Sebastian Barry’s shimmeringly poetic memory play is a portrait of a man with tangled allegiances. Thomas Dunne, the chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan police until 1922, was Barry’s great-grandfather. A loyal servant of the British Crown, he was considered a traitor – a “Castle Catholic” – in the wake of Irish independence.
When we meet Dunne (Owen Roe) he is an old man in an asylum in the 1930s, grieving his many losses and haunted by memories of his son, killed in the first world war. Wearing grubby long johns, in a cell-like room, he is visited by an aggressive orderly, Smith (Cillian Ó Gairbhí), who relishes reminding him that the world has changed and there is no place for him in the new dispensation.
Louise Lowe’s production coincides with the 100th anniversary of the handover of Dublin Castle to the new Irish provisional government, after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
In the years since this play’s celebrated premiere in 1995, Barry’s whole body of work has been enormously significant in breaking the silence surrounding the Irish men who served in the Crown police force, or who died in service to the empire on the western front.
Full of regret, Dunne recalls his father’s harshness, while feeling guilty about his treatment of his own son. Father and son relationships are central here, to the extent that Dunne’s three daughters, played by Julie Crowe, Eavan Gaffney and Caroline Menton, are less fleshed out. Their flashback sequences are also made somewhat cumbersome by Paul Wills’ set design, its glass panels maximising Paul Keogan’s painterly lighting more than easing the flow of movement onstage.
Yet this is Dunne’s play, essentially, and Roe is riveting to watch: physically expressive in every mode, from childlike to imperious, tender to raging. With a musical vocal range and lightning responses, he can switch in one line from a fumbling attempt at prayer to a curse of frustration, from confused half-sentences to ironic riposte. One late, moving, recollection suggests that there are times when memories of the dead might even be a balm, enabling him, somehow, to live with his grief.
Gate theatre, Dublin until 3 September; then touring to The Everyman, Cork, and Lime Tree, Limerick, until 17 September.
