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Christopher Murray, Such a Sense of Home: The Poetic Drama of Sebastian Barry, in Colby Quarterly, 27, 4 (Dec. 1991), pp.242-48: In 1986 Barry edited an anthology of younger Irish poets (including himself) under the significant title The Inherited Boundaries. He called his Introduction The History and Topography of Nowhere. Here he tilted against the prominent profile generally accorded contemporary Northern Irish poets. Barry wishes to mark out a space for a different kind of sensibility with different interests and commitments: They [Northern poets] are a fine part of the story of an island, but they are no part of the story of the Republic. The anthology was being presented as the latest report on ... the poetic of a separate, little-understood place. It was necessary to map such a territory, if you were a native, mapping and talking about the visible and invisible country, because A country without definition is nowhere at all. From Barrys perspective, as a poet born in the 1950s, Ireland was still without definition, simply because it was a new place. / The seven poets whose work he gathered together had this for their theme: and here Barry obviously detects a common voice among his contemporaries: They are talking about a new country that is often hard to make out at all in the thick rain of its history and the sullen, dangerous roll of the land - but they are talking about it with the courage of an inherited, doubted freedom. (p.243.) [Cont.]
Matt Wolf, Its Ancestor Worship, But of a Dramatic Sort [phone interview (from London)], in New York Times, (19 Jan. 1997) [Theatre sect.] quotes Barry: I though if I was going to live a life in this land I was accidentally born on, I must people it; I must have a history - and remarks that all his plays purport to be true, but of course are concoctions. Further quotes: finishing conversations with myself; Fanny Hawkes, a vanished, lost grandmother. Also quotes Barry on the Steward of Christendom: what it could be to be a father, seen as a bad father, an accused father - which may be the only sort of father there is. [ top ] Matt Wolf [London theatre critic for Variety], notice of Sinead Cusack [as Cossack] as Our Lady of Sligo, in The New York Times (23 April 2000), pp.6-7; off-Broadway at Irish Repertory Theatre; reprising a role that won her the Critics Circle Award and Evening Standard; Sinead is 32 (in 2000); played in Bad Behaviour (1993); Waterline (1992); Stealing Beauty (1996), often pop. Jeremy Irons; Max Stafford Clark says: In some ways, Our Lady of Sligo is a more difficult play in that it is about someone to whom Sebastian doesnt so easily extend grace and redemption. It trivialise it say that Our Lady is simply the distaff version of Steward. Cusack says (for reasons not given): I bob about all over the place in my morphine-induced hysteria and euphoria [ ] Its wonder wonders of morphine, really. You can do anything you like on morphine.
Maggie Gee, rev. of Prayers of Sherkin in its London production by Peter Halls company (Old Vic; Times Literary Supplement, 6 June 1997), p.21; Gee finds it lacking in any vestige of historical or psychological realism; there is nothing nasty in the woodshed; indeed, the woodshed is positively bursting with loving kindness. Kevin Myers, Irishmans Diary, in The Irish Times (28 June 1997), on the publication of Complete Plays: [ ] Sebastian Barrys importance as an enquirer, as a social historian and a reifier of lost and once certain worlds lies, among other things, in the honesty of his thought and the power of his imagination in dealing with what for must of us is gone quite beyond the power of our imagination. [ ] Sebastians most recent work, The Steward of Christendom, for which the other day he won the Ireland Fund award, is the most imaginative, the most generous, and by its historical elisions, contractions and reconstruct ions, emotionally - and by extension, politically - the most honest examination of the loyal southern Catholic Ireland which was either consumed by, or forced to hide itself from, the fires of 1916 onwards. That dead world has been brought alive with lazarene genius. Under the sub-heading Stretching the truth, includes this following: It is not that Sebastian is always factually correct. Playwrights needs must stretch truth; the Manchester from which Matt Purdy would have escaped in the 1790s in Prayers of Sherkin would not have been the great chimneyed metropolis Matt remembers in his Irish exile. Manchesters dark satanic mills at that time were driven by water, not steam. But we know what Sebastian means; the error - if such it is - enhances a broader truth: and that is the nature of art. [ top ] Eileen Battersby, book notice of The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, in The Irish Times (3 April 1999): At a time when so much new Irish fiction has adopted a tone of aggressive comedy, Barrys gentle tale about one of lifes innocents doomed to an existence of perpetual wandering stands out as something strange, surreal and even off-beat. As is to be expected from Barry, his artistic vision is shaped by his fascination with history and the idea that an epic does not necessarily have to be about public happenings. With its stylistic and thematic echoes of his previous novel The Engine of Owl-Light (1986), this novel manages to be both dream-like and earthbound. Eneas is battered as much by history unfolding as he is by bad luck and poor timing. He lives in his imagination as much as in a world of brutal confusions. Yet for all its beauty, Barrys passive, airy novel, which flows and eddies like water, somehow fails to engage the emotions.
