I went to see Sebastian Barry's play, Hinterland, under the impression, on the basis of hearing snatches of public discussion on the subject, that it was about Charles Haughey. Instead, I found it to be about our apprehension of Charles Haughey, a somewhat different matter.
Many of the critical points which have been made about the play have merit if it is taken as a fairly literal exploration of the life and psyche of Charles Haughey. The central role, that of Johnny Silvester, despite the excellent playing of Patrick Malahide, is two-dimensional and lacking in dramatic focus.
There is a clash of content between the invented elements of the character and the known facts which intrude concerning the life and legend of Charles Haughey. The script also fails to spell out the precise moral context in which Silvester stands accused by his people, and this deprives the piece of a mainspring other than in the knowledge and/or prejudices of the audience (not a problem in the Abbey, admittedly). There is also a strong dissonance between the central character and the others, Silvester's part being written primarily as farce, the others as melodrama.
It is possible to perceive these other than as flaws. A play, once the curtain goes up on the first performance, becomes the property of the audience, and can come to mean not what the author imagined he intended, but perhaps the opposite. I don't know what Sebastian Barry intended, but what he has achieved is the dramatisation of our national inability to comprehend somebody with an almost superhuman capacity to fascinate us.
At a superficial level, Hinterland is a voyeuristic drama centred on the question: what does the cornered lion do in his lair all day? The character of Johnny Silvester, in all his poetry-spouting ridiculousness, is not Charles Haughey. He is our half-baked idea of Charles Haughey, and Hinterland is accordingly an attempt at imagining the existence and personality of somebody we have observed from a distance and comprehended only in caricature. The result can be seen as a failure in the writing, but also as a truthful representation of the national failure to imagine what Haughey might really be like, and the consequent inclination to judge him on the basis of legend, prejudice and stereotype. The farcical elements of the piece work precisely because they gratify certain prejudices concerning a character from whom sympathy is withheld.
SINCE the persona of Charles Haughey is so recognisable in Johnny Silvester, some of the tirades against him, particularly from the mouth of his wife, Daisy, are unspeakably cruel. And yet, by the venomous way in which they recreate the public spleen against Haughey, they are in a certain sense artistically justifiable: they allow us to hear in common parlance what is normally dressed up in pious journalese.
Although the writing fails to recreate a plausible private Haughey, that core dissonance between the literary grandiosity of the anti-hero and the literalism of his family, is symbolically apt.
Arthur Miller, in his essay The Family in Modern Drama, wrote about the dramatic incompatibility of public and private language. Poetry, he argued, was the language of the public arena; prose that of the domestic space.
Private life lends itself to realism; public life does not. These dichotomies spring from different aspects of human experience, and appeal to different receptivities in the audience: "When one is speaking to one's family, for example, one uses a certain level of speech, a certain plain diction perhaps, a tone of voice, an inflection suited to the intimacy of the occasion.
"But when one faces an audience of strangers, as a politician does, for instance - and he is the most social of men - it seems right and proper for him to reach for the well-turned phrase, even the poetic word, the aphorism, the metaphor.
"And his gestures, his stance, his tone of voice, all become larger than life; moreover, his character is not what gives him these prerogatives, but his role. In other words, a confrontation with society permits us, or even enforces upon us, a certain reliance upon ritual."
Johnny Silvester is imprisoned in the rituals of a lifetime in politics, a role in search of a character. He speaks as though speechmaking, in a manner he himself describes as "stilted and formal". Stumbling upon the attempted suicide of his son, he delivers a line from Tennyson.
IT seems implausible that Charles Haughey, holed up in Kinsealy, is similarly imprisoned. But the idea of a man who has alienated himself from his family by virtue of devoting himself to a public now turned against him, and who in old age seeks to re-establish communication with his wife and son in the language of the public arena, is itself interesting enough to render the Haughey connection a secondary issue.
There is a profound connection between the public disillusion with figures like Haughey and the more personal rage of our time directed at the hole where something tells us our own fathers used to be.
Beyond the immediacy of the Haughey connection is a drama in which the wife and son of the king flail impotently at the chest of their and the nation's father, accusing him, perhaps on behalf of us all, of sins which, by the very vagueness of their nature, suggest a different and deeper sin - the sin of absence, of failure to provide an unconditional target for our love and hate, thus denying us the opportunity to grow.
jwaters@irish-times.ie