|
A savage tale of colonialism
 Martin
doyle talks to Leo Butler about his controversial new play I’ll
Be The Devil which shows the brutality of the Penal Laws brought into
force in 18th century Ireland.
A pig in the uniform of an 18th century British soldier is the provocative
image being used to promote Leo Butler’s new play I’ll Be
The Devil — a viciously poetic, visceral and violent study of the
brutalising effects of war and occupation on coloniser and colonised alike.
The play is set in Limerick in 1762 when the Penal Laws that persecuted
Catholics were being enforced by British Redcoats who were themselves
Irish Catholic turncoats.
Knowing that her soldier lover is leaving for England a local woman unleashes
a sequence of events that will result in tragedy for both their children.
Butler shows us what happens when a violent foreign power is in intimate
and callous contact with the primitive heart of an ancient society.
The aforementioned pig is accompanied by a quotation from a British officer
in the play whose unintended irony drips down the centuries: “Civilisation
is a process, Lieutenant. It can take years. Generations even. I doubt
our own grandchildren will live to see the fulfilment of our project.”
Though his play is set in the run-up to Easter and opens with a key character
standing outstretched in a stocks as if on a crucifix, Butler has no truck
with religion, redemption, resurrection or happy endings.
He does not offer false hope but a vision of human nature which, however
bleak, he believes to be the truth and therefore more useful.
Veteran RSC actor Gerard Murphy, originally from Newry in Co. Down, plays
Sergeant Browne — a brutish bully.
He sees the play as a contemporary parable.
He said: “I think what it is really about is what we know about
Iraq and maybe Afghanistan but Leo never refers to them though —
he uses words like surge and insurgents.
“The reason I was attracted to the play is that it is a poetic work
without being poetry, a historical piece without being slavish to history.
“What it is really about is the decimation of a family by their
own kind.”
Poetic is not the first word that springs to mind on reading a script
figuratively drenched in the blood of maimed animals and brutalised human
beings — a story stark in its portrayal of casual savagery and blasphemy
which carries the warning: “Contains strong language and scenes
of an adult nature.”
Murphy admitted: “It’s the most brutal play I’ve ever
done.
“First of all I thought, is this pornographic?
“But that’s what I mean by poetic — the brutality breaks
through into something else.
“There is a sort of Eucharistic feel about it.
“There is a glimmer of redemption.”
I asked Butler — who has some vague Irish roots on his father’s
side — why he set the play in Ireland if his real interest is in
events in Iraq.
He said: “It’s not really about Iraq or Afghanistan or Rwanda
or Zimbabwe.
“I think you could read that into it but it is about Ireland at
the time of the Penal Laws.
“Primarily my concern was finding the truth of that time in history.
“I knew the colonial record was bad but the specifics of the Penal
Laws, how extreme they were, really fed my imagination.”
Strikingly for a play about colonialism, there is only one English character.
All the other oppressors are Irish collaborators.
Even the victims, it is made clear, would be only too happy to collaborate
for a quiet life.
Butler said: “They’re eating each other which is the tragedy
of it because they all come from the same place.”
This is reminiscent of Joyce’s description of Ireland as a sow eating
her own farrow.
“That came up in rehearsals,” says Butler. “It’s
a very powerful quote.”
While his play’s message may be relentlessly bleak Butler hopes
it has a vigour and excitement — which it certainly does —
not to mention black comedy in some of the dialogue.
Butler agrees there is still resistance in England to facing up to its
colonial past, to taking responsibility for past crimes.
He said: “Absolutely, as is still the case with India, Pakistan
and a lot of African nations.
“The risk, as with the abolition of slavery, is that it becomes
remembered in broad brushstrokes and the actual savagery is forgotten.
“If you are going to learn from history you have to remember the
details otherwise you evade the truth.”
When you dwell as he does on the depredations of British colonial rule
in Ireland does that make it problematic to repudiate the right to resist
it violently in the present, if you see Britain’s presence in the
North as a colonial hangover?
“It’s an incredibly tough question for me to answer,”
Butler says.
Because he can see the headlines in the Evening Standard?
“Yeah,” he laughs. “It’s complex, difficult
and challenging but rather that than broad brushstrokes.”
I’ll Be The Devil runs from February 21 to March 8 at the Tricycle
Theatre, London, box-office: 020 7328 1000.
See www.tricycle.co.uk for further
details. |
