CultureShockSeeing the very Irish production of The Tudors is not too far removed from watching a western in which the cowboys are Native Americans, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Down with Irish cultural imperialism! A few months ago, when The Tudors, which has been running on TV3 and started on BBC last night, was starting out on Showtime TV in the US, the Western Mail in Wales reported the complaints of the Welsh cultural historian Peter Stead. He was unhappy that the story of a Welsh dynasty that pushed its way on to the English throne had been made in Ireland, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII. "It's Ireland stealing a march again because of the international clout it has, that we can only aspire to."
You can see what he means. We've had a long experience ourselves of feeling marginalised in the global marketplace, without the power to tell our own stories. If there were a major $35 million, multi-part TV dramatisation of, for example, the life of Hugh O'Neill, with, say, Michael Sheen or Ioan Gruffudd playing the Earl of Tyrone and all the shooting done in Cardiff, we'd be pretty cheesed off too. But for that very reason, there is something almost surreal about watching The Tudors in Ireland.
It is like entering some kind of distorting cultural vortex, where all the power relations are warped or morphed. To the (rather considerable) pleasures of ripping bodices, clashing lances and the Tudor court as a version of Dallas is added the strange sensation of seeing Ireland as if it were the US - an imperial superpower in the world of international commercial culture.
It's nothing of the kind, of course, and The Tudors is essentially an American take on British history, or rather on the bit of English "heritage" that is most easily packaged. (Stead, in that same article, nicely summed up The Tudors as "the Jane Austen of history".)
It is simply an extension of the process in which Americans take British TV programmes - Steptoe and Son, The Office, Da Ali G Show - and remake them. It takes that process to its logical conclusion by cutting out the initial BBC series and going straight to the source.
It configures British history as a placeless, timeless cultural commodity and is, as such, a perfect post-modern package. But because it's made in Ireland, using so many Irish actors - 80 per cent of The Tudors was filmed at Ardmore with the remaining 20 per cent filmed on location in Dublin - it has, for us alone, another layer of intimate strangeness. For here we all are, portraying the dynasty that conquered us. Seeing the man who shot Michael Collins (as Rhys Meyers did in Neil Jordan's movie) play Henry VIII is not a million miles from watching a western in which the cowboys are played by Native Americans.
There's a kind of intermittent double-take, in which a glossy American production slips, for a moment, into a local, homely mode. Familiar faces from the Gate and Abbey, from Fair City and The Podge and Rodge Show, keep cropping up. Maria Doyle Kennedy is Catherine of Aragon. Nick Dunning is Anne Boleyn's scheming father, and Pádraic Delaney is her brother. Catherine Byrne is married to Sir Thomas More. Arthur Riordan turns up at one point as a priest hearing confession. I spotted Mark Lambert and Jonathan White at court.
A lot of the foreigners are Paddies: Jonathan Ryan is the French ambassador, Declan Conlon is the scheming Mendoza, John Kavanagh is the cynical Cardinal Campeggio and Barry McGovern is a hapless French bishop. Ian McElhinney is the pope. Messengers and pages deliver their one line in a distinctly Irish accent. Joe Taylor, fresh from impersonating Tom Gilmartin and Bertie Ahern in all those tribunal reconstructions, is due to turn up as a Tudor physician. It's all a bit like, albeit at a much higher level, the experience of watching an amateur drama group and remembering that Hamlet is the local butcher and Lady Bracknell is the postmistress.
All of this has, of course, damn all to do with art and everything to do with commerce. Ireland has spectacularly few Tudor buildings and, fine as our actors are, good performers aren't thin on the ground in England or Wales. The technical skills available here are undoubtedly excellent - Joan Bergin's costume designs for The Tudors won an Emmy - but far from unique. Irish directors have shot some of the episodes - Brian Kirk and Ciaran Donnelly in the first series, Dearbhla Walsh, Donnelly and Colm McCarthy in the second - but nothing we've seen so far suggests that they have - or would be allowed to have - a specifically Irish take on the material.
The Irishness in The Tudors is instead a pure function of commerce: Morgan O'Sullivan and James Flynn used their skills and Irish tax-breaks to put together an Irish-Canadian co-production for a US channel. As such, The Tudors is a product of Ireland's place in economic, rather than cultural, globalisation. But it is, accidentally, a weirdly accurate image of the oddity of that global commercial culture in which we get not just to appropriate bits of British history but to get paid for it.
It's just a pity that we couldn't use all that skill and ingenuity to play ourselves.
The Tudors is on TV3 on Tuesdays and on BBC2 on Fridays