Reimagining Ireland’s neutrality in the second World War led playwright Conall Quinn into a complex treatment of the Irish Jewish community and anti-Semitism
“You can’t separate them, Harry; love and politics, the bedroom and the town square, they’re always only a balcony away. Romeo and Juliet! Shakespeare knew it, even then . . . The balcony is not for the lovers to gaze down from, it’s there for the mob to climb when they decide to come for you.”
– from The Death of Harry Leon, by Conall Quinn
THEATRE AND POLITICS are natural, historic allies. In its very essence, the theatre is an act of public address. In ancient Greece, drama was used to inspire collective social will. In the 1930s, the Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project in the United States provided social commentary in the aftermath of economic collapse. In Ireland, theatre is particularly embedded in the political fabric, where the very foundation of the State was imagined into being at the Abbey Theatre.
Yet in the final years of the 20th century, theatre in Ireland lost its political edge, as writers began to turn inwards for inspiration. Their expression of social anxiety began to take shape in the monologue form – perhaps the ultimate artistic expression of the country’s dying collective cultural reality – as the imagined nation of Ireland was reshaped by the subjective anxieties of the individual.
In light of the conservative storytelling form of Celtic Tiger drama, The Death of Harry Leon, by Conall Quinn, is a refreshing surprise. It is an imaginary intervention in the fabric of Irish history, providing a fascinating glimpse of an alternative history for 20th-century Ireland which has an uncanny resonance for the greater global issues of today.
Originally commissioned by the Abbey Theatre in 2004, it today comes to the stage under the aegis of Ouroboros Theatre Company at Smock Alley, in commemoration of World Holocaust Day. Set in Dublin’s Jewish enclave of Portobello between 1939 and 1941, it examines the fate of a group of Jewish intellectuals who find themselves besieged when the Irish government decides to forsake neutrality and throw their lot in with the Germans.
“My first instinct was not necessarily political,” Quinn explains, despite a background that includes a history and politics degree and a research job with the political think tank at the Institute of European Affairs. “What I really wanted to do was write about a Jewish writer and what his responsibilities might be during the second World War. I thought immediately that it would be impossible to set the story in Ireland because we were neutral during the war.
“I thought maybe I would set the play in Poland or France, but then I began to wonder what might have happened here if we had not been neutral, if we had a right-wing government at the time. I didn’t really think it was that big a leap: we got away with neutrality by accident more than by design. So all I had to do was figure out how that happened. For example, what if the Germans had decided to overthrow the government with the help of the IRA or other anti-British forces in Ireland?”
The Death of Harry Leon makes an interesting companion piece to Arthur Riordan’s absurd historical musical, Improbable Frequency, in 2005, which suggested that Irish neutrality was only possible because of an adjustment of the laws of probability: a suspension of the logic of cause and effect. However, despite its fictions, Quinn’s play is firmly realist; in fact, Quinn suggests that his fictional version of the events is only a minor stretch of the truth, a potential possibility more than an improbability.
“The reality is that Ireland has always held that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’,” he says, “and in the 20th century that meant Germany. You actually had quite a few German agents in Ireland during the war, looking to see if a backdoor invasion of England might be possible. And if the Germans had gone into Northern Ireland, I don’t think they would have stopped at the Border just because Ireland was neutral.
“And then England came relatively close to invading over the issue of the ports, so we faced a possibility that we could be invaded either by the Allies or the Nazis. But neutrality was really our way of asserting our independence more than anything else. Yet it had a moral dimension to it as well as a political dimension, in the sense that I think we regarded the squabbles and wars of other countries as in some way beneath us or repugnant. The other day one of the actors said to me: ‘You know what this play is about: it is there but for the grace of God go we.’ ”
Of course, The Death of Harry Leon is not just about how easy it would have been for the Irish to adopt anti-Semitic policies (de Valera himself denied asylum to hundreds of Jewish refugees during the war). What it is really about is human relationships in extreme circumstances, and Quinn’s play provides a poignant study of a marriage dissolving under such pressures, brought to an inevitably chilling conclusion by a failure of individual as well as collective responsibility.
THIS IS QUINN’S third play. His first, Miss Canary Islands, was produced by Focus Theatre in 2002; his second, The Machine Gunning of Anwar Sadat, was produced at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2006. Both plays had an historical-political element, borrowing settings from the Spanish Civil War and 1916 Dublin. However, like The Death of Harry Leon, they wear their historical origins lightly, using the past as a way into the present. In fact, it is the resonance of current international events that makes The Death of Harry Leon most affecting. While there is no direct reference to the current Israel-Gaza crisis within the play, and nor did Quinn intend to make a statement, the resonance is there, as he acknowledges.
“Even though Ireland was not involved, we essentially lost our Jewish community after the war,” he says. “When I was researching the play, I would walk around Portobello, and it was interesting to go and look at where the old synagogues used to be in Dublin and to see that they are now mosques. And I suppose there are things in the play that could be construed as having contemporary resonance, especially to something like Israel/Gaza.
“Over the last year, I have actually taken out certain things that might have pushed that further, because it’s a risky thing to make bald political statements in your work – but I mean risky artistically rather than politically. It becomes didactic, and you just don’t want the play to be polemic, whether you agree or disagree with the polemic or not.
“But at the same time, if you write a play about the Jewish community and a right-wing Irish government, well, with what’s going on in Gaza at the moment it’s going to be impossible to escape some sort of poignancy between the situations.”
If The Death of Harry Leon raises bold questions about Irish political history and artistic responsibility, it also challenges contemporary production models for Irish theatre, with its uncompromising use of a large cast and its demand for multi-locational sets. It is refreshing to see new writing reach towards the epic scale, but Quinn acknowledges that the breadth of his vision has been a problem.
“In many ways, I have been lucky,” he admits, “in that everything I’ve written since Miss Canary Islands has been written for commission, and one of the first things I ask is: ‘Can I have as many characters as I like?’ The thing is, though, if your script is rejected, you’re left with a play with 15 characters, like The Death of Harry Leon was, and you are selling it around to organisations who have about 1 per cent of the Abbey’s budget, and they’re never going to do it even if they think that it’s the best play in the world.
“So if you are writing a play that’s not commissioned, of course your first question is: ‘Should this be a monologue?’ Because if you have more than three characters, nobody’s going to be able to put it on. It is very limiting, but you know from the beginning when you are working in theatre that you are working within a serious amount of constraints.”
However, as the philosophical Stein puts it in The Death of Harry Leon as the Jewish community find themselves challenged again: “The beauty is in the struggle.”
The Death of Harry Leon, by Conall Quinn, opens in Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, today, World Holocaust Memorial Day, and runs until Feb 14
