Making History
Everyman, Cork
★★★☆☆
There has been no underestimating the attraction of recognisable topography since the melodramas of the 18th century. Richard Brinsley Sheridan sent urbanites roaming Bath’s historic terraces and London’s theatre district. Dion Boucicault had noble Irishmen diving into Muckross Lake and meeting amid monastery ruins in Glendalough.
When, during the Everyman’s new production, a group of 16th-century clansmen at their Tyrone base baulk at the decision of Spanish reinforcements to land in Cork, their cluelessness induces laughter in the auditorium. “I think I heard some mention of Kinsale,” one strategist says. “Never heard of it,” comes the reply.
The running gag of Ulstermen struggling with the geography of the south – “The Ballyhoura Mountains ... they’re in Co Cork, aren’t they?” – in Making History is an astute observation by the theatre’s new artistic director, Des Kennedy, but a bigger swing is being played here: can something be made of Brian Friel’s 1988 play, a difficult artefact, conceived during the Troubles, that deflates romantic myths around the Flight of the Earls?
[ ‘People forget that Brian Friel was a radical’Opens in new window ]
This version of Gaelic Ireland isn’t what you’d expect. Inside a grand diningroom, a logistics-orientated secretary tries to tick through a list of social commitments – “The invitation came the day you left. I said you’d be there” – while a smartly dressed Hugh O’Neill, Irish lord and eventual leader of a confederacy against the English crown, prefers the purity of living in the present – “This jacket. I should have got it in maroon.”
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In this zingy back-and-forth, nicely judged by Stephen O’Leary and Aaron McCusker, Friel’s play seems to present these important historical figures as a screwball-comedy duo.
Into the mix arrives Archbishop Lombard (mostly a cipher for the play’s exposition and ideas, delivered as well as can be by Ray Scannell), who announces that Spain is interested in joining their battle against England. O’Neill’s head isn’t exactly in the game; to everyone’s horror he has just eloped with a Protestant.
Locating the disorganised leaders of the Irish rebellion in a drawingroom comedy is the play’s radical idea, but it is soon derailed by Friel’s insistent metacommentary on how things are remembered – an instinct that often leads to long-winded revelations solicited without tension. Did you know O’Neill still has affections for the English politician who raised him? Or that he once fought against his fellow Gaels?
Kennedy’s production fights hard to share Friel’s vision of history as a conspiracy, with debris from the Battle of Kinsale removed by figures wearing hazmat suits in Catherine Fay’s costuming. After fatiguing war reports, the play finds some grit in a relocation to Rome, where an older O’Neill argues with Lombard about how to record the Nine Years’ War in a manuscript (Denis Conway and Peter Gowan, making the best of an intellectual debate). “People think they just want to know the facts, but what they really want is a story,” Lombard says. On that count, Making History isn’t one for the books.
Making History is at the Everyman, Cork, until Saturday, April 26th
