When Brian Friel's Making Historywas staged on Dungannon's Castle Hill last weekend, it made history in more ways than one, writes Frank McNally. For many of those attending, this was the first time they had ever set foot on the town's highest spot, which is hardly a stone's throw from the main square.
The site of a security installation throughout the Troubles, Castle Hill had a long history of private ownership and fortification before that. By some accounts, it had been off limits to the public since the Flight of the Earls, exactly 400 years ago today. But on Saturday last, the long wait was over and the people of Dungannon could finally enjoy the view from the spot where Hugh O'Neill once surveyed his realm.
It can't have changed much in the intervening centuries. In his classic portrait, The Great O'Neill, Sean O'Faolain imagines the panorama circa 1550: "miles upon miles of waving land, broken by streams and the meandering line of the Great River, as they called the Blackwater, shadowed by the clouds piling up from the lake, shadowed too by immense, roving herds of cattle, this country's gold".
There are probably fewer cattle now, and what O'Faolain called the "impenetrable fastness" of Armagh's oak forests, once a protective barrier to the south, is long gone. Only a football jersey worn by an audience member on Castle Hill suggested that, in the novelist's words, this was "O'Neill territory, the land of Tyrone, held inviolate from time immemorial". But Lough Neagh still dominates the view to the east and Slieve Gullion to the south, just as they must have done in 1550 when the fateful earl was born here.
The opening of the hill - soon to become a public park - is yet another instalment of the North's peace dividend. So was the staging there of Friel's play about O'Neill, which held a cross-community audience rapt for more than two hours and earned a standing ovation at the end. Filing out of the tent afterwards, the elderly gentleman in front of me leaned conspiratorially towards a friend and confessed: "I didn't realise until today just how little I knew about that man."
The O'Faolain/Friel version of O'Neill is a challenge for those raised on the competing myths that he was a hero or villain. He was a bit of both, and as the star of this much-travelled production, Denis Conway enjoys himself playing up the character's many contradictions. One minute, he's falling in love like a 40-year-old teenager, eloping with his betrothed (the sister of his arch-enemy) and getting a Protestant bishop to perform an emergency marriage. Next, he's refusing his new wife's tearful pleas to stop keeping mistresses, on the grounds that this would infringe his rights as a Gaelic nobleman.
O'Neill's politics were no less mixed up. He had a foot in both the modern and ancient worlds and deftly kept them there for as long as it was possible. In an era when the English saw Gaelic chiefs as being either "in" (loyal to the crown) or "out" (a rebel), O'Neill performed an epic, 20-year-long version of the Hokey Cokey - protesting his loyalty whenever necessary, while gradually building his leadership of Gaelic Ireland.
It was crucial to his success that he had been raised by English gentry and so knew how the enemy (as he finally decided they were) thought. If his story was uncomfortable for any unionists in Dungannon, it must also have confused some nationalists to hear a Gaelic icon speaking in plummy, anglified tones, and even mocking his in-laws for their provincial English accents.
The big theme of Making Historyis the contest between the messy reality of O'Neill's life and the heroic myth that was already growing up around him in his later years, helped by his biographer in Rome, Archbishop Lombard. In Friel's version, O'Neill's last battle is to ensure that his life is recorded accurately. And the acid test of this is that Mabel Bagenal - his third and favourite wife - should be central to the plot.
There are ironies here, because, like Lombard, Friel takes certain liberties with the facts. He has Mabel's death follow the defeat at Kinsale, for example, landing another heavy blow on the already wounded O'Neill. Actually, she had died way back in 1595, and after having run away, tired of her husband's Gaelic lifestyle. But like O'Faolain's book, Friel's play is less a work of history than an imaginative search for truth.
Having completed an epic tour of all the Irish sites associated with O'Neill, the Ouroboros production of Making History heads next week for Paris and then Louvain. The plan is to bring it to Rome in the spring.
The search for the true O'Neill continues, meanwhile. A new documentary on the Flight of the Earls, to be screened by TG4 this weekend, will take issue with the O'Faolain portrait of the Earl's Roman exile as a long, slow, impotent fade-out.
Bláithín Ní Catháin's film has Stephen Rea as O'Neill and argues that he remained a dynamic figure, plotting his return - and remaining a source of fear in England - until the end.
It features, for example, the report of an English spy in 1615, quoting a still feisty O'Neill thus: "[His majesty] thinks that I am not strong. I would he that hates me the most in England were with me now, to see whether I am strong or not
. . .[then, taking out his sword]: If I be not in Ireland within these two years, I will never desire more to look for it."
O'Neill's misfortune was that, back in 1604, his main sponsors - the Spanish - had ceased hostilities with England. Nobody expected the truce to last long. But it did, and while it lasted, interfering in Ireland was no longer politically expedient for Spain. O'Neill ran out of time in 1616. He was still in Rome when he died, the victim of a 17th-century peace process.
Imeacht na nIarlaíwill be shown on TG4 this Sunday at 9.30pm.