Paddy: The Life & Times of Paddy Armstrong
Viking Theatre, Clontarf, Dublin
★★★★★
Along with Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon and Carole Richardson, Paddy Armstrong was one of the Guildford Four, the group of young people wrongfully imprisoned in Britain for 15 years.
After the Provisional IRA bombed a pub in the Surrey town of Guildford, in 1974, English police rounded up and then beat and brutalised Armstrong and the others. After several days they obtained a set of false confessions – and before long arrested and then imprisoned another group of innocent citizens, the Maguire Seven, including Conlon’s father, Giuseppe, who subsequently died in prison.
At the time of his incarceration, in 1975, Paddy Armstrong was the oldest of the Guildford Four. He was 25.
Jim Sheridan’s film In the Name of the Father raised the four’s profile globally, but the details of Armstrong’s personal experience were not common knowledge until the publication of his acclaimed memoir, Life After Life, in 2017. He wrote it with Mary-Elaine Tynan, a teacher, journalist and documentarymaker. Profoundly affected by Armstrong’s story, she has now taken on the role of producer and director of this sold-out stage adaptation, which is about to go on tour.
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In the prologue to Life After Life, Armstrong observes that, so incredible were the events that befell him, it sometimes feels as though “I’m remembering someone else’s life”. This idea is given a poetic twist throughout this one-man play, as its central character’s memory is fading, his recall declining: Armstrong remembers the moments of his life out of joint, each narrative episode linked not by chronology but by the intensity of its feeling.
Don Wycherley, who wrote the play with Tynan and Niamh Gleeson, is incandescent, delivering a remarkably compelling performance. He glides through characters, emotions, accents, locations and time periods without missing a beat. He conveys the humanity at the core of the character he is portraying, a funny, charming and sometimes confused survivor of the cruellest prejudices of English imperialism.
Though there is plenty of humour, as well as some precious moments of joy, Wycherley carves space for both wrath and despair. After all, many in the English establishment seem to have thought it likely that the Guildford Four were innocent but did nothing to change their circumstances.
Nor has anyone been held responsible. Three police officers who were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, Thomas Style, John Donaldson and Vernon Attwell, were found not guilty. Peter Imbert, the officer who oversaw the arrest and interrogation of both the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, went on to be knighted and, later, made a peer. Mr Justice Donaldson, the judge in the case, who lamented Britain’s abolition of capital punishment as he sentenced Armstrong, Hill and Conlon, later became master of the rolls, the head of England’s civil courts.
Yet these facts do not ultimately disturb the sanctity of Armstrong’s life. He finds a measure of peace in the suburbs of Dublin. Though he grapples with the memories of so much injustice, he is unbowed: after prison, Armstrong met his wife, Caroline, and had two children, John and Sophie.
This devastating story of disaster, oppression and redemption is not to be missed.
Paddy: The Life & Times of Paddy Armstrong is at the Viking Theatre, Clontarf, Dublin, until Wednesday, January 8th, before beginning a tour that starts at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, on January 14th-15th
