How to be Down and Out... and win
The world is tough and success is not given. But that’s life, writes Emer O’Kelly
Down and Out in Paris and London New Theatre, Dublin
I See You Theatre Upstairs, at Lanigan’s, Dublin
GEORGE Orwell was not a nice man; but he was a superb writer and chronicler. And it’s the latter that concerns Phelim Drew in his stage adaptation of Down and Out in Paris and London.
In 1933, Orwell worked as a “plongeur” (dishwasher) in a series of sordid cafes, as well as in what would now be classified as a five-star hotel in Paris. Backroom conditions differed little, save that the cafe owner allowed his plongeurs two litres of wine per day: he felt that if he didn’t they would steal three litres.
That more or less sums up Orwell’s experiences — a kind of brutally pragmatic camaraderie where a 15-hour day was the norm, and when work was scarce, they would live on bread and slops for days at a time.
There was Boris, the huge Russian, perennially looking forward to being a head waiter; there was Charlie, “a curious specimen” weary of the world at 22, and living on telling the story of having paid the vast sum of a thousand francs in order to be left alone in the dark in a whorehouse with permission to “do what he liked” with the girl on the bed: nobody would hear or see. (He viciously raped her and considered it the “happiest day” of his life.)
In a state of collapse from deprivation, Orwell returned to London, where he went on the road as a tramp. They slept in “spikes”, locked in at night, three in a cell five feet by eight, without beds. He learned about all sides of humanity as he listened to the stories, and realised that the liberal intelligentsia, who could understand them, never met them. Poverty, he found, is “merely squalid”.
Phelim Drew brings it all wonderfully alive with a series of vignettes of vividly memorable characters. But there is a certain wry hypocrisy as well. While Orwell was “practising” destitution, he had quite a large sum of money on deposit in a London bank. And while his fellow plongeurs and tramps could never turn away from their destitution, Orwell could (and did) return to his mother when his health, unsurprisingly, broke down.
When he had been a police officer in India during the Raj, George Orwell thoroughly enjoyed whipping his “boys” to within an inch of their lives. And he refused to pay for surgery for his first wife when it was needed; she died undergoing a delayed hysterectomy. His passionate empathy was at best selective.
But that’s not Phelim Drew’s fault, and his adaptation is a joy to watch; he’s directed by Michael Tuomey, and it’s playing at the New Theatre in Dublin. Mary, Lady Heath would seem like a good subject for a play. She was from Limerick, and as a small child, witnessed her father beat her mother to death. (He was declared insane and incarcerated). She was reared by her grandparents, studied science, drove an ambulance in World War I, and divorced her first husband for cruelty. (He later committed suicide.)
Her second husband was Sir James Heath, who bought her her first plane, and she flew solo from South Africa in 1925, becoming a celebrity even before Amelia Earhart. Heath was 40 years her senior, and she married him only for his money.
A crash over Cincinnati almost killed her, and she lived with a plate in her skull afterwards. She also took to the bottle, then married a jockey of Jamaican origin, his colour being the last nail in her social coffin. She died in 1939 after falling down the stairs of a London bus, and following frequent court appearances for being picked out of the gutter.
Amy De Bhrun has taken this promising saga, has set Mary against a 21st century apparent prototype, and has them commune on a spiritual level. Except I See You doesn’t work; 21st century Mary is a working class battered Dublin wife, whose baby was stillborn after she was pushed down the stairs by the boyfriend who had promised her mother he would look after her. No connection, no nuthin’ as might have been said in Cincinnati.
What I See You is really about, is an excuse to whinge/rant: Lady Heath, indulged with every luxury her husband could buy, hates Amelia Earhart for having surpassed her. Twenty-first century Mary thinks men are what’s wrong, while admitting that her mother filled in her CAO form, and the person who ridiculed her in school was her female teacher. (She dropped out of university after six weeks... because she hadn’t made any friends.)
Throughout the play the two women break into choral duets of rage at being put down in a male-dominated world. The advice for other women is: “You can be anything you want to” — a sure-fire recipe for frustration, disappointment and despair: maybe even a road to suicide.
The world is tough, success isn’t guaranteed: in common parlance, s**t happens, so get used to it.
I See You, with the author and Roxanna Nic Liam playing the two Marys, is quite clearly a deeply-felt piece. But instead of inspiring one with resentment of men past and present, it rather makes one feel sorry for them. And sadly, it’s boring as hell.