[ top ] Derek Hand, The Future of Contemporary Irish Fiction [Irish Writing Today Ser./Irish Writers Centre and the James Joyce Centre, Dublin] (during 2001): [ ] In Sebastian Barrys novel, The Whereabouts, we are presented with a Forrest Gump type of character: he appears to be wholly without agency. Events happen all round him but he is unable to intervene in productively in any of them. He possesses no firm belief in anything and wanders almost aimlessly through the world of the novel. Perhaps like the movie character, Barry is attempting to mediate history to us through a character so devoid of any character that that history will be objective.The enemy in the novel are those characters who possess beliefs in this instance, Irish nationalists. Actually this not true, for anyone who decides to rise up against the British Empire is deemed wrong. Of the rebellion in 1950s Nigeria it is said, Whats afoot is freedom, that dreaded thing; and then little later: Bloody politics! Deathly, killing, seducing politics. Feckin ould freedom anyway. The problem is that the vision set against such dreaded freedom and politics is little more than, basically, passive acceptance of the world a usually British world that one finds oneself in. Something similar is celebrated in his play, The Steward of Christendom, where the main character declares his love for Queen Victoria because she was the head of an Empire that was on and brought order to the world.This book has been hailed as a masterpiece. The reason why is simple. It attacks Irish nationalism and supposedly the all-pervasive influence of Irish nationalist history. In a time when to write a novel or indeed anything celebrating that aspect of Irish history would be different, this book simply reconfirms what we already know the Irish past is a nightmare. Revisionist historians and literary critics in their rush to celebrate such a work as this, fail to recognise the cost as displayed in the novel itself of such a negative view of Irish history. McNulty is an enervated character who can believe in nothing, expect the world as it is. Indeed, what is being implied is that history should not have happened. In other words, for all its supposed iconoclasm, this novel actually suggests a return to colonial pre-independent Ireland would be a good move. Eneas McNulty, then, is no hero to be emulated in the present; nor does any of his actions (or to be more correct, inaction) gesture toward any type of future. Our heroes now must be toothless characters, afraid to act. Barry also engages in a sleight of hand in regard to the manner in which he presents death and murder in the novel. McNulty is involved on both the World Wars, but true to form he does not actually witness any action. It is a way for Barry to side-step the very real hard questions surrounding any act of killing. If his character was, himself, to kill an enemy soldier he would soon discover that all acts of killing legitimate or illegitimate are, close up, unpalatable and problematical. Instead, Barry opts for the easy option and the pat response: only the violence and chaos associated with rebellion are displayed and never that violence which is at the heart of the order he so yearns for. (See Irish Writers Centre, Anthology [online] - accessed 25.10.2006.)
[ top ] Emer OKelly, review, A Party Line [believes] impartiality on air: RTE denies having an agenda [ ], reports on contacts made by Joe Duffys Liveline programme to establish her view of Barrys play Hinterland, effectively vetting her to see if she held a view that suited the programme; OKelly writes of Duffy, it was probably his big heart which led him to feel sympathy for the Haughey family when he attended the premiere of Hinterland. But the play does not deal with the Haughey family. It deals with a fictitious Irish political whose personal and political circumstances track those of Charles J. Haughey. (Sunday Independent, 10 Feb. 2002.)
