A play with honesty, respect and love

LAST WEEK en route to a play in Dublin’s Peacock Theatre I went into town by bus, upper deck. A chance to see the world pass by. A few stops before getting off I spotted two men, probably in their 30s, holding hands. It was something of a foreword to the play I was about to see. ‘Come On Home’ is written by Phillip McMahon and directed by Rachel O’Riordan.

McMahon, as he explains in the programme, has been making theatre at the Abbey for over 20 years.

‘Come On Home’ is about family, faith and desire. While travelling abroad, the 20-year-old McMahon, met a gay couple who happened to be two Catholic priests. The three of them became friends and had ‘amazing conversations about faith and sexuality’.

The subject matter might well sound a cliché at this stage in ‘modern Ireland’. But the overall impression the play left with me was one of people living their lives in the here and now, grappling with the cards they had been dealt.

The main character in the play, Michael comes home from England to attend the funeral of his mother in rural Ireland. The family had a hair salon in the village and Michael’s brother Ray inherited the business from his late father but is now about to close shop and head off to Manchester with his pregnant partner. The other brother Brian is loud and often drunk.

There is a lot of drinking and foul language, but there’s honesty, respect and love too.

From the outset Michael is different, shades of sophistication about him. There are early hints that he is ‘different’.

Michael is gay, had spent some time in a seminary studying to be a priest. It seems he was asked to leave because he was ‘too creative’.

All the conversations, the arguing, the drinking, the disclosures take place in the living room with their dead mother lying in the open coffin. It’s there too that the crudest and foulest of language is uttered, no holds barred.

In the midst of bereavement, elements of comedy, raw anger and expressions of dreams, two priests enter the plot. One, in a cameo role, an older man, probably not in touch with ‘modern Ireland’. They offer him a glass of whiskey, which he graciously accepts.

Then there is the younger priest, who was in the seminary with Michael. And now the hinting is over. They had had a sexual relationship and Fr Aidan Cleary tells Michael how he says his name every day to himself. Michael is confused, experiences emotions of love and hate.

It also transpires that Michael’s older brother Brian was sexually abused at school by a Christian Brother.

You can imagine the anger.

Would one theme have been adequate on the night? Coming back home, again on the bus, this time with two friends, who were at the play, we were naturally talking about it.

In the midst of all that is happening and being revealed in ‘modern Ireland’ is there any serious and helpful conversation going on among priests about sexuality?

One hears many esoteric theories but a misguided sense of orthodoxy stymies any discerning, real and authentic debate. And fear is never too far away.

As novices we were told celibacy was a sign of sacrifice for the Kingdom of God. A sign of what in ‘modern Ireland’?

‘Come On Home’ is probably raw. But isn’t so much of the human condition raw, confusing, painful.

There is no perfect way, no perfect life.