Peacock Theatre, Dublin Mannix Flynn read out a personal statement on Thursday night at the end of his performance J ames X, his 2003 play, which has been remounted to conclude the Darkest Corner series at The Abbey Theatre. This is "not about healing," he said, "which is a private matter. It is about justice." This terse affirmation was perhaps more important than any other word spoken during the previous 80-minute performance, in which Flynn told us the particulars of James X's story.
“Walkin’ and talkin’ at two. Runnin’ amok at fuckin’ three,” James X is criminalised, institutionalised, and eventually left paralysed by physical and sexual abuse and his own memories. Waiting to give evidence to the Ryan inquiry in an empty hallway, he is made victim again, by the very same system that he has been up against all his life.
As director of his own material, Flynn forcibly strips away all of the theatricality that attended the confessional in its original 2003 form. Dressed in a smart grey suit, he is visible in the foyer before the show, meeting and greeting the audience; he enters the theatre through the same door as we do; he gives the fire announcement from the steps of the auditorium; while the house lights remain on full for the duration of the show.
As sole actor, Flynn also appears reticent to give himself over to the performance. He plays low to the ground, bent over into himself; a diminished, uncomfortable and awkward presence. He races through James X’s childhood at breakneck speed, as if to remind us that it was no childhood really at all, but also, more vitally, so that he might give way to the issue of greater importance that the Darkest Corner series has raised.
If this performance of
James X
is not as powerful as it was in 2003 or in its subsequent performances, it is because the Ryan report, invoked directly in Flynn’s closing address, has stripped the individual power from such personal histories and left us instead with a general truth: a statistic in which the individual voice, the individual tragedy, becomes almost palatable, the details paling in comparison with the scale of the abuse. James X’s history, which once proved a watershed in Irish theatre, is not remarkable anymore. He is just one of the thousands of “children who didn’t matter”.
That is why Flynn’s personal statement rings out beyond the poetry of his play: stories must now give way to facts; abuse exposed does not equal justice. The only people punished, criminalised, despite the vindications of the Ryan report, remain the thousands of James Xs who, unlike Flynn, never got a chance to have their testimony heard.
Ends tonight
