Culture Shock: Why I worry for the unfair representation of psychotic Provo priests

Does an Irish play have to be written by an Irish playwright? If culture is now globalised, who has national rights on any particular story? Does authenticity matter at all? What does Irish mean anyway?

These questions occurred to me watching a play called The Belle of Belfast off Broadway in New York. As the title suggests, it is set in Belfast. And it is presented by the Irish Repertory Theatre, which makes it officially part of the contemporary Irish repertoire. But its author, Nate Rufus Adelman, gives his hometown as northeast Los Angeles and describes himself in the programme notes as "a proud member of the Choctaw nation" .

Of course this shouldn’t matter. If you have to be from a country to set a play there, almost the entire pre-20th-century Irish comic tradition is out of bounds. Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw: almost all their plays are set in England. Imagining elsewhere is part of what artists do. And the gift that Robert Burns wished for all of us – to see ourselves as others see us – is valuable and potentially salutary. Yet even with all of these qualifications, and with an eye to the dangers of small-mindedness and myopia, there is a problem. The question is sometimes not about how others see us but about whether they see anything at all. “Irishness” is so deeply embedded in the history of English-language theatre that unless you get behind it it is impossible to see an actual Ireland at all. And unless you really know that actual Ireland what you end up with is not engagement but cliche.

You have to careful about this. Some things that will annoy an Irish person seeing a play supposedly set in modern Ireland simply won't bother an American audience. Accent is one of them. If you're from New Orleans and you end up at a production of A Streetcar Named Desire in Dublin you're probably going to be annoyed by generic southern drawls. And if you are from Ireland and you go to see a play set in Ireland on a New York stage you will be annoyed by the generic Oirish accents. But you've no right to be: it's not an issue for the local audience. The best anyone can expect is that the actors create a reasonably consistent vocal soundscape and that it catches at least the main cadences of the playwright's language.

You also have to stop fretting about details. In The Belle of Belfast a working-class girl in 1985 mentions shopping for Cashel Blue cheese at Crazy Prices supermarket. You know that this is extremely unlikely: Cashel Blue was still an esoteric (and expensive) product in 1985, and if it was for sale at Crazy Prices I doff my hat to the culinary sophistication of poor Belfast Catholics during the Troubles.

But who cares? Certainly not any American in the audience. The cheese lovers will identify Cashel Blue as an Irish product, and most of the rest will probably have heard of the Rock of Cashel, so it sounds authentic. None of us can afford to be snobby about this – I have no idea whether someone is eating the right kind of baloney in an Arthur Miller play, and I don’t want to know.

So there’s no need to sweat the small stuff. Which is just as well, because the big stuff is perspiring prodigiously. The big stuff in this case is what I’ve previously referred to as the McDonagh effect. Martin McDonagh’s pastiche of the cliches of 1940s Irish drama is brilliant. It is laden with dark ironies and twisted comic exaggerations.

But if you’re not Irish and you watched his plays you could easily mistake them for a kind of realism. You could imagine that all of those cliches amount to an actual society, a way of talking and living and being that you can just put on the stage without the ironies and the games. You leave off the invisible quotation marks and write the italics as bold roman.

The Belle of Belfast is a spectacular example of the McDonagh effect at work. It is entirely based around some of the cliches that McDonagh manipulates so cleverly: priests, whiskey, priests who love whiskey, wild girls, wild girls who love priests who love whiskey. The main priest, Fr Reilly, is Fr Walsh from the Leenane trilogy. The girl who falls for him is Girleen from the same plays with a touch of Slippy Helen from The Cripple of Inishmaan. The other priest is a part of Fr Walsh (the alcoholic part) spliced into the psychotic Provo from The Lieutenant of Inishmore. This would all be bearable except that the play is set during the Troubles, and the Troubles were real. The Belle of Belfast gives such a crude version of them that I found myself with an anxiety I never thought I'd have: worrying about the unfair representation of psychotic Provo priests.

But the biggest problem is that The Belle of Belfast is successful. It got very good reviews, and anyone I talked to who had seen it thought it was just great. It seems now that, at least in the US, Irishness doesn't have to be handmade any more. You can just buy it off the peg.

fotoole@irishtimes.com