When a band of Fascists ruled our land
Conall Quinn was a jobbing freelance journalist, struggling with a novel. He'd nothing against the theatre, but he'd not much interest, either.
That all suddenly changed, thanks to a story he was sent to cover. But the story didn't involve any great stars, and his moment of enlightenment didn't come in the stalls of the Abbey, Gate, or West End. He went on an intense theatre binge, but it wasn't amidst the heady theatrical excess of Edinburgh.
Conall Quinn's 'Eureka!' moment came at the All-Ireland amateur drama festival in Athlone.
He had been sent to cover it for the Evening Herald, and saw 12 plays in 12 days. It blew him away. "I fell in love with theatre there and realised my novel would work much better as a play."
That became Miss Canary Islands, a story of two veterans of the Spanish Civil War, produced by the Focus in 2002. A second play tackled the subject of the Easter Rising. With his third, The Death of Harry Leon (running until next Saturday at Dublin's Smock Alley), it may seem that Quinn is single-handedly trying to wrest Irish drama into an encounter with the world beyond these islands.
Quinn studied history and politics at college, and went on to work at the Institute of European Affairs. Though Quinn cites Brian Friel as a commanding influence, he'd had little exposure to Irish drama when he started writing, and instead found his inspiration in the writers of pre and post-war Europe, in whose work the fact of war is ever-present. It intrigued him that Irish discourse was bound up in such a narrow view of Irish political history.
"The 15 guys executed in 1916 have completely dominated 20th century Irish history. Yet so many others died fighting for other governments, in other wars, and they've been almost forgotten."
This parochialism surprises him, given that Irish people are rarely short of opinions on foreign conflicts, for example. The traditional emphasis on a narrow conception of Irish interest is a "straightjacket", he says.
"People are always asking me, 'where are the plays that reflect contemporary life?' But there's nothing to interest me, artistically, in that. I couldn't see anything interesting for me to write about in the Celtic Tiger economy. I was never particularly enamoured of what was on the Irish stage. The theatre I write is the theatre I want to see."
That theatre is one that finds its dramatic edge in the moral conflicts that broader conflict occasions. Quinn isn't interested in lecturing about politics, but in exploring the doubts and fears that beset people at times of political upheaval. He imposes the ancient Chinese curse on his characters: they may live in interesting times
Quinn took inspiration from the famous observation of the German emigre philosopher, Theodor Adorno: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
What Quinn wondered was, was the responsibility of artists, prior to the discovery of Auschwitz, watching the rise of Hitler from afar? Harry Leon, the eponymous hero of this new play, lives in interesting times. A Jewish poet living in Portobello, of Russian emigre stock, he is passionately Irish, and convinced that his art should be aloof from politics.
Around him, the small Jewish community is in turmoile and Leon's wife begs him to emigrate to America. "We're not famine victims!" he snaps.
"Ireland is neutral," Leon insists.
"So was Poland!" she replies.
Then, in a literal coup-de-theatre, Quinn brings fascism closer to home. In this fictionalised Ireland of the 1940s, a fascist coup deposes de Valera, and paves the way for a German invasion. Portobello becomes a ghetto for Irish-born Jews, while Jewish refugees from Europe are sent west, "to hell or to Connacht", and republican militants weave bigotry into Irish folklore to forge a virulently anti-Semitic foundation myth.
This is a concept that has been used before, most recently (and brilliantly) in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. While Roth's is a rigorous account of the (hypothetical) rise of fascism in the US, with the detail of a social history, Quinn's employs broader brush strokes, eluding to macro-political developments rather than detailing them.
His central question -- how should art react to politics? -- is a potent one for a theatre that is too often indifferent to the grand narratives of politics. Conall Quinn, at least, is answering by example.
colinmurphy@independent.ie