It’s directed by Helena Browne at Theatre Upstairs at Lanigan’s on Eden Quay in Dublin.
SITTING over a pint in The Flowing Tide pub, Tom Murphy leaned back expansively as he discussed “the dhrink”.
He liked, he said, to keep a case of Champagne in the house, because “It’s handy if someone drops by on a Sunday”. On other occasions, he would refer to himself as being “just a plain boy from Tuam”. In other words, Tom Murphy was a divil, and also a highly sophisticated man of the world.
Above all, he was a playwright of genius, an angry observer and analyst of the Irish psyche, and an excavator of the soul who made you understand the depths of the grave in which we bury ourselves, often before our time.
Born in Tuam, Co Galway, the youngest of 10 children, all of whom emigrated save for himself, the shadow of emigration hangs over all his work. His characters are dispossessed, sometimes from the reality of homeland, and always from the peace of a tranquil soul. The result, in most of his work, is a scenario of blood-curdling savagery that never tries to make excuses for itself. Murphy never sentimentally excused the Irish character, or tried to paint it in “justifiable” victimhood.
In The Morning After Optimism, first staged in 1971 at the Abbey, a surreal fairytale of the search for innocence, the central character, a retired pimp, says he believes in ignorance, and it should never be confused with innocence. That’s what hypocrites do, he says. And in one searing speech, the author debunks a great deal of Irish writing which so heavily leans towards the identification of the two with each other, just as deprivation is confused with spirituality, that sure-fire essence of fascism everywhere.
Tom Murphy’s first play was On the Outside —a prophetic title: he remained an outsider who did not identify with the Irish selfidentification with innate nobility of soul. He saw our violent ugliness and made no excuses for it.
It is much quoted that the Abbey turned down his first major play — A Whistle in the Dark — in 1961. It depicted an Irish emigrant family in Coventry, where with the arrival of the paterfamilias from the homeland, the vicious hatreds and predatory greed simmering below the surface break out and end in tragedy. The play is unrelentingly cruel and hate-filled. It was certainly not part of the pattern of Irish writing which presented the uneducated Irish abroad as put-upon and discriminated against merely for their race. In the context of policy at the time, where the national theatre was seen as the cultural arm of the civil service, charged with presenting a desirable image of our character and society, humbly content to be free, unworldly and deeply spiritual, A Whistle was heresy.
It electrified London when staged by Joan Littlewood at Stratford East, and the heretic was on his way.
Seven years later, he took on the great tragedy which sears our national consciousness to this day. Murphy was now an internationally acclaimed playwright, his work the subject of academic criticism as well as popular interrogation.
Were it not for his unyielding integrity, one might have said that Famine was written almost impishly. It ran against the semiofficial Irish narrative of deliberate starvation of a captive people by a brutish imperial power.
The play denies none of the historical facts as it gives us a single family at the centre of the horror. But they are at the centre of a vortex of bureaucratic incompetence rather than an attempt at near-genocide. And (the heretic again) equally complicit and possibly more blameworthy are the snivelling Irish of the gombeen class, exploiting their fellow countrymen to line their own pockets.
Conversations on a Homecoming — arguably Murphy’s most popular play, with its theme of blighted hopes in an encroaching darkness of the soul — originally had a companion piece: the overall title was The White House, again staged at the Abbey, with the second piece portraying the disillusioned characters when they were still full of exuberant joy, encouraged by the local publican who bore a passing resemblance to John F Kennedy, and in whom the young people saw an obvious heroic leader. But leaders are fallible, as Murphy devastatingly showed.
Tom Murphy had many successes, some of them more muted than others as he continued his surgeon’s work on the Irish psyche. But it was to his roots that he returned for his final play. Brigit, a commission for Druid with whom he had a long and fruitful association, is a prequel to Bailegangaire, and its central character mirrored the experience endured by Murphy’s own father: denied work in a sanctimonious community due to his anticlericalism, he finds his own salvation in the pride of craft: the carving of a statue of St Brigid, only to have it destroyed verbally by the callousness of the local nuns.
We could not wish Tom Murphy back: he had been ill for several years, looked after devotedly by his wife Jane Brennan.
With her own soaring acting talent, theirs was a match made in theatrical heaven, and the world to which Tom gave so much enrichment joins her in mourning the loss of a colossus.