There are times when, as a writer, you come across something by another writer and are overcome by a rather unedifying jealousy for what has been achieved.
There are other times, much rarer sadly, when the work is so tremendous that all you feel is awe. I experienced this in Dublin's Peacock Theatre last week, at Stuart Carolan's play Defender of the Faith. The writing achievement of this play is beyond intelligence, indicating an artist at work untroubled by contemporary notions about lines between politics and art.
Carolan's first play, it is based in the republican badlands of south Armagh and explores the legacy of violence in the life of one family. The story centres on the arrival of a senior IRA troubleshooter from Belfast, in pursuit of a troublesome "tout".
Usually, plays about the "Troubles" set out with a primary moralistic agenda concerning the evils of violence, and involve republican archetypes such as IRA Godfather, Foaming Psychopath and Young Volunteer with Moral Qualms. There is no sense that the playwright here is less chilled by violence than anyone, but it is clear that he assumes his artistic responsibility to require more. Carolan seems to perceive that he has a responsibility to the integrity of what he exploits, and the broadest moral content of what he explores. This is a profoundly moral play, and yet withholds any handy moralistic filter that might enable the audience to sit back and expect conventional assumptions to be affirmed.
Carolan's deeper subject is the spiritual repercussions of violence in the soul of a family in which it has become a way of life, the result of a layering of grievance, rationalisation and ideology, and underpinned with religious and spiritual templates. There is a strong sense of normal people existing in abnormal conditions, who have, perhaps, been enabled by circumstances to access in themselves the brutality a civilisation normally moves to circumvent.
Laurence Kinlan's Thomas is troubled by worries neither deeper nor shallower than moral scruples. He lives within the rules of a culture as rational to him as the rules of the road. Gerard McSorley's Joe is a man whose violent excoriations read for what they seem until they emerge as an attempt to distract from what he really is.
At another level, the play is about the absurdity of what we call idealism. The IRA trouble-shooter, JJ, beautifully played by Frank McCusker, is an existential idealist whose idealism has shorted into a crude cause. He is like a ghost of himself, caught in the irony of his lifestyle, yet convinced of its necessity.
The play examines how we become hardened into roles, attitudes, opinions and ways of life that may have little to do with what we are. It explores how half-truths arising from grievance can drive us into stereotypes of our own crystallised beliefs. Outwardly zealots, inside informers. In a sense, the play is about the potentially bogus nature of idealism in the human spirit, unveiling the effects of an external culture on the soul, showing what happens when the culture makes demands that bring the individual out of his own "civilised" nature. It also shows perhaps the greatest terror such a culture offers is when the individual collapses out of it and can't get back in.
This, in short, is not a play about "them up there", but a play about us. Its drama is the drama of a society contaminated less by, in the first instance, violence, than by unresolved grievances that contaminate everything. And whether this expresses itself in denunciations of "the c**tin' Brits", or equivocation, or philosophical relativism, or hypocrisy, the damage is just as real.
Although there is no room for complacency, we can now be hopeful of having entered the post-war phase. The issues raised last week by the Independent Monitoring Commission, and before that by the British government's plans for a kind of peace and reconciliation commission, remind us that ending such conflicts is not like turning off a tap. There are legacies, consequences, wounds - some so deep they can only be looked at. Those who long told us that we are all guilty are morally correct, but so are those who said that simply distancing ourselves from the problem would not overcome it. Nobody in this is any more guilty or innocent than a human being can be.
As a writer, I find it chastening to see Stuart Carolan confront head-on something that, whether I like to acknowledge it or not, I had been avoiding. It is all very well to write reasoned arguments about why we must listen to all sides, acknowledge hurts, and do this, that or the other in order to talk the extremists down from the ledge. This has its place, as has the outright moralistic denunciation of violence and its nurturing ideas. But none of this can touch the soul of a damaged people. Defender of the Faith, now into its final week at the Peacock, does that.