Sebastian Barry's Hinterland, which opened last night in the Abbey, is like the former Taoiseach who inspired it - deeply flawed but utterly compelling, writes Fintan O'Toole.
If The Steward of Christendom was Sebastian Barry's King Lear, his new play at the Abbey, Hinterland, is his Macbeth. Like The Steward, it is dominated by the powerful presence of an man who has outlived his time.
Both plays are haunted by ghosts. Both deal with the personal dimension of epic public events.
Both centre on a real, recognisable public figure. The key difference is that while in The Steward that figure was a forgotten man, in Hinterland, he is very much alive, both literally and in the public mind. Beneath the thin disguise of Johnny Silvester are the craggy, hawkish features of Charles J. Haughey.
This is Haughey as the Macbeth of Shakespeare's last act: abandoned, at bay, holed up in his fortress waiting for the last encirclement, yet fascinating in his awareness that the price of political power has been a hollowing-out of his very humanity. The difficulty, as Barry realises, is that the real Haughey is as much a figure from farce as from tragedy. The closer the play gets to Haughey himself, the more obvious this difficulty becomes.
From the very first moments of Hinterland, you realise that there is to be no teasing, no guessing-games about the identity of Johnny Silvester. As the lights come up and the eye takes in the Georgian grandeur of Es Devlin's splendidly detailed version of the study at Abbeville, with the jewelled Arabian dagger in pride of place on the wall, Silvester is writing a letter to "my dear aunts in Derry".
Moments later he talks of "my sweet interrogation at the hands of the nation". Then he trots out Haughey's now-infamous "I have done the state some service". This, then, is not a character inspired by Haughey. It is Haughey. The absolute identification is much more, however, than a matter of external detail. With his poet's ear, Barry has caught quite magnificently the patterns of Haughey's speech, that unique conjunction of puffed-up pomposity and vivid vulgarity. A perfect example of this mix of absurd grandiosity and half-comic savagery is Silvester's comment on the judges who now hold his fate in their hands: "Fellas without an ounce of poetry in them, unless it's Robert Service, some old fucker that their grandfathers used to read to them. e.e. cummings? I don't think so."
In his extraordinary performance, moreover, Patrick Malahide almost entirely inhabits Haughey's voice. He captures quite astonishingly the way Haughey's speech mirrors the contradictions of his language, the ugly guttural tones riding on top of those rolling, stately, mesmeric cadences. And he achieves the same feat for Haughey's psychology, creating an utterly convincing amalgam of ruthlessness and sentimentality, inflated self-regard and emotional fragility, bluster and breakdown.
In the very brilliance of the imitation, however, lie the seeds of the difficulties. Barry has too much respect for the truth to pretend that Haughey really is a tragic figure. He is alive to the reality that the thread of true tragedy is interwoven with lurid strands of farce and buffoonery. And he is therefore forced to sacrifice the formal coherence of a tragedy which he achieved so superbly in The Steward of Christendom to the deep incoherence of Haughey's own story. Hinterland is, in other words, too true to life.
Some of the problems lie primarily with the play, others with the production. The main difficulty with the conception of the piece is that while almost all the main characters are obvious versions of real people - Haughey, his wife Maureen (Dearbhla Molloy's Daisy), Brian Lenihan (Kieran Ahern's Cornelius) and Terry Keane (Anna Healy's Connie) - one central figure clearly isn't.
The figure of Silvester's son Jack, a suicidally depressed vet, is at the emotional core of the play. But Jack, being pure invention, exists on a different plane from all the other main characters, making the necessary emotional connection difficult, even with Phelim Drew's strong performance in the role.
More broadly, though, the trouble originates in the failure of director Max Stafford-Clark to fully think through the consequences of the array of forms and moods that Barry has found it necessary to use. By way of shorthand, the overall feel of the piece might be summed up as Macbeth with bits of A Christmas Carol, a Gaelic aisling poem, a French farce and a chunk of Jarry's Ubu Roi thrown in. Thus, the dead Cornelius/Lenihan, appears periodically from the cupboard, like Jacob Marley rattling his chains and warning of damnation. A student called Aisling pops up to interrogate Silvester. Connie/Terry Keane ends up hiding in the same cupboard in a vain attempt to conceal herself from Johnny's wife ("This is not a bedroom farce, Johnny.")
The ending, with Silvester constructing a throne from which to rage against fate with mad futility wonderfully reprises the grotesquery of Ubu, or in this case Gubu, Roi. All of this is heavily signalled and entirely self-conscious. Which implies, surely, that the appropriate style of production should be equally self-conscious and stylised: something, perhaps, along the lines of Stewart Parker's Northern Star, where each sequence is played as a burlesque of a different Irish playwright.
Stafford-Clark, however, opts for the false safety of treating the play as if it is all of a piece and can be contained in a relatively simple, almost naturalistic style. This doesn't make the clashes of style and mood go away, it merely makes them look unintentional. What seems from the text to be a conscious strategy for engaging with Haughey's contradictions ends up seeming like a failure in the basic architecture of the play.
For all this, Hinterland remains rather like Haughey himself: deeply flawed but utterly compelling. It is hard to think of a piece that is at once so problematic and so unmissable. Here after all, is a national theatre doing what it should be doing: engaging with a figure who, for good and ill, is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Here is an extraordinarily gifted writer working his way inside a language that has dominated public discourse in the Republic for three decades. Here is, above all, a performance from Patrick Malahide that embodies with breathtaking skill the state of the public realm. Beneath all the carefully orchestrated histrionicsof his character, all the precision of his manoeuvring, Malahide stares out at us, hollow-eyed and disconnected, a haunting emptiness that is a chilling image of the State.
Hinterland runs at the Abbey Theatre until February 23rd . To book, phone 01-8787222
