Sebastian Barry’s Fatherland
In the first years of the new century the young Irish playwrights wrote about bad fathers. In May 2000, for example, Marina Carr’s play On Raftery’s Hill, in a joint production by Druid in Galway and the Royal Court in London, was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC as part of a festival of Irish culture. Some in the audience at the opening night were old Kennedy stalwarts; others were loyal devotees of Irish culture. It was clear from the silences and the gasps and the shocked comments at the interval that this Irish father on the stage was not familiar to them. ‘The kitchen of the Raftery household’, where the play was enacted, lacked charm, to say the least. There was no dancing at Lughnasa; there were no wild or comic Irish characters; there was even no bitter melancholy; the language was colourful in ways that did not seem to appeal to the audience. The dark cruelty of the father was relentless. Incest, rape, violence, vicious attacks on animals were all central to the drama and its impact. It was an Ireland recognizable to anyone who attended to page four of The Irish Times, which by the mid-1990s was daily covering cases of family horror. But for those whose image of Ireland came from their memory or from the glories of The Quiet Man or Riverdance, this dark Ireland was new and strange.
In 2004 three first plays by Irish writers dramatized a world dominated by bad or mad fathers. In these plays, fatherhood was to be mocked, subverted, shown in all its madness and perversion. Stuart Carolan’s Defender of the Faith, for example, was, once again, set in a rural kitchen. The setting was South Armagh in 1986. As in Marina Carr’s play, Foucault rather than Freud was the dominant spirit, where power over others was the goal, where mindless control and cruelty lay in a fierce embrace on the hearthrug. Foul statement made a constant raid on the inarticulate.
In Mark Doherty’s Trad, first performed at the Galway Arts Festival in 2004, the word ‘Da’ became almost a chant in the play, as a mad father, well past his sell-by date, led his dim-witted son into the temptation offered by hideous prejudices, many non-sequiturs, hilarious wild goose chases and bizarre urges and desires. In Take Me Away by Gerald Murphy, produced by Rough Magic, the father was a manic figure, unprotected, asking absurd questions, lacking all forms of authority, a joke on the stage. As in On Raftery’s Hill, Defender of the Faith and Trad, the mother in Take Me Away was entirely absent. Thus the father was left exposed in his foolishness, his exaggerated needs, his mad requests, his ultimate humiliation.
In his play Hinterland Sebastian Barry sought to move the drama about fathers and their failures from a purely domestic space into the public realm, or into what seemed at first like the public realm. For an Irish audience the character of Johnny Silvester was clearly, and also deceptively, a closely researched version of Charles J. Haughey, who became Taoiseach in 1979 and held that position through some of the 1980s until he was ousted in 1992. Later, in his retirement, Haughey was plagued by allegations, which he himself subsequently confirmed under oath, that he had taken large sums of money from prominent businessmen for his own private use, and had held an enormous overdraft at Allied Irish Banks. If Ireland needed a public figure to become its disgraced father, then Charles Haughey auditioned perfectly for the role and played it with tragic dignity in a lonely exile in his Georgian mansion in North County Dublin.
This was the house of Hinterland. The stage directions set the play in ‘the private study of a Georgian mansion, outside Dublin. All the paraphernalia of a successful political life — citations, presentations, election posters framed.’ The opening speech, however, offered a clue to the great ambiguity that would surround the text and its dramatic intentions. In what was, ostensibly, a stilted letter to his aunts in Derry — Haughey also had family in Derry — about the effects of partition, Silvester mentioned his father, who was ‘hardly the same man after partition, and his physical breakdown may well have been hastened by the same imposition’. Partition, he wrote, separated ‘father from fatherland’; the play dealt over and over with the matter of fathers — Silvester was haunted by his own father’s failure, his wife by her own father’s reputation, and their son by Silvester’s own disastrous fathering.
What distinguished these fathers in Irish plays of the first years of the twenty-first century was that none of them was a tragic hero; they were not caught between two worlds as one collapsed and the other took its place. In these plays, there was only one world, the one that had collapsed and had brought down a reign of terror, or a reign of madness, with no other world come to replace it. These men were static villains, caught in dramatic headlights, willing to destroy, living in a dream of the past. They would always do their worst, and there would be no moments of redemption or recognition or reconciliation. These fathers did not change; they acted and they remembered and they justified their actions. They and those around them were frozen in a ritual in which there was no exit. They were like figures in a Trojan horse, which does not move, which has no Troy in sight.
The act of not killing the father became the core of both On Raftery’s Hill and Hinterland. Letting the father live, against all dramatic expectation, became a powerful and intriguing way of offering no resolution, no easy hope, and an increased tension. It is important to note that both of these plays were written in a time of great and obvious social change in Ireland, a time of new money, new social and sexual freedom and many bright expectations. These plays became a message from the strange, dark, hidden soul of the society. But they were also plays which dealt with both the private and the public. The unrepentant exile of Charles Haughey was a godsend to a playwright concerned with the dramatic possibilities of intractability; he is a hero who is unready for change, on whom everything is lost. Johnny Silvester’s kingdom in Hinterland has already been taken from him; his house, where his wife weeps, is his prison. As his servant leaves him for the night, Silvester uses precisely the same phrase from Othello as Charles Haughey used in the Dail on the day of his resignation. ‘I have done the state some service.’ Just as he begins then to quote Yeats’s lines about ‘an aged man’ he is visited by Cornelius, a dead colleague, instantly recognizable to an Irish audience as Brian Lenihan, who held many ministerial portfolios in Fianna Fail governments, and was defeated for the Presidency by Mary Robinson in 1990. One of Silvester’s earliest comments to his old friend mentions his heart transplant; Brian Lenihan, as an Irish audience would know, had a liver transplant.
Hinterland thus contains large numbers of references to details from the career of Charles Haughey that are given to Johnny Silvester as part of his past. Both Silvester and Haughey, for example, were praised by pensioners for giving them free travel. Both men gave a silver teapot to a female British Prime Minister. As Silvester had betrayed Cornelius during his bid for the Presidency, so too Haughey betrayed Brian Lenihan in the 1990 Presidential campaign. Both Haughey and Silvester have to face tribunals to investigate their financial affairs.
These clues to the emotional or political core of the play are, however, deeply misleading; they represent a sort of decoy to distract the audience from what is really happening. Almost any imaginative writer who creates a set of motives and signature tones for a character from history ends by writing a sort of autobiography. Sometimes this can happen unconsciously; the character begins as a set of facts, and slowly melts into a set of fictions. The process is gradual and tentative; it may have its origins in speculative drafting, seeing how some new ingredient might work, realizing that, while the main character need not be changed, some of the surrounding circumstances will not fit the drama. Gradually, the play, or the novel or the story, becomes a dramatization of an aspect of the secret self.
In considering the relationship between Hinterland and Sebastian Barry’s secret self, it might be useful to quote in full the second stanza from a poem from his collection The Pinkening Boy, which was published in 2004, and written in the same few years as the play. The poem is called ‘The Trousers’. The first stanza deals with the poet’s interest in joining the Royal Marine Yacht Club, his inability to join because his father was not a member, his plans with his father to buy
a yacht and sail 
