Play brings the reality of the Holocaust home to Irish audiences

CULTURE SHOCK:'The Death of Harry Leon' does what political theatre should do – take real risks in order to provoke new thoughts, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

I N THE foyer of Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, where Conall Quinn's fascinating play The Death of Harry Leonends its run tonight, there are poignant notices. They apologise for the absence of a planned exhibition on the history of Dublin's Jewish community.

It didn’t happen, they explain, because of the death of Raphael Siev, curator of the Jewish Museum and keeper of the community’s collective memory. There could be no more stark or poignant reminder of the fragility of that memory. In a declining community, what is lost with Raphael Siev may be impossible to replace.

This matters for the obvious reason that Jewish immigrants have been a rich thread in modern Irish history. But it matters even more because the memory of those Jews is a crucial bridge between an insulated Irish culture and the larger, more crucial memory of the Holocaust.

That bridge is weakening at a time when it needs to be strengthened. It is not just that Holocaust denial is still a thriving business, as we’ve seen in the recent admission to the Catholic church of Bishop Richard Williamson. It is also that the integrity of its meaning is threatened by, on the one hand, the use of resentment against Israel’s recent actions to stoke anti-Semitism and, on the other, the use of the Holocaust to justify those same actions.

It is this context that makes Quinn’s play important. It is not a fully accomplished piece, but it is terrifically courageous. It does what political theatre should do, taking real risks in order to provoke new thoughts.

The risks that Quinn takes are in doing the opposite of what apparently needs to be done. One of the cultural problems of remembering the Nazi’s systematic extermination of Jews, gays, left-wingers and Roma people is that it seems literally unthinkable. The more you read about it, the more documentaries you watch, the more unbelievable it seems.

Through this window of incredulity, Holocaust denial creeps. As the direct survivors die out, and figures like Williamson are rehabilitated, the obvious need is for the kind of hard, forensically factual approach taken, for example, by Laurence Rees in his superb BBC documentaries.

Yet that approach has its limits in the Irish Republic. One of the consequences of our neutrality in the second World War is that we remain somewhat detached, not just from the historical facts, but from the complex questions of guilt and collusion, or resistance and collaboration, that hang over most European societies. The Holocaust didn’t actually happen here, so we can convince ourselves that it never could have happened here.

This is where Quinn takes his risk. It would seem that the last thing that should be done is to mess around with the memory of the Holocaust by inventing an episode that didn't happen. Yet that is precisely what Quinn does. The Death of Harry Leonis counter-factual history, a "what if?" story in which Dublin's Jewish community suffers the same fate as its counterparts throughout Europe. It is immensely to Quinn's credit, and to that of Denis Conway's fine Ouroboros company, that this fiction serves to illuminate the reality rather than to obscure it.

THE DEVICE OF the play will be familiar to anyone who has read Philip Roth’s dazzling counter- factual novel The Plot Against America, in which the far-right, anti-Semitic Charles Lindburgh comes to power in the US in 1940.

Quinn is a little unfortunate in that his play was actually commissioned by the Abbey in 2004, the year Roth’s book was published. The Abbey’s misjudgement in not producing the play (it is, surely, the kind of work that a national theatre is for) may make Quinn’s idea seem a little jaded.

But it’s not. The outlines of Quinn’s scenario – an ultraCatholic nationalist militia funded and supported by Germany assassinates de Valera and takes power – is sufficiently well-rooted in historical plausibility to produce a sense of dramatic conviction. Conway himself, in a superb double act as the German manipulator and the head of the native fascist Cuchulainn Militia, gives the notion a solid theatrical embodiment. In any case, all theatrical plots are “what if?” stories, and once the premise is established, an audience can lend itself to what follows.

This is true here even when Quinn struggles for a tone adequate to his ambitious task. At times, he seems weighed down by the duties of his high-level concept, and opts for a Shavian-style dramatic essay rather than for the ordinary, banal dialogue that establishes character.

He might have been better served by making his central character a plumber rather than a poet whose profession encourages the declamatory tone.

Yet, even within these confines, Quinn, with the help of a strong cast, excellent design and fluently intelligent direction by David Horan, pulls off the difficult task he has set himself. There are superbly worked individual scenes, and one key sequence, in which Peter Gaynor’s tacit Leon is harangued by Conway’s German functionary and his Irish mistress, is truly gripping.

But the real achievement is in the overall architecture of the piece. It sustains an epic act of re-imagining Irish history, forcing the audience to confront a possibility that becomes steadily less fantastic as the play goes on.

Essentially, Quinn brings the Holocaust home. Unlike, for example, John Boyne’s fine novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, in which the writer merely happens to be Irish, Quinn uses his specifically Irish point of view to deeply unsettling effect. He brings the Holocaust home, and it doing so brings home the continuing urgency of its memory.

fotoole@irishtimes.com