Brian Friel’s play Making History centres on Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone and leader of Irish resistance to the English crown in the tumultuous era of Elizabethan colonisation and the plantation of Ulster. It may be the most controversial of relatively recent Irish plays. Add a question mark to the title of the drama and it suggests that history is malleable, and can be made, or made up. That is the essence of the playwright’s contention.
Friel based his script on Seán O’Faoláin’s biography of O’Neill, who was born around 1550 and died in 1616. That book, The Great O’Neill, has been the subject of both scholarly and popular scrutiny since its publication, in 1942. This is even more true of the play. Both ask what is historical truth and what is fiction, whether political or romantic, devised to satisfy an appetite for sensation and heroism.
“The play examines history itself,” says Des Kennedy, the artistic head of the Everyman theatre, in Cork, who is directing Making History as the first production in its Everyman Made programme, in part to mark the 10th anniversary of Friel’s death.
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“It’s been forgotten that Brian Friel was a radical. He was writing in the late 1980s, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in which I grew up. His earlier play Translations was about the eradication of the Gaelic peasantry. Making History is about the eradication of the Gaelic aristocracy. It’s unpacking a lot about Hugh O’Neill, and it’s also interrogating the fine line where the facts are blurred by subjective interpretation.”
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The plot is simple in attempting to portray the life of O’Neill, the central character in the Irish epic that concluded with the Flight of the Earls, in 1607, the symbolic end of Celtic Ireland. The issues are complex, however, and create the play’s enduring fascination. In his review of the Ouroboros production in 2005, Fintan O’Toole observed that the gap between historical fact and tribal mythology is precisely the space mapped by Friel’s drama – a play that may not emerge as a masterpiece but is “undoubtedly the work of a master”.
O’Neill was a political contortionist, both diplomat and warrior, according to the historian Hiram Morgan, of University College Cork, who describes him as trying “to pull the recalcitrant Irish nation towards modernity”. Morgan believes it was unfortunate, and somewhat ironic, that Friel used such a faulty source as O’Faoláin’s book as the basis for his play, which was first produced at the Guildhall in Derry in 1988, by Field Day, with O’Neill played by Stephen Rea, Friel’s fellow founder of the theatre company.
In Making History all of O’Faoláin’s ideas are “repeated and indeed exaggerated”, Morgan says; in his preface to the book O’Faoláin himself suggested that some talented dramatist might write an informative and entertaining play on the theme of the living man helplessly watching his translation to myth despite all the facts that had reduced him “to poverty, exile and defeat”.
There had been successes, too: granted an earldom (subsequently dissolved) by Queen Elizabeth I, O’Neill had a campaigning career that seems to have been defined by his abilities in negotiation, assisted by a captivating charisma, as well as in warfare, perhaps most notably at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, in which O’Neill’s forces routed an English army on its way to relieve the besieged Blackwater Fort in Co Armagh. Assisted by a captivating charisma, he manoeuvred within two worlds, a ruthless chieftain among the Irish tribes, a silken dissembler abroad, his marriage to the unfortunate Mabel Bagenal sharpening antipathies on both sides.
Morgan describes O’Neill as a study in power: “He spent his life trying to win it, trying to retain it and trying to regain it.” But he did not try to write about it. That task he left to his friend Peter Lombard, a Catholic archbishop – who admitted even then that his account might be a lie but was “a necessary lie”.
O’Neill, ageing and in exile in Rome, witnesses the narrative of his career re-created as heroic legend. According to O’Faoláin’s biography, every word that he reads is untrue – “a glorious story that was in every thread a heartbreak”. The living O’Neill cannot contradict the eulogy being constructed by Lombard. The playwright challenges the audience to do that.
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A question repeated by Morgan, and one that recurs through examinations of O’Neill’s loyalties, marriages and strategies, is why, having fought a long and carefully controlled guerrilla war against the English, he makes “the fateful decision to commit himself to a pitched battle at Kinsale”, where troops dispatched by the king of Spain waited to assist the Irish.
There are many versions of the conflict in the fields near the Cork fishing town where the forces of O’Neill, his impetuous confederate Red Hugh O’Donnell and their Spanish allies were routed. In his book Modern Ireland 1600-1972, Roy Foster writes that here, for once, the archaic language of the poet Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh found its appropriate pitch: “Though there fell at that defeat in Kinsale so few of the Irish that they would not miss them after a while, and indeed did not miss them even then, yet there was not lost in any defeat in recent times in Ireland so much as was lost there ... noble impetuous chiefs, lords of territories and tribes, chieftains of districts and cantreds, for it is full certain that there will never be in Erin at any time together people better or more famous than the nobles who were there and who died afterwards in other countries one after another ... There were lost besides nobility and honour, generosity and great deeds, hospitality and kindliness, valour and steadfastness, the authority and sovereignty of the Gaels of Ireland to the end of time.”
“The argument may be that history is just a fact, but I believe it’s a fact in an ever-changing process,” Kennedy says. “Friel was questioning the nature of heroes and how they might be deified rather than understood as real people, and this play examines that conundrum through a personality who brought Ireland as close as it ever came to decolonisation.”
The Everyman production brings Denis Conway back to the play in the role he took in 2005, then as O’Neill young and old, now as the reluctant hero at the end of his time. (The younger earl is played by Aaron McCusker.) “I love the idea of Denis returning to the play after 20 years,” Kennedy says. “He toured in that Ouroboros production around the world.”
The Everyman Made programme shows the ambition in Kennedy’s first season. Coming productions include the family thriller The Beacon, by Nancy Harris, and another by Caryl Churchill, with Daniel Kramer joining Cork Midsummer Festival in late-night political and subversive cabaret. Visiting shows range from Paddy: The Life & Times of Paddy Armstrong, with Don Wycherly, to the stage adaptation of Claudia Carroll’s The Secrets of Primrose Square and to Laura Whitmore in The Girl on the Train. Added to all that is NI Opera’s La Voix Humaine, by Poulenc, based on the play by Jean Cocteau.
While his focus on local connections is deliberate, Kennedy sees that keeping touring relationships alive is imperative. “I’m excited by the stories we tell in Cork, and the way that we tell them, but our intention is that our work should have an outward reach,” he says.
“The challenge to the audience here is not so much the subject but the whole experience. We’re growing used to short performances or to modern television drama delivered in episodes which leave little time for debate on complex and difficult issues. With these coming productions I think people will enjoy getting the whole cake at once rather than slice by slice.”
Making History opens at the Everyman, Cork, on Tuesday, April 15th, and runs until Saturday, April 26th, with previews from Friday, April 11th
