WAR STORY LIFTED BY EMPATHY AND PASSION
Historical drama does for the US-Mexican conflict what John Wayne did for the Alamo
‘San Patricios were fighting a proxy war, with Protestant forces represented by the US Army’
the loss of Texas, turned down Polk’s offer of a deal to buy land to the north and west.
Polk wasn’t fazed. He picked a dispute over territory on the USMexican border and sent in troops, provoking a new war. The Mexicans weren’t up to the job militarily and, after two years of fighting, Mexico ceded 800,000sq.km of land to the US, from the Rio Grande to the Pacific.
All of which is the background to Larry O’Loughlin’s story of that war, adapted for the stage by Stephen Jones and performed by him as a hugely entertaining one-man play.
It covers the war in the fictional person of Thomas O’Byrne, a 12-year-old Irish post-Famine emigrant who suffers the brutality and discrimination heaped on Irish Catholics in Boston at the time.
100 More Like These Viking Theatre, Clontarf Until July 15
Historic memory is a funny old bird. Take the battles over the Alamo. The mission was lost and then recaptured by Texas within a month in 1836, and has achieved legendary status through songs and films about the likes of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.
On the other hand, the far more important US-Mexican war, that extended for two years, from 1846 to 1848, rarely gets a mention nowadays.
It has never had the glamorous appeal of the Alamo, which had the ultimate accolade of John Wayne in all his glory playing Davy Crockett in the 1960 film.
The war grew out of the drive by American president James Polk to expand the US westward in pursuit of America’s vision of its ‘Manifest Destiny,’ which meant intruding into huge chunks of Mexican territory.
But the Mexicans, still sore over
He joins the US army, deserts, and ends up on the Mexican side in the 1846-48 war because he feels more at home with them.
It’s very much a personal story, laced with humorous touches about overcoming difficulties in the context of a war where there was no mercy from either side.
The beginning and end sections of the play concentrate in particular on the personal aspects.
Thomas is in the San Patricio Battalion, made up of hundreds of Irish who deserted from the US army and were led by John Riley from Clifden.
As told in the play, the San Patricios are fighting Irish grievances from home in Ireland in a proxy war of Catholics against the Protestant forces represented by the US army.
American expansionism almost becomes a sideshow.
The production gets its name from the reported statement by the Mexican leader Santa Anna, that, with ‘100 more like these men of Riley’s, I could have won this war’. That’s unlikely, given Santa Anna’s general incompetence and Robert E Lee’s tactical skills on the other side.
Little is known about John Riley but O’Loughlin has invented a fullblooded, Irish rebel-style speech for him.
It’s a testament to Jones’s exceptional performance, his versatility and stamina in bringing alive a whole world of accents, characters and incidents, that the 90-minute play never palls and never becomes just a litany of battles but has great human empathy and passion.