Gaelic between episodes which debated Ireland’s right to independence from England or showed supporters of Eugene Debs’s presidential campaign running around the hall, imitating a train.
I played most notably Matt Talbot, Dublin proletarian mystic who tied himself in chains and lacerated himself with whips to redeem Dublin of its sins; Sean O’Casey, Dublin’s poetic dramatist; Francis Sheehy Skeffington, an elegant pacifist and feminist. I remember the cold of the hall, the determination of the actors, the dynamic climax of the play: the dramatic dilemma of Connolly, would he or would he not join the nationalist revolution?
There was an uncanny tension which locked these scenes together, a poignancy for those of us who were educated on the sanctity of 1916. D’Arcy and Arden are the only dramatists I know of to focus on this central crux of Irish history through historical characters; what is the position of a socialist in the face of an overwhelmingly nationalistic sense of history?
There were many uprisings in Irish history, all sung about or celebrated in doggerel verse. Ireland has two traditions: one not so much of the gun but of vicious, merciless violence, the scythe, the sword, the bomb; the other the pacifist tones of someone like Daniel O’Connell, the like of whom strikes a deeper chord in the Irish psyche.
Connolly came from neither tradition. He was a Republican and a socialist who loathed Pearse’s blood-lust – ‘The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield’ – but who ultimately opted for a bloody revolution on a minor scale not so much to break from Britain but to let out his own protest against Britain’s centuries of manhandling Ireland.
The end of The Non-Stop Connolly Show has a verve, an alacrity, a triumphant tenacity with words that is elsewhere missing in the play. One feels one is in the presence of great drama and that the drama was made from a cold eye, an eye which like Yeats’s, penetrated lies, phobias, images which dressed other images, and came up with – even if only for moments at a stretch – a mind-boggling authenticity.
The first production of the play was lit with colour, masks, flashes of crazy cartoon wit; would one forget Queen Victoria’s Jubilee procession, for instance? Or a very arch-looking doll who resembled Pope Pius XII being carried across the stage earnestly pursued by a goonish W. B. Yeats and a Maud Gonne who was much his senior?
Staring at a bald script, though from a vantage of five years later, I confess boredom, frustration with much of the material. The efforts to make Connolly and his relatives illustrious fall flat a lot of the time; there is a niggling veniality, a lack of drive, a supposition of audience awareness of contemporary political arguments.
However that point is far transcended by the dynamics of the play as it reaches its crucial stages. Parts 1,2,3,4 cover the biographical necessities of Connolly’s career. Parts 5 and 6 show Connolly in conflict with two of the major Irish political figures of the time, Jim Larkin, the trade union leader and self-made messiah, and Patrick Pearse, the principled, eclectic Irish nationalist. And wedded to these confrontations are the background issues of the time – war, hunger, strikes, more than anything the lockout of 1913 and the Great War. At these points, points that assail the dignity of the human being in immediate terms, the dramatists excel themselves. There is a wonderful grasp of dialect, of historical incident, of the odd revealing piece of poetry. The use of English is resonant, always clear, and flowing. A few lines sum up a battle. A phrase evokes an era.
A mystic emerges in the middle of a storm of aggression, an English suffragette wonders at the intransigence of Ireland, Larkin summons the Dublin proletariat to a side street, the shoulders of a God on him, the arm of a soldier, a war demon does a pirouette and renders an account of the horrors of the First World War, Connolly in his execution chair looks back on his life and refuses to apologize, not even to his own fragmented conscience.
One is reminded of the early Arden, of Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, a firm purpose, a refusal to stand on soggy ground. The landscapes of the play are more D’Arcy’s I suspect, the gnomish politicians, the tirelessly ugly capitalists, the proletariat rallying, asking for manna. John Arden is an English writer who came to live in Ireland. Margaretta D’Arcy is of Irish and Russian Jewish origins. Together they moulded the finest interpretation of Irish history ever achieved dramatically.
That the Irish nation seemed to reject their gift is not surprising. Ireland is as it was in Yeats’s time:
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
The National Theatre of Ireland and the National Theatre of Britain made no overtures to the Ardens.
After the production in Dublin some five years ago we toured Ireland. Firstly we went North. Numbers quickly dwindled and we were left with a few who ended up reading the plays to small but fascinated audiences. We stayed with Billy MacMillen, the Offical Sinn Fein leader, four days before he was shot dead. We journeyed to Galway, perhaps seven of us left then, including two of the Arden children. That was the most successful part of the production, those readings; there was an immediacy, a lack of pomp that lent itself to the Arden proselytism.
Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden were organizers of the recent tribunal on the British presence in the north of Ireland. In that capacity they invited me as an Irish writer also living outside Ireland to read some of my work at an entertainment to finance this tribunal. I accepted their invitation because, although I am an enemy of the vicious violence that passes in Northern Ireland as tactics of liberation, I believe with one of the patrons of the tribunal, Noel Browne, for instance, that the British army are exacerbating violence in areas where there wouldn’t otherwise be any. However, some days before the entertainment I was told I couldn’t go because certain people had objected to remarks I’d made about violence at a seminar in the ICA. After some wrangling I went anyway, read to red-hot Republicans and interested English people passages from my novel about an Irish woman looking for a wayward son in England.
But it is Connolly who must have the last word. As James Stephens said, ‘If Larkin was the magnetic centre of the Irish labour movement, Connolly was its brains.’ It was those brains which were addled when confronted with Pearse’s fanaticism and violent wishes. Yet it was Connolly who founded the Irish Labour party which has included such diverse members as Noel Browne and Conor Cruise O’Brien, one who forever reminds us of the conflict in Irish minds between the two manifest Irish traditions, that of violence and that of constitutional agitation. Connolly mutters towards the end of the play:
Out in the street the people throng and rush
And cry aloud ‘Bread, bread, where is our food –
This child destroys our life,’ they cry.
It would not have been done had there been another way.
Was there another way? Sean O’Casey would have said yes. Francis Sheehy Skeffington would have said yes. But for Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden it’s an emphatic no, and we are reminded at the end of the play of their present concerns with the island to which they have given so much dedication. As Connolly is strapped into his seat of execution, a wounded man, his thoughts veer on Ireland:
They always claimed that they were here to stay.
They did not ask us if they may.
And altogether they asked so very few
That when the fire and sword and fury flew
At them in Russia, China, Cuba, Africa, Vietnam
And indeed once more in Ireland, my own home,
They could not credit what it was they’d done.
I have no doubt that Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden will continue illuminating areas that most of us don’t want to think about, let alone talk about; it is our privilege to contradict them but theirs to write about H-blocks, Armagh gaol, the cancerous conditions of Irish political prisoners in English gaols, to go on saying over and over again that people have a right to stand up to the system and that those fighting oppression with their nerves are considerably aided by those who fight with the pen.