Gerard Mannix Flynn's 'James X' is a brilliant mix of theatre, documentary and direct human encounter, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Above all, it's the fingerprints that get to you. The year is 1967. The charge is the larceny of two pounds, 10 shillings. The previous convictions are the larceny of three pounds, two shillings and five pence, the larceny of a box of chocolates and "numerous convictions for non-attendance at school". If you put your own hand over the fingerprints of the accused, you realise, with a shock, how small they are. These are the hands of a little boy. He is, in fact, just 10 years-old. And already he is tagged, categorised, criminalised.
The page with the fingerprints is not even the start of the thick file of documents that accompanies Gerard Mannix Flynn's performance of James X. Before you reach it, there is already a sheaf of documents, recording the encounters of Church and State with a child born in the inner city of Dublin in 1957.
The documents are authentic, though the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. Since they have been compiled using the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to personal files, we must also assume they relate essentially to Mannix Flynn himself. The institutions that generated the documents - Golden Bridge, Letterfrack and Daingean industrial schools, St Patrick's Institution and the Central Mental Hospital - are all too real.
While the author and actor is rightly anxious to disavow any biographical or autobiographical intent, the power of both the documents and the performance lies in their underlying authenticity. Though the story they tell must not be reduced to the merely personal, this is nevertheless an extraordinary act of testimony.
There are two very good reasons for the device of using a legalistic pseudonym. One is aesthetic. The rawness and ferocity of the story need to be controlled and shaped. In Pam Brighton's superbly restrained production, Flynn is calm, composed, and therefore all the more devastating. The slight distance between Mannix Flynn and James X is crucial to this effect.
The other reason is that the point of the performance is that the file does not, in fact, belong to Flynn. It belongs to us, to our history, our culture. It is, both literally and metaphorically, the property of the State. What Flynn wants to give us is a record not of his sufferings but of our collective cruelties. Instead of indulging in a cathartic feast of vicarious sorrows, we are forced to take possession of a catalogue of crimes carried out in our name.
In one sense, James X is the kind of work that Irish audiences have seen before. We've recently seen Duma Kumalo performing in He Left Quietly, based on his own imprisonment on death row in apartheid South Africa. A few years earlier, we saw Come Good Rain, George Seremba's extraordinary re-enactment of his own torture and attempted murder by the Ugandan secret police.
That James X shares a great deal with those works is, in itself, quite shocking. This form of theatrical witness arises only from societies steeped in the extremes of horror. The very fact that modern Ireland has produced testimony that stands alongside Idi Amin's Uganda or apartheid South Africa is itself appallingly eloquent.
At another level, James X is like nothing we have seen before. Flynn's use of documents and the interplay between the printed file, his own memories, and the terrible truth that finally emerges creates a brilliantly original mix of theatre, performance art, documentary and direct human encounter. The artistry lies not in the usual display of skills but in the subtlety with which Mannix first inhabits and then disavows the file.
The one problem, indeed, is that not everyone who sees the show might spend €4 to buy a copy of the file. Given that the show has no public funding, this is entirely understandable. Yet the logic of the piece is that every member of the audience should be handed the documents. The point, after all, is that they belong to us.
It is on our behalf that the psychologist examined seven year-old James X and recorded that he has "a slight stutter, is a nail-biter and is afraid of the dark". That his case history notes, as if it is evidence of his delusions, that he claims the Brothers in the industrial schools have "huge poles to beat the boys". That he is dumped in Letterfrack even though, as is noted with casual assurance, "this, of course, will not offer him any real psychotherapeutic treatment". On our behalf, too, this evidently intelligent boy is labelled "fairly severely mentally handicapped", or as showing "intelligence rather of the cunning, cute and evasive, type", or, at the age of 16, as insane within the terms of the Criminal Lunatic Act of 1838.
We can already guess, from States of Fear and the unfolding series of revelations, that far worse crimes were committed against this child than by him. At some level, we know, as the many officials who contributed his file chose not to know, that his string of mostly petty crimes arise, not from some psychotic evil, but from terror, shame and abuse. Yet we can only guess at the courage it takes for James X or for Mannix Flynn to confront that reality in public.
Some 20 years ago, when it was immensely hard to do so, Mannix Flynn broke the silence on the enslavement of Irish children in the industrial school system with his novel, Nothing to Say. Two decades on, he has had the guts and the skill to make the silence articulate, to make us hear the voices of legal and medical evasion in which our society announced that it, too, had nothing to say.
James X runs at the Project, Dublin, until March 29th. Booking: 01-8819613/14