New Ways to Kill Your Mother

wherever the spirit took us, to Dalkey island,
to the inland mysteries of the French canals
though neither of us knew a sail from a bedspread,
and still don’t.

The second stanza reads:

So what a surprise to meet him in Dawson Street
last Friday, after years of separation,
family troubles keeping us apart. He passed
like a retired sea-captain with a long white beard,
the trim of his coat quite sailorlike,
the hint of the South Seas in the sun creases
about his eyes, his tentative and nautical hello—
not sure of his ground, the tilt of the hard earth.
As if in the intervening years he had indeed
gone off to the Caribbean or rounded the Horn
nonchalantly enough, and the Royal Marine Yacht-club
owed me an apology. And as he hurried on,
quite shipshape at sixty-seven,
his sea-legs not yet attuned to land,
it was his neat trousers particularly I noticed—
the cut of his jib, the breeze athwart the main.

Hinterland is as concerned with the failures of fatherhood and the surrounding grief and estrangement as the poem ‘The Trousers’. Just as Johnny Silvester summons up his father in his opening speech, so his wife Daisy does hers almost as soon as she arrives on stage. Daisy’s father, like Charles Haughey’s actual father-in-law, was a politician, ‘the soul of probity’. Both Johnny and Daisy will continue throughout the play to make reference to their respective fathers, as though they are desperately trying to eke out an identity for themselves, even one that depends on myths and shadows. So too Aisling, who comes to interview Johnny, refers over and over to her own father. (‘My father is a good decent person, I have to say. As fathers go.’) As Daisy bemoans her husband’s infidelities, she mentions the needs of their son Jack:

A little boy waiting for his father to come home. Do you know what a little boy is, Johnny? I’ll tell you. He’s a tiny contraption of bones and skin, tuned like a radio to give out and receive certain signals. When a little boy is sick, his whole body strains to broadcast a special signal, he wants a very simple thing, to be cuddled in the arms of his father.

Daisy carries on discussing the power of the absent father to do damage in a set of speeches that are the most emotionally forceful in the play:

I pity all the little boys of this world. Because, when the signal is not answered, the pain is so great, so oddly great… A true father would feel that call from three thousand miles and travel all day and night to reach his child. Nothing can put that little scenario back together again and time goes on swiftly and then there is nothing but a tangle of broken wires, good for nothing because it can finally neither receive nor send a signal.

When Jack arrives on stage, it is clear that he is a tangle of broken wires, still half a child demanding and offering love. Daisy, by this time, has mentioned a particular mistress of her husband’s who had written a book. For an Irish audience, this would have been seen as a reference to the journalist Terry Keane, who published a series of articles in the Sunday Times about her long affair with Charles Haughey and who made no secret of the affair in her column in the Sunday Independent. Once more, a precise reference to an actual event in the life of Charles Haughey had been inserted into the play.

The problem, however, was not this reference to Haughey’s personal life, but the presence of Silvester’s son Jack on the stage. Charles and Maureen Haughey, as is well known, have three sons, all of whom benefit from exceptionally strong mental health; there has not been a sign of a breakdown or a hint of a twitch among them. But healthy children, in general, are no use to a playwright. Suddenly, with the son Jack, the play had moved into areas dictated by its own necessities, the proper realm of fiction. In one sense, the play had always been there, since its emotional life arose not from a set of public events but from a series of meditations about fathers and fatherhood. But in scene after scene, the connections between the Silvesters and the Haugheys had been made abundantly clear. Now the script had departed from the story of the Haugheys to tell another story, one of grief and estrangement and the damage fathers cause to their sons, which belonged more to the emotional life of the poem ‘The Trousers’, in which a son inspects his father as he passes him silently on the street, than to the many volumes by journalists that told the story of Haughey’s reign and his downfall.

The controversy surrounding the play thus centred on the use of Haughey as a central character and the distortion of the facts for dramatic purposes. It simmered in the newspapers and on radio and came to a head at a post-show discussion in the Abbey Theatre on 20 February 2002. The actors, the director and the theatre’s literary manager took part, the author watching from the wings.

Jocelyn Clarke, the literary manager, remembers ‘an unusually full post show discussion house’ in which the first speaker from the audience disagreed with the director’s statement that the play had ‘grace’. ‘The characters,’ she said, according to Clarke, ‘were small-minded and petty, especially the politician, and his relationship with his wife and son was not credible.’ Clarke remembers that a young man then stood up ‘and wondered how Barry could use the life and figure of a still living politician for his play — what right had he to do that to Charles Haughey’s family, and to a lesser extent Brian Lenihan’s family’. Clarke set about defending the play:

I replied that Hinterland was not a biographical drama about Charles Haughey’s life and times but about an imaginary politician whose life and times were based on figures and events in Ireland’s recent political history, which were very much in the public domain. That a playwright chooses to write a play about a political figure whose life story has similarities to the story of a living or dead politician does not make it a play about that politician’s life or career.

‘The audience,’ Clarke remembers, ‘grew more restive.’

‘That’s not true,’ cried somebody. ‘It’s about Charles Haughey,’ shouted somebody else. ‘It’s all been in the newspapers.’ I replied… that it had not been Barry’s intention to write a play about Charles Haughey. Indeed, Hinterland should be seen in the broader context of his work, and his ongoing theatre project to explore a nation’s history through the prism of Barry’s own family and its history. It could be argued that Hinterland is a biographical play in the sense that Barry primarily uses elements from his own biography rather than Haughey’s or any other politician’s and that as far as I was aware Haughey was still happily married, and he has several sons, none of whom suffer from a mental illness.

Thus the ambiguities surrounding the play and its intentions were spelt out. Its emotional shape came from the author’s private life and that of his family; some of its detail came from the public domain, from aspects of the life of the former Taoiseach. Some of the audience believed that the author had no right to confuse the two, and the play had been damaged by the confusion. The theatre’s literary manager suggested that to see Hinterland as solely about Haughey or as a distortion was a fundamental misreading of the play.