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If You're Irish: 'John Bull's Other Island'
by George Bernard Shaw
Reviewed by Danny Morrison
“Do you remember where I put my revolver?” Englishman Tom Broadbent asks his valet Hodson.
“Revolver, sir! Yes sir. Mr Doyle uses it as a paper-weight, sir, when he’s drawing.”
Irishman Larry Doyle is Broadbent’s partner in their London firm of civil engineers.
“Well, I want it packed. There’s a package of cartridges somewhere, I think. Find it and pack it as well.”
Hodson asks, “Is it a dangerous part youre going to, sir? Should I be expected to carry a revolver, sir?”
“Perhaps it might be as well. I’m going to Ireland.”
And so opens the first scene of George Bernard Shaw’s, ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, written exactly one hundred years ago in 1904 and currently being performed in the Lyric Theatre in a superb production on this its centenary.
Within a minute, however, Broadbent, for all his good instinct, comes across as a buffoon when he interviews the shabbily-dressed Haffigan, whom he is looking to accompany him and introduce him to the natives.
Before long Haffigan has drank half of Tom Broadbent’s whisky and tapped him before agreeing to meet him later in a rendezvous he has no intention of keeping. Larry Doyle, 18 years in England and much more the realist, arrives and reads the scene instantly. He guesses at how Haffigan beguiled Broadbent with his greeting of ‘top of the morning’.
“Did he call you the broth of a boy?... And wished you more power to your elbow?... And that your shadow might never be less?”
Broadbent concedes that that is exactly what happened but his naivety is then exposed when Doyle tells him that Haffigan is not an Irishman at all but an impostor.
“Not an Irishman!” exclaims Broadbent.
“Born in Glasgow. Never was in Ireland in his life… No Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland, or ever did, or ever will. But when a thoroughly worthless Irishman comes to England, and finds the whole place full of romantic duffers like you, who will let him loaf and drink and sponge and brag as long as he flatters your sense of moral superiority by playing the fool and degrading himself and his country, he soon learns the antics that take you in…”
Broadbent then persuades the reluctant Doyle to come with him to Roscullen in Ireland, Doyle’s own town, where he left behind his girlfriend, Nora Reilly, who patiently awaits his return. Broadbent is intending to foreclose a mortgage and take over the property of the former tenant “on behalf of the syndicate”, which explains him taking a gun, though he will meet no resistance but, in fact, receive a rapturous welcome.
And so we have the setting for the comic interaction between the putative naïve Englishman and the natives of Roscullen, some of whom have recently benefited from the Land Acts only to become petty little landlords, more materialist than before. They are looking for somebody articulate to represent them in parliament, and when Doyle refuses their offer they happily look to the so-called liberal Broadbent whom they think is a fool and can manipulate.
In the preface to his play, ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, Bernard Shaw writes: “A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”
Shaw, the Home Ruler, left Dublin when he was twenty and settled in London where he was admired and became a successful writer. He could hardly bite the hand that fed him, so to speak, but nevertheless, always remained critical of British policy in Ireland though in his play ‘John Bull’ he suggests that both the English and the Irish, for their own advantage, ham up the stereotypes that each has of the other and which are mocked in this work.
Though there are some parts that jar, and it could do with some abridging, it is still a magnificently funny play. Whilst it provides no proscription for resolving the ancient enmity between both nations it does throw a spotlight on how people farcically act out their assumed identities.
Congratulations thus to the Lyric Theatre for staging it in Belfast in its centennial year. Last Monday night’s performance had the audience alternatively laughing and thinking, because the moral of the story is never signposted and there are many twists and turns and surprises.
Each of the ten actors shone in various scenes but undoubtedly Alan Cox as Broadbent carried off his role with aplomb, his transformation from stupid Englishman into a charming, cunning, calculating individual wholly credible. Local actor Vincent Higgins was suitably dour and unsmiling as Doyle though from where I sat it was inexplicable why England - or the world! - could keep Doyle away from the charms and beauty of Marian Connolly (Nora).
Lalor Roddy, as Peter Keegan, a defrocked priest and self-proclaimed lunatic, was brilliant in his role as somewhat of a mystic, challenging Broadbent and foretelling the destruction that would ultimately befall the village in John Bull’s Ireland.
A great night’s entertainment the play runs until 16 October. Box Office bookings: 90381081
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison