The Arts: Dr James Barry, the surgeon at the heart of the writer's new play, was one of his time's most unusual figures, writes Mary Russell
What is it about women? In London this summer there are no fewer than three plays in which they have been cast in male roles. At the Royal National Theatre Nancy Carroll's character, masquerading as a man, seduces Charlotte Rampling in Marivaux's The False Servant. At the Globe there is an all-female production of Much Ado About Nothing. And at the Almeida Kathryn Hunter has just played Dr James Barry in Whistling Psyche, Sebastian Barry's play about his surgeon namesake.
The person known variously as Margaret Bulkley, Miranda James Stuart and James Barry continues to fascinate writers. For the 1988 Dublin Theatre Festival the Abbey put on a production of Colours - Jean Barry Esq, Jean Binnie's play based on the life of the enigmatic military surgeon whose true identity was revealed only on his deathbed. In 1999 Patricia Duncker's novel James Miranda Barry was published, followed three years later by Rachel Holmes's excellent biography, Scanty Particulars.
Barry follows in their footsteps by turning his attention to the life of this courageous and brilliant character, who was born in Cork in or around 1799, went to Edinburgh in his teens to study medicine and rose through the ranks to become colonial medical inspector and, later, staff surgeon to the forces.
In Whistling Psyche the elderly doctor has a fanciful encounter with Florence Nightingale, a device Barry uses to contrast the lives and ambitions of these two people whose paths crossed briefly, and rancorously, in the Crimea in 1855, when Nightingale was 35 and Barry 60, both of them motivated by a compassionate desire to work in medicine and both of whom were constrained either by disguise or by the mores of the times. Nightingale formed passionate but sexually unfulfilled friendships with at least two women; Barry guarded his male persona jealously and on only one known occasion formed a relationship with a man, causing a scandal at a time.
Barry died in 1865, aged about 70, and it was as his body was being prepared for burial that stretch marks were discovered and the secret came out: he was born a woman and had given birth.
Every century had its share of women who dressed in male clothes, each for her own reason. Some preferred the active life of soldier or pirate to that of housewife. The life of an abbot was, for some, preferable to that of an abbess. Others passed as men in order to earn better livings. George Sands donned a military greatcoat in order to go on the town with her soldier brother. Some were lesbians and some hermaphrodites.
Margaret Bulkley reinvented herself as Barry and, disguised in male clothes, went off to study medicine in Edinburgh at a time when women were not admitted to university. She was not the first to use such a strategy; the earliest known example is Agnodike, a high-born Greek woman of Athens, educated at Alexandria, who, circa 300 BC, concealed her gender to practise midwifery.
Barry's story is intriguing in its own right, but it was endowed with an extra dramatic dimension on stage by Kathryn Hunter's portrayal of a man who himself was playing the part of a woman. If this sounds complicated, it is, although Hunter's excellent characterisation of the tetchy old doctor made you believe you really were watching a man on stage.
Or were you? In the programme notes Roy Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford, writes: "As a 'young army doctor in the muddled wool basket of Empire', he lives - like so many of Sebastian Barry's characters - at a permanent cross-roads, poised between Irish and English, old world and new, male and female."
Hunter takes her place in a long tradition of women who have played men on stage, one that had its flowering during the Restoration, when female parts, originally written to be played by young boys, were finally reclaimed by women, who then often found themselves playing men playing women, as in A Comedy Of Errors. The effect of a shapely female leg, albeit clad in a silken doublet, was no different in those days from what it is now, driving sober men to delirious distraction, a condition due perhaps to the contemplation of what such a display might lead to, the opportunity for innuendo in breeches parts being legion.
It was an aspect of Restoration drama that Pepys found delicious. "A woman played Partenia and came afterwards on the stage in men's clothes and had the best legs that ever I saw and I was well pleased with it," he wrote. In Smock Alley in Dublin the sexually busy Peg Woffington was so famous for her male roles that she remarked to a friend: "I have played the part so often that half the town believes me to be a man." To which he replied: "Madam, the other half knows you to be a woman."
Gradually, however, women actors moved beyond mere male impersonation and into drama. Consequently, by the 19th century there were so many female Hamlets they were no longer newsworthy. Ellen Terry played Romeo and was received with rapture, though not everyone was amused by this gender switching. During a royal command performance in 1912 Queen Mary turned her disgusted back on Vesta Tilley, who was clad in tails and top hat.
Kathryn Hunter, one of the founders of the innovative Theatre de Complicite, has made the male role her own, portraying Lear as a befuddled old man plucking irritably at his clothes and Richard III as a diminutive opportunist with the sideways walk of a black widow sidling up to its victim. But it would be unwise to compare these roles with her part in Whistling Psyche. Her Lear, with stiff neck and cranky, whining voice, was unmistakably male, while her Richard III focused on the sexual power that is one of the most devastating aspects of that character.
Her Barry, in contrast, is a self-important little dandy, strutting the stage, hand tucked importantly behind the tail of his frock coat, smoking, holding forth arrogantly as only one well used to being obeyed can do, each studied pose and mannerism bordering on the stereotype. It was these qualities of arrogance and self-confidence that so infuriated Nightingale when she encountered him, in real life, in the Crimea.
Nevertheless, beneath all the posturing, as Sebastian Barry revealed, there is the well-concealed anguish the fussy little doctor felt at never having been able to live a more open life, at always having had to suppress his female side even though it was this aspect of his character that made him such a compassionate doctor and reformer.
Posted to Canada, he ordered the soldiers' straw pillows and mattresses to be replaced by ones of feather and down and introduced the concept of married quarters. In South Africa he performed the colony's first Caesarean section - also one of the world's first - and distanced himself from the racist imperialism prevalent at the time. This humane approach set him aside from his peers.
But in Whistling Psyche there is also another character: Nightingale, played, by Claire Bloom, as a heavily built old woman with wispy hair who spends much of the play nodding off. It is on the contrast between these two real people with apparently similar ambitions that the play finally focuses. For, in the 25 years that divides the two, attitudes changed and Barry, living in exile from the female part of himself, envies his junior, who was able to pursue her medical career openly while his life continued to be analysed and picked over so that the privacy he sought in life eluded him even in death.
Barry ended his days in rented rooms in London, dying attended by his black servant and his dog, unfulfilled as both a man and a woman; no trace was ever found of the child supposedly born as a result of the scandalous relationship he had with Lord Charles Somerset, the governor of South Africa. When news of that affair broke - probably the only time Barry found love - he was ridiculed and lampooned andeventually stripped of his title of colonial medical inspector.
He lies now where he was buried, in a three-guinea plot in Kensal Green Cemetery, in London.