Helen Meany, Political Hinterland, feature-interview with Max Stafford-Clarke, director of Hinterland, in The Irish Times [Weekend] (19 Jan. 2002): My tasks is to make those scenes concrete, to bring the work on a parallel journey to the one he has indicated in the writing. It may be about a contemporary public figure, but this is not the language of TV naturalism. The director has to make it sound like psychologically accurate dialogue and yet not compromise its poetry. (p.4.) Robert Hanks, Sebastian Barry: A real family man, in Independent [UK] (3 May 2002): given the garrulous and somewhat high-flown eloquence of Barrys writing. His new novel, Annie Dunne, set in rural Wicklow in the summer of 1960, is narrated by Annie, an elderly woman of little education, who at one point in the story is amazed by the level of learning reached by a cousin who can use a word such as beauteous in everyday conversation. But Annie herself talks like a cousin of the learned builder: The barn owl, that roosts not in the barns, but in the tallest pine at the margin of the woods, calls out one haunting, memory-afflicted note. / This is the kind of high-flown Irish prose that normally makes me itchy, but Barry stands up for its truthfulness: If you listen carefully for how people are talking to you in Ireland, in certain districts, it is quite elaborate, there is a strangeness to it. And in his novels – especially in what to me is his best book, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) – the prose has a conviction that is hard to resist. / Back to Annie Dunne: Annie is a crookbacked spinster, living out her old age at Kelsha, a farm owned by her cousin Sarah. While her nephew goes off to London to search for employment, he leaves his two children, a boy and a girl, in her care. The book describes her joy at this brief spell of motherhood, and in the beauty of the land around her, but also her terrors – in particular, her fear that Sarah will marry and that Annie, not for the first time, will be left homeless and destitute. / This is fiction, but Annie Dunne was a real person. She was the writers fathers aunt and, in his boyhood, my favourite person on Gods earth. And he really did live with her at Kelsha through one summer. By coincidence, he says, he can see Kelsha from the house where he now lives. (Accessed online, 14.05.2010; for full text, go to RICORSO, Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index or direct.)
[ top ] Declan Kiberd, review of Annie Dunne, in The Irish Times (18 May 2002) [Weekend], p.10: [ ] It is audacious of Sebastian Barry to try to filter an entire novel through the contents of an ageing womans mind [and] Annies interior monologues are richer by far in their language than are her conversations with Sarah; There are beautiful passages of writing about the countryside all through the book; Any reader who has seen The Steward of Christendom [ ] might be forgiven for wishing that the second half of that drama had located itself inside the rich consciousness of Annie Dunne, the better to offer a multi-dimensional perspective on the policeman-fathers life. / Like that play, this book will be praised by many critics whose criteria are less artistic than political that herd of independent minds which believes that it is a holy and wholesome thing to dismantle the narrative of nationalism. These reviewers will see Annies nostalgia for a proper kingship, her contempt for Gaelic revivalism and de Valeras followers, as further proof of Barrys genius. But they arent. The weakest parts of the book, as of the earlier play, are those which submit to this rather sentimental style of Raj revisionism. And the strongest are those in which the rituals of country living are narrated with a sort of delicate, inquiring reverence which is that closest thing that fine writing can ever come to prayer. Notes above that the redemptive strangeness of the childrens presence in the unfamiliar setting is rendered with a noble tact [ ; &c.]
Eamonn Sweeney, Busted flush? [Eamonn Sweeney is disappointed with Sebastian Barrys latest, Annie Dunne], in The Guardian (Saturday 29 June 2002): The Steward of Christendom, Sebastian Barrys magnificent play about the last days of the former Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, was a big success when it premiered at the Royal Court in 1995. No less impressive were his other plays Boss Gradys Boys, Prayers of Sherkin and Our Lady of Sligo. Then there is his last, excellent novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998). / From his own family history, Barry had wrought an exhilarating series of works that were linguistically brilliant, contained haunting characters and fell just on the right side of the line that separates pathos from mawkishness. For breadth and depth of talent, no Irish writer of his generation could rival him, it appeared. / Annie Dunne sees him again mining the seam of his ancestral past. Annie is the daughter of Thomas Dunne, the central character of The Steward of Christendom, but Barry approaches her in a manner which suggests the seam is becoming exhausted. This latest book has the enervated feel of a padded novella. / Waiting for Godot has been described as a play in which nothing happens, twice. Annie Dunne is a novel in which nothing happens many times. The eponymous protagonist is an unmarried woman in her sixties who lives with her similarly solitary cousin Sarah in a Wicklow farmhouse. In the summer of 1959, they are asked to care for their grand-niece and grand-nephew whose parents are