Tragedy or Farce?

Theater director Max Stafford-Clark is no stranger to controversy. An ardent promoter of new writing through his Out Of Joint company, he brought to the stage such succès de scandale as Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 hit about sex and consumerism, Shopping and F______. Even he, though, may have been taken aback by the furor that has attended his latest project: Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland, a co-production between Out Of Joint, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and London’s Royal National Theatre.

The play is a satire partly based on the life of the Irish politician Charles Haughey — nicknamed by his people the Boss. Formerly the leader of the Fianna Fáil party and Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Haughey saw his career collapse amid a series of allegations, both extramarital and economic (he was accused of illicitly amassing a vast fortune while publicly advocating belt-tightening). In 1970 he was even accused, though acquitted, of gun-running.

A dramatic figure, given to quoting Shakespeare, Haughey is reportedly not at all pleased to be stage-fodder; his lawyers are said to be scanning the text with litigation in mind. Nor were the Irish media any less sensitive when the Abbey presented the piece. “Haughey fury at Abbey play” blazed the front page of the Sunday Independent, while daytime TV and radio was full of Hinterland talk. Press comments — the Sunday Times (not a reviewer) called Hinterland “feeble, puerile, trite, dissociated, shallow, exploitative and gratuitously offensive” — might also make the Irish Arts Council reluctant to extend more funding to the Abbey, Ireland’s national theater.

Now the play has reached London, and Stafford-Clark is expecting a quite different reaction. “The play’s reception in Dublin wasn’t a complete surprise,” Stafford-Clark says. “But in London, where Haughey is less well-known, it is likely to be seen more in the light of a domestic drama.”

On opening night in London, the play was greeted with nothing more sensational than polite, slightly disappointed applause. It’s neither as bad nor as worthy of prolonged debate as the Irish media suggested, but turns out to be a frustratingly uneven outing from a writer whose 1995 play The Steward of Christendom marked him out as a special talent.

The play is set in a handsomely furnished study, where the aging Johnny Silvester paces and faces his demons. He is plagued by the press, his bitter wife and his mentally disturbed son — even the imagined ghost of the friend he betrayed. Barry has denied that Silvester is specifically Haughey. However, there are some obvious parallels — both are ex-Irish Prime Ministers, both have had affairs with journalists, and both are accused of dubious financial dealings. At one point Silvester even growls, “I have done the state some service,” the Shakespearean quote famously employed by Haughey.

Patrick Malahide is magnificently irascible in this role, his frosty wit a thin veil flapping erratically over the vulnerability that now defines him. Barry sympathetically depicts Silvester as a man who knows he has done wrong, but believes that his motives were always noble. “What a pity love is no defense” he reflects, an image cleverly crystallized in a tale of his childhood, when he accidentally transmitted a fatal fever to his baby sister by hugging her.

In the middle of the second half Barry suddenly ruins what was a very good play. Not content with making Silvester likable, he feels compelled to make him a saint by having him falsely accused of restarting his affair. It’s an excuse too far. As his wife melodramatically shrieks, “Even the devil may scorn to have you in his fearsome halls!,” the play’s credibility collapses. Silvester ends up cancer-ridden and abandoned. It feels like a selfish, self-glorifying bid by the author to turn a fascinating character into a great tragic role. That may not be libelous, but it’s offensive enough.