Psycho in a soutane

The theatre is not, in my experience, a particularly good medium for the recreation of historical facts or moods. Books, films and TV can usually do it so much better. John Barrett's new play, Borrowed Robes, presented last night by Island Theatre Company, is a fiction based on the pogrom against Jews in Limerick in 1904, rather coyly set in an unnamed Irish city in the same year. It is quite unconvincing.

The rabble-rousing Catholic priest here is a Father Keane, an apparently good and charitable man whose mother has just died. He returns from her funeral to find that a prized novice has quit the seminary and has taken lodgings with his brother from a Jewish widow whom Keane once fancied more than was good for his soul. He goes there to retrieve the lost lamb and succeeds only in reviving his suppressed passion. Suddenly he is a psycho in a soutane.

In the pulpit he goes ape, ranting on about Jews killing children, their women being Jezebels, all of them anti-Christ parasites. He foments riots and boycotts, which drives many Jews from the city and impoverishes those who remain. His superiors disapprove of all this, but do little to disown it other than to plan a transfer for Keane. He does more mischief before this happens, and the novice's brother is killed.

The play somehow manages to make the whole sorry saga seem like an accident, the result of one man going gaga. It does not penetrate the complex psychology involved, least of all that of a public so easily driven amok by the ravings of a junior priest, whose inner confusions are so presented as to be at times unhappily risible. None of the characters is drawn in convincing depth and the situation has none of the resonance that might make it relevant today.

The actors don't have much opportunity to shine, although they do their best; John Anthony Murphy, Dermot Arrigan, Eileen Kennedy, Mike Finn, Catherine Bailey and Liam O'Brien tackle their roles with obvious commitment. Terry Devlin's direction employs the familiar device of having the actors sit on benches at the rear of the stage and come forward as required; the set is then a simple backdrop of Madonna and Child, with a few pieces of furniture in front. It is functional, but no more.

The play falls heavily between fact and fiction, really a melodrama which taxes one's credulity from the start. Whatever elements of historical truth it may contain are buried in a treatment that is far too superficial.