If you want to see an electrifying new play that features a mercurial performance by Paddy Considine as a reformed IRA activist and has a tortured Irish priest who is as conflicted and anguished as any creation by Graham Greene, then make sure you get to see Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman at the Gielgud Theatre.
This extraordinary play opens in the farmhouse kitchen of the Carney family in Northern Ireland in 1981. There is a visitor: the gangster-like “Mr Muldoon”, a leading IRA figure. The sort of man you don’t want to cross under any circumstances.
The play has a brutal and lyrical prologue in a back alley in Derry where Father Horrigan (played by Gerard Horan), the Carney family’s priest, has been “invited” for a late-night encounter with Mr Muldoon, played with thuggish brilliance by Stuart Graham.
While Butterworth has not been the only recent British playwright to dramatise the blurring of private and public loyalties and religious conscience in modern Ireland – David Ireland’s Everything Between Us explores similar themes but from a Protestant angle – no playwright comes close to creating an emotional universe through which a better understanding of the deeper issues that lay behind the Troubles can be grasped in human rather than purely political terms. The scene in which an English labourer – a Shakespearean rural fool – reads out Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “The Silent Lover” is a moment of poignant theatre that reminds one that politics always has a human side.
To get the most out of the play, I also strongly suggest reading a new biography of the inter-war political figure and socialite Sir Philip Sassoon, by Damian Collins MP. The book is entitled Charmed Life: the Phenomenal World of Philip Sassoon, and you might wonder what this Gatsby-like figure has to do with Irish priesthood and Northern Ireland in the 1980s.
Collins – who was educated at Belmont Abbey and read history at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford – is an expert on modern Irish history and understands international and foreign affairs better than most. During the Coalition government he served as parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to the then foreign secretary Philip Hammond. From 2012 to 2014 he was PPS to the then secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers. The Anglo-Irish political stage set of the 1920s that Collins describes explains the historic background to the creation of the Irish Free State better than any other book I have read on the subject.
The Irish Free State existed from 1922 to 1937 and was an independent state established under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. Sassoon had a ringside seat at the events that led to this new state, effectively resolving the “Irish problem” (although fighting still continued) and ending the three-year Irish War of Independence between the forces of the self-proclaimed Irish Republic, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and British Crown forces. From 1921 onwards, the “Irish question” became largely Ireland’s own problem.
During all these events and negotiations – whose after-effects are still being felt today in Ireland, not least over the acutely sensitive issue of a hard or soft border post-Brexit – Sassoon was close to the centre of the political stage, often loaning out his own country houses for conferences and meetings. He was PPS to David Lloyd George in 1920 just before Lloyd George tackled the issue of Irish self-identity.
This sharply written biography is psychologically exhausting to read. Sassoon was elusive, exotic and socially and politically upwardly mobile on an oleaginous scale that infuriated many. But he rose – though his money, social connections, wit and metrosexual charm – to become one of the most prominent members of the pre-war British political and arts establishment.
Like Butterworth’s play, Collins is a “ferryman” through history and a writer of the human as well as the 20th-century political condition. The book succeeds in humanising politics and showing that history is as much about the fierce little private dramas that were enacted at Sassoon’s houses as about “politics” itself.
Sassoon was a super-wealthy member of a Jewish merchant family from the souks of Baghdad. His family fled Iraq in 1928 with pearls sewn into their clothing. Sassoon was a golf-playing cousin of the Rothschild family and an intimate of the Prince of Wales. He was secretary to General Haig throughout the carnage of the First World War (he spoke fluent French) and personal secretary to Lloyd George during the wartime coalition.
But a part of Sassoon was troubled with self-loathing, or at least a large dollop of self-doubt. He was so unsure of himself and wary of admitting his Jewish trader roots that, when he wrote an account of his journey (The Third Route) flying into the belly of Afghanistan and the Middle East as an air minister to monitor British imperial aerial power and air bases, he avoided all mention of his returning to his family’s humble souk trader roots.
Sassoon knew everybody – from Charlie Chaplin to Charles Lindbergh, Churchill to George V. If you thought that the most famous society and political hosts of the inter-war years were the likes of Emerald Cunard, Sibyl Colefax and Lady Desborough, then you will have to read this book to discover an even more exclusive society world.
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