It has felt easy, in these uneasy days, to stand in solidarity with freedom of expression, particularly the right to criticise religion, and still feel apart from it all. How important, after all, is religion to Ireland after generations of lockstep Catholicism, a scarred history of sectarian conflict, litanies of church abuse and hateful ideologies from the pulpit? Religion is the nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
That could explain the apparent disconnect for the Government to insist, as Minister for Arts Heather Humphreys did last weekend, "We must defend the right to artistic freedom and freedom of expression," without recognising the contradiction of a constitutional prohibition against blasphemy. Aren't we a post-Catholic nation now, multidenominational and vastly nonpractising? And what was the most played song last year in this new, secular Ireland? Hozier's defiantly sexual and somehow still tortured Take Me to Church. His sacrilegious lover "giggles at a funeral", together they are force-fed the mantra of original sin – "We were born sick" – and, as an apostate beyond salvation, sex is "the only heaven I'll be sent to". Even as the lovers reject the shibboleths of Christianity, it's the only language they know, so they make a game of the shame, a religion out of each other, and that unresolved tension gives the song its power. I'm pretty sure you could call it blasphemous. But is anyone ready to sue Hozier?
Religion seems inescapable in Irish art. Today, on the next page, The Irish Times announces the nominations for the paper's Irish Theatre Awards, bringing a useful focus to onstage concerns of the past 12 months. In the award for Best New Play there are three new works that seem, to my mind, obsessed with religious ideas, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely.
Take Petals, a verse monologue by Gillian Greer that follows a teenage schoolgirl through a sexualised vision of present-day Dublin yet seems indebted to a more puritanical, nun-infested vision of Ireland. Greer writes graphically about sex, yet every description reels with revulsion. "I thought his cock tasted of stale, old smokes," it begins, then describing "the stench of pulsing, rotted meat". A pivotal scene, in a tellingly Edenic setting, has a tyrannical nun use a rose as a religious-education-textbook metaphor. "Your flower is purity. A soul that shines before the Lord." It torments the character, the petals of her soul discarded with each sin, and finally, in a demonically evoked nightclub, the protagonist is raped. She blames herself, and the play is in no hurry to contradict her: "But how can I complain? I can't ignore. Wasn't my soul discarded long before?"
This may be a deliberate provocation, but in performance it more closely resembled a moralising Victorian narrative of the fallen woman. The play is being lauded not for its politics, you suspect, but for its artistry; Greer’s verse monologues may resemble the work of Mark O’Rowe, but they have their own freedom of expression.
O'Rowe's play Our Few and Evil Days, also nominated, was one of two plays from 2014 to take its title directly from the Bible. (The other was Brian Martin's Be Infants in Evil.) If O'Rowe's drama seemed almost neurotic in its construction of a family's naturalistic dialogues, it also sought to undermine that reality. Haunted by a tragedy and a secret, the couple at its centre are gradually revealed to be confined to a ceaseless torment. It might be a particularly Irish damnation, familiar from Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, but O'Rowe's play is reconceiving something intrinsically religious: guilt, punishment and eternity – in short, hell on earth.
Michael West's Conservatory, also nominated, portrayed its own kind of damnation, an elderly Protestant couple sealed in a room, endlessly bickering in a world without future: the Church of Ireland dwindling to nothing, their son dead, and a waft of Beckettian allusions that suggested guaranteed oblivion.
The theatre is the closest thing I have to a church. It provides the celebrants, congregation, parables, and depictions of sin and righteousness, desire and love, punishment and forgiveness. But it’s a usefully sceptical religion. It asks not for unwavering belief but for the suspension of disbelief. These days that seems appropriate.
Beckett, high priest of the godless, may have put it best. “I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others.” Perhaps this is why, in a nation where religion has apparently lost its importance, we still seem so paradoxically devout. We use the words they taught us, over and over again, hoping to make them mean something new.
