POSSIBLY there is a good reason why the complete plays of Sebastian Barry should have found a British publisher (Methuen) rather than an Irish one. There is a sterling introduction from Fintan O'Toole and a foreword by the author himself. But still, with all the fine drama emanating from Irish pens, why are Irish houses not publishing more of it? There are indeed few enough things in life to compare with a finely wrought play finely presented; but equally, there are few frustrations to compare with being locked from the reality of that play, with only the thin gruel of memory to nourish one's appetite and remind one of the emotional thrill one felt in the theatre.
And more than that. Good plays, really good plays, are not merely the playthings of the director and the actor, no matter how much the conceit of those in the theatrical professions would have us believe they are. They are not bare texts which come alive only with the touch of the director's hand, the words turned into flesh by the actor.
Ordinary mortals
To be sure, the true potential of a true work of theatre can be realised only by the scholarly and intuitive genius of those who work and direct the boards. But very ordinary and untheatrical mortals can enjoy the linear kitform that is the written play. One might not be able to transfer what one imagines into a three dimensional, living piece of theatre, and one might merely get a tithe of the pleasure which would result from the dramatically finished and presented product. So what? I have not seen most of Shakespeare's plays, but I have read most of them - and taken from them a particular nourishment which can so often be lost to the tumult of the theatre, or be jettisoned in the green room as unnecessary.
Shakespeare did not think such lost scenes redundant: perhaps he had good reason for them; and only those who choose to browse through the vast and unproduced tracts of Henry Thingummy or Cymbeline the King of Britaine will ever get the pleasure of his words, his fulsome genius.
We have been divided by the professionals of the theatre into thinking that they alone are capable of transforming the written words of dramatic text into intellectual and emotional enjoyment.
In this regard, theatre is at one with all the other professions: it is a conspiracy against the layman; or rather, since theatre audiences are predominantly female, against the laywoman.
The sad truth is that plays are not read enough simply for the pleasure of reading. Good playwrights are intensely cerebral creatures. They might long to have their words, their ideas, fleshed out on the stage, but the human brain can consume only so much in the short, noisy and often action packed hour and a half that a modern play must consist of. Many words can be relished and understood only in the quiet of the hearth, and this is especially true of a lyrical and powerfully questioning writer such as Sebastian Barry.
Ireland transformed
In a time of change, it is often impossible to say in which direction that change is going. Appearances might be temporary and therefore misleading. All we can say for sure is that during the span of time in which Sebastian Barry has been writing, Ireland is being transformed. The old certainties which predated our current metamorphosis can now be seen as being as temporary as the certainties which they replaced. Sebastian Barry's importance as an enquirer, as a social historian and a reifier of lost and once certain worlds lies, among other things, in the honesty of his thought and the power of his imagination in dealing with what for must of us is gone quite beyond the power of our imagination.
Of course, much of that thought and that imagination will call upon the thought and the imagination of a talented director and sympathetic actors for realisation. But the theatrical experience is a fleeting one; it would be rather pitiful if we were compelled to wait for costly and cumbersome theatre whenever we needed a dose of best Barry's.
Stretching truth
It is not that Sebastian is always factually correct. Playwrights needs must stretch truth; the Manchester from which Matt Purdy would have escaped in the 1790s in Prayers of Sherkin would not have been the great chimneyed metropolis Matt remembers in his Irish exile. Manchester's dark satanic mills at that time were driven by water, not steam. But we know what Sebastian means; the error - if such it is - enhances a broader truth: and that is the nature of art.
Sebastian's most recent work, The Steward of Christendom, for which the other day he won the Ireland Fund award, is the most imaginative, the most generous, and by its historical elisions, contractions and reconstruct ions, emotionally - and by extension, politically - the most honest examination of the loyal southern Catholic Ireland which was either consumed by, or forced to hide itself from, the fires of 1916 onwards. That dead world has been brought alive with lazarene genius.
For the theatregoer, of course, a treasury awaits the symbiosis between word and theatrical deed. But those who want a studied and humane contemplation of those who served a doomed order and then tragically outlived their time will be rewarded in the fullest measure by reading, at their leisure, Sebastian Barry's written words. It will make you just that much wiser - more so than any history book - about our journey to this day.