Before the new year starts in earnest I want to mention two artistic works from last year, each in its own way obscure, which, by virtue of being overlooked, indicate the kinds of discussion we seek to avoid.
One is the play Mutabilitie, by Frank McGuinness, which played at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin last autumn, and is now in mothballs, having been passed over by the major theatres. This is shameful, for it is perhaps the play an Irish theatregoer really needed to see.
Mutabilitie is a tragic fantasy, set in the Ireland of the 16th century. It features unlikely characters, including the English poet Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and an Irish family of dispossessed rulers coming to terms with a changing reality.
I find it strange that a playwright so beloved of the artistic establishment should have his best work so wilfully ignored.
There may be a clue in the fact that the original production at the Royal National Theatre, London, in 1997, was not a success, ironically for reasons prefigured in the text. This year's fringe revival by the Theatreworks Company, under the direction of Michael Caven, was well received by small audiences, but should have been gracing the stage of our national theatre.
Mutabilitie was a little too timely. It is all very well dealing with the Irish psyche when the issue being dug up is regarded as safely dead. But this play emerged at a time - postceasefires - when its theme, the relationship between the Irish and the English, could be dealt with for the first time without baggage. It was no longer abstract or about others. It wasn't about "rural Ireland" or "traditional society" or any of those other places Abbey audiences, having had all their shots, can observe from a distance.
It is as much a "rebel" play as it is "revisionist", and revolutionary. But it is not "political", in that it does not vindicate prejudices of any kind. An Irish Tempest, it seems to have a nodding familiarity with Frantz Fanon and Padraig Pearse, but does not seek to vindicate either. It has the disorder and wildness of Peter Brook's Rough Theatre, offering a sacred eruption of the lived possibility of history. It makes you think and feel at the same time. If it suggests anything it is that there are no monopolies on original sin - evil is as often perpetrated from the doing of presumed good. I left the theatre puzzling the distance that opens up between a political perception of a relationship and the relationship itself, which means that, for me, the play lived up to its name.
The other overlooked opus is even more obscure, an online book which has yet to find anyone willing to put it into print. After a page or two of Rich Zubaty's What Men Know that Women Don't, you'll begin to grasp why.
For several years, as some men began tentatively to seek words for what had happened to their lives, they were screamed at by feminists to be quiet and listen. They hadn't wanted to say much, just to ask if they could go on loving their children, have a roof over their heads and a little self-respect. They were even prepared to plead guilty, so as to get the whole thing over with quickly. "Backlash!" screamed the establishment, posing as beleaguered opposition. "Woman-haters!" What these men suggested had been fairly uncontroversial: that some men oppress some women, some women oppress some men, some women oppress some other women, and some men oppress some other men. It was called the human condition. They proposed that a belief system recognising only wrongs by men against women was in need of some deconstruction. "Misogyny!" came the response. "Backlash!"
Well, now they have gone and asked for it. Here is the backlash, the reply to 30 years of calumny and lies. I have seen the future and its name is Rich Zubaty. What Men Know that Women Don't might become the most explosive book of the century. Zubaty seeks to give men a revised map of their souls as a way of saving their lives. He says things we have not dared to think. Men are more spiritual than women. Men have deeper feelings than women. Men are intuitive, women are not. Women are not oppressed. Women are the cause of war. Our lives are inside out. Feminism is a disaster because it annihilates love.
But unlike many feminist tracts, Zubaty seeks to prove his contentions with facts and analysis and hard-earned experience. He was, as he puts it, "just another jerk who believed the lie", a typical American father, with a family, a home, two cars and a boat, until one day he was awakened from a nap in his living room by a man reading from loose sheets of paper "as if he were auditioning for a play". The man was a process server, and the document a Dissolution of Marriage. Everything Zubaty had known and loved and worked for "was removed from me in that instant". He spent several years fighting false charges of abusing his children, and by the time he succeeded, found they had been poisoned against him. He finally whittled his possessions down to what fitted in a suitcase and started again. What Men Know . . . is the result. It can be accessed on www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/5225/. If you read only one online book this year, let this be it.