The propaganda battle of WWII
A magnificent performance lights up this tale of two war-time propagandists
Thomas Kilroy’s 1986 play attempts to look into the minds of two great manipulators of communications, Brendan Bracken, British Minister for Information during World War II, and William Joyce, immortalised as the infamous propagandist Lord Haw-Haw, broadcasting from Germany at the same time. The play sees the two men as opposing characters distorting information, and has obviously been revived with an eye on the barrage of social media, the growth of fake news, antisemitism and the recent revival of aggressive nationalism in Russia, America and Europe.
Bracken and Joyce both totally rejected their Irish backgrounds, and each developed a passion for his vision of Britain, but from totally different political angles.
Bracken, from Templemore, with an abusive republican father, steeped himself in English history, invented a spurious history for himself, worked his way into the life and politics of Winston Churchill and into a vital role in the Cabinet during the war. His opposite number, Joyce, was another Irishman, born in America, brought up in Ireland, who came to England, joined Oswald Mosley’s fascists, fled to Germany before the war and became a hated figure for broadcasting sneering war propaganda aimed at undermining British morale. But, fatally for himself, he had applied for and been given a British passport. The unbalanced first half pays almost no attention to Bracken’s achievements as a major figure in British journalism, visualising him in surreal terms as a man haunted almost to insanity by a determination to eliminate his national and family background from his consciousness, and haunted too by Joyce’s broadcasts.
And there’s a heavy-handed simplistic image of him as a sexually impotent paedophile with a mental preference for boy scouts.
The second half, devoted almost totally to the fiercely anticommunist Joyce, is written in a realistic style, seeing him in a more compassionate light than Bracken, emphasising his political philosophy as a passionate broadcaster, struggling with his marriage and drink, and striving to save England from its leaders and eradicate Jews from Europe by forced emigration.
The meeting between the imprisoned Joyce, and the Canadian newspaper mogul Lord Beaverbrook, produces the most interesting writing in the play as two outsiders reinventing themselves, balancing their lives between reality and politics.
The production provides one of the outstanding performances of this or any other year in Ian Toner’s depiction of both Joyce and Bracken. Charlotte McCurry and Seán Kearns supply all the other roles with great versatility, and Jimmy Fay’s use of projected black-and-white footage is remarkable in its inventiveness. As with all plays based on biography, Double Cross has its weaknesses, but it’s an absorbing piece of historical drama.
‘Brendan Bracken and William Joyce both totally rejected their Irish backgrounds’