Theatre
The Patriot Game
By ALAN BRIEN
Dublin, like Edinburgh, is a city that might have been created for a festival. Both are small capitals of small foreign nations and attract like magnets the barbed eccentrics of their country—the folksingers, the drinkers, the revolu- tionaries, the bigots, the gossips, the layabouts. Here everybody knows everybody and lets every- body know it. Petty princes still hold court in Irish taproom and Scottish drawing-room and can sum- mon their liegemen to parade at the flourish of a tucket or a shillelagh. Edinburgh is gathered round its old abandoned loch like idlers round a hole in the rod. The Castle is propped improb- ably upon its mound like a film set of Dotheboys Hall. The hills besiege the city in fossilised tidal waves of earth and stone. Dublin is divided (as always) by the Liffey—that moat of yellow-green fog which dawdles under hump-chested bridges. Both places have a certain seedy splendour which can easily become an addiction. And Dubliners above all possess that nostalgia for the future, that optimism about the past, that lazy, contemp- tuous tolerance for the present of men adrift in a fuel-less space ship. I can hardly imagine better seats for a festival of drama—if only they had some drama.
Dublin at least made some attempt to flavour its spiritless festival with one ball of Irish malt. Dominic Behan's Posterity Be Damned suffered from the same timelessness of the Dubliners, but it was a new play by a new native author set in the city in the present. Mr. Behan's play is an anti-heroic comedy about the IRA. His attitude towards the patriot game—the table-top war in which the tin heroes are melted down for ammu- nition while the senile politicians who manipulate them never even stub a finger—is much the same as his brother Brendan's. But Brendan is like a barrel into which everything is thrown from dead cats to live Prime Ministers. He brews up a hun- dred degree proof Irish stew which would feed a dole queue of critics for a year. Dominic is like a spigot stuck in a stout bottle and shaken--- his play conies out half creamy froth, half black bitter beer. As a nightcap, it is stimulating and sparkling. As nourishment, it is rather sparse and Spartan.
Posterity Be Damned begins in John Conroy's kitchen. He is a farm labourer by day, an IRA Commandant by night, and he is never sure which is the disguise. A serf posing as a clan chief, he is fighting a war for a land in which he has no stake—as his wife says: 'The only acres your father owned were in a window box and he ploughed those with a spoon.' To him and his brigade rebellion is a hobby. Patriotism is play- acting and only the blood is real. In the words of his wife again: 'You pay your sixpence a week and they let you shoot as many as you like.' Then the order arrives via the local bookie (Executive Officer by night) to execute an old school-friend (Police Spy by night). The guns begin to pop and bullet breeds bullet in the corpses of the victims. After the death of the traitor, Conroy is shot down by the police. The traitor turns out to be innocent. Conroy's aide-de-camp is killed in an alleyway behind a pub as he attempts to execute the real traitor. He dies with a bucket of garbage across his body for a wreath as he gasps: 'Mother Ireland, get off me back.' The traitor orders a drink at the bar. It is the end of another well- fought match in the patriot game.
This slaughter of the pawns has been the theme of Irish writers again and again since 1916. Part of Dominic Behan's point is that the green ghost will not be exorcised. The weakness of his plot does not lie in its familiarity. The fact is that the sequence of events is dramatically anti-cli'mactic. Conroy and his wife disappear at the end of the second act just when they are ceasing to be attitudes and turning into human beings. The real traitor flits only momentarily across the stage in the first and the last acts and we never know what clockwork set off his betrayal. What does he think of the game? Does he have no con- science, no dreams, no illusions? The nullity of his character is emphasised by being played by Joe Lynch---a sprightly, effervescent droll who has here no outlet for his springheel talents. Mr. Behan has devised as a background for his triple- cross gunmen a pubful of word-drunk, song- sloshed, music-hall Irishmen. Their raucous laughter, their ludicrously dignified quarrels, their terminological exactitudes were designed to underline the pathetic dilemma of the part-time heroes of a half-forgotten cause. As the main theme grows progressively weaker, the comic sub- plot begins to over-balance the action. The jokes here are often very funny, occasionally both funny and shocking. Dermot Kelly, as Ninety Higgins the bedraggled shrimp of a seaside post- card punter, has a wealth of funny lines and he grabs on to them like a drowning drunk. He is a parody patriot—a bemused admirer of those 1916 martyrs, 'Tom Moore, Brian Boru and the bould Robert Mitchum.' He rallies to brave repartee only in defence of his beverage. 'You'd think God made nothing better than drink,' snaps Mrs. Conroy. 'Sure and if He did.' replies Ninety earnestly, 'He kept it to Himself.' It was also a brilliant invention to make the frightened book- maker on the run from the IRA guns also pur- sued by the flotsam and jetsam of the bar for their winnings. But the play in its present form, though intelligent and high-spirited entertainment, is still dramatically lopsided. Dominic Behan himself, looking like a battered range-rider from a Western film, wanders outside the action as a lonely. ballad-singer. His own song, The Patriot Game,' makes explicit the tragedy and futility of these overgrown schoolboys who think civil war is a Gaelic football match with medals. But too little of his message has soaked through into his drama, and where it has, it has not been trans- muted into action and character which is theatrically digestible.
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