War stories

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme
Hampstead

Carrie’s War
Apollo

I want to be nice about this play but I simply can’t. Look at the idiotic title for starters. Frank McGuinness sets his drama in an Ulster barracks where a gang of recruits are preparing to fight the Hun in France. The characters, though competently drawn, are a weeny bit predictable. There’s the Belfast bullyboy, the young priest besieged by doubt, the shy kid whose mother is a closet Catholic and the Brokeback Mountain couple whose manful back-slapping hugs are a trifle more enthusiastic than strict camaraderie requires. The most fully realised character, Kenneth Pyper, is a mercurial jester who dominates the barracks with his insouciant rhetoric and unpredictable menace. Is he a bigamist, a fraudster, a fallen aristocrat, a bisexual predator? We await developments keenly.

Then the play snarls up. We shift to rural Ulster and get a sequence of lengthy speeches elaborating the characters’ back stories. Dramatic momentum dies. It doesn’t help that McGuinness’s love of the soliloquy isn’t matched by his skill in deploying it. He then takes his carefully sketched characters to the Western Front where he abandons their differing contours and lets them congeal into a mass of braying egos honking ‘Ulster, Ulster, Ulster,’ as they prepare to go over the top and rush the German machine-gun posts.

McGuinness is a lifelong enthusiast of Greek tragedy (uh-oh!) and his desire to create Great Emotion, Great Oratory and Great Art prevents him attending to the basics. All we want is a coherent drama. He doesn’t deliver. The production’s prime asset is Richard Dormer, one of the most versatile and watchable actors of our time, whose skills are extremely well suited to the role of the lovable silver-tongued charlatan, Pyper. What a shame his character has no satisfying narrative path to follow. The play is best understood as a piece of memorabilia from the mid-Eighties when it was written. At the height of the Troubles everyone assumed Ireland’s slow-burn civil war would go on for ever, and to understand the Ulster mindset wasn’t just absorbing but necessary. McGuinness brilliantly evokes the blood lust, the blind hatreds and loyalties, and the psychotic fixation with the native soil that motivates the militant Ulsterman. But these themes have scant relevance these days with the IRA army council happily employed by the Crown and the Protestant gunmen filing their Lugers into fishing reels.

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