PETER CRAWLEYreviews The Kissat Bewley's Café Theatre, Dublin
“I am a priest,” Tom Hickey’s character says, sitting alone on the stage, in the subdued tone of a confession, “that most spat-upon, despised and detested individual.”
Writer Michael Harding has every right to be angry. Although this monologue was first staged in 1994, in the wake of the Brendan Smyth scandal, and is here revived 15 years later in the white heat of the Ryan report’s litany of institutional abuse, the most profound and affecting note of his play is not bitterness, but compassion.
Hickey, under Harding's direction, is a haunted soul, acerbic and abandoned, looking for some succour in music, which trails out – in a perfectly observed detail – from his desktop cassette recorder. Hickey begins with a snippy remark about Desmond Morris's The Human Animal, sardonically tracing all human achievement and failure as a result of more basic genetic urges.
Harding deftly recognises that such glibness is the precise hazard of his own enquiry.
The priest has had to leave the church and few in the audience won’t hazard a guess as to why, but Harding and Hickey refrain from both shock tactics, prurience or pat answers. Instead, a masterfully contained Hickey seems to construct a tapestry out of tangents, his deceptively discrete recollections conspiring to sketch out a life of faith, desolation, urges and finally transgression.
It is hard to unpick the potency and artistry of the text from the unapologetic intimacy of the performance. But as Hickey recounts a childhood fascination with monastic discipline, the unsatisfying sublimation of sexual harmony into communion (God’s timing was never in sync with his, he tells us), the institutional upheaval of Vatican II (the gaiety of the clergy, the banality of the new sermons, the laity striding around in woolly jumpers), he meets our gaze with soft, steady eyes.
If Harding’s humanism and imagination reach a limit, it is in denying a sense of genuine spirituality to the figure or even its vestiges – in our repulsion for the sins of the church, we tend to repudiate its better values.
They don’t elude Harding, though. In fact, the effect of this quietly devastating piece of work both contradicts and complements the tenets of religion. It doesn’t seek anything as banal as forgiveness or damnation, – it attempts something far more profound. It seeks to understand.
Runs to August 8th