going to England to seek work. / Not much else happens. There are copious descriptions of the daily agricultural round, the introduction of a farm labourer, Billy Kerr, who has designs on Sarah, and some hints about possible child sexual abuse. These plotlines are abandoned unresolved, as if Barry couldnt be bothered to do anything more with them. What is most disappointing is that the writers touch with prose seems to have deserted him. I very much hope his next book sees a return to form. (For full text, go to RICORSO, Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index or direct; visit Guardian > Books - online.) [ top ] Mary Russell, No wonder Sebastian Barry was intrigued by his namesake, in The Irish Times (28 June 2004; Weekend), on Whistling Psyche: [ ] The person known variously as Margaret Bulkley, Miranda James Stuart and James Barry continues to fascinate writers. For the 1988 Dublin Theatre Festival the Abbey put on a production of Colours - Jean Barry Esq, Jean Binnies play based on the life of the enigmatic military surgeon whose true identity was revealed only on his deathbed. In 1999 Patricia Dunckers novel James Miranda Barry was published, followed three years later by Rachel Holmess excellent biography, Scanty Particulars. / Barry follows in their footsteps by turning his attention to the life of this courageous and brilliant character, who was born in Cork in or around 1799, went to Edinburgh in his teens to study medicine and rose through the ranks to become colonial medical inspector and, later, staff surgeon to the forces. / In Whistling Psyche the elderly doctor has a fanciful encounter with Florence Nightingale, a device Barry uses to contrast the lives and ambitions of these two people whose paths crossed briefly, and rancorously, in the Crimea in 1855, when Nightingale was 35 and Barry 60, both of them motivated by a compassionate desire to work in medicine and both of whom were constrained either by disguise or by the mores of the times. Nightingale formed passionate but sexually unfulfilled friendships with at least two women; Barry guarded his male persona jealously and on only one known occasion formed a relationship with a man, causing a scandal at [the] time [ ] Michael Billington, review of Whistling Psyche (Almeida Th., London), in The Guardian (Thursday May 13, 2004): Sebastian Barry writes like an angel; but I sometimes feel it is a recording rather than a dramatic angel. And, while his latest piece has an eloquence unmatched on the London stage, its intersecting narratives deny us the familiar satisfactions of a play. [ ] You can see what fascinates the author: the lost fields of womanhood and the personal griefs that accompanied an expansive empire. His writing is also burnished with a shimmering prose-poetry. Dr Barry talks of the strange original that is an Irish person and the toothless Leviathan of poverty that lies across Victorian London. Only occasionally does the language seem richer in sound than sense. When Florence talks of the vats of faeces at Scutari you wonder what she means by the wild broken music of that stench. / But writing is not the same as drama; and what one misses is not just interaction but any real sense of narrative momentum. Only at the end does the play touch the heart; and that is because the characters achieve mutual recognition and because the doctor has a beautiful speech about the mercy of God comparable to Sonyas final exhortation in Uncle Vanya. / he main pleasure, however, comes from watching Kathryn Hunter as Dr Barry: with her husky voice and stance, she persuades you of the characters enforced maleness while lapsing into a nostalgic femininity. Claire Bloom also brings out the bitterness and solitude of Miss Nightingale. But while Robert Delameres production works hard to lend the play theatricality, what you are left with is a rich text that demands to be read as much as enacted. 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Paul Taylor, Psyches longeurs [sic] leave it whistling in the dark, in Independent [UK] (13 May 2004):It was Kathryn Hunters childhood dream to play King Lear, an ambition she achieved at the age of 40. The tiny, sprite-like actress has also given us her Richard III and the Old Shepherd in A Winters Tale. These assumptions of masculine identity were, however, voluntary and temporary and therefore very different from the prolonged male impersonation imposed by cultural constraints on the historical character that Hunter brings to compellingly clear, if excessively mannered, life in Sebastian Barrys new play Whistling Psyche. [...] The raw material is fascinating. Happiest when writing monologues of dense lyricism and rhetorical reminiscence, Sebastian Barry constructs a scenario that plays to his perceived strengths but renders the occasion dramatically inert, a fact that Robert Delameres sensitively shaded production cannot disguise. The author imagines a limbo-like situation where the transvestite doctor finds herself in the ornate waiting room of a spectral railway station (the grand, eerie design is by Simon Higlett). She is so wrapped up in her recriminations that she cant perceive the other presence in the building: an ancient Florence Nightingale, whose ladylike asperity and vulnerability are beautifully captured by Claire Bloom. / You know that these opposed types will eventually discover much in common and end in an awkwardly touching embrace. Before that, though, the charge between the characters remains obstinately feeble because of the incommunicative format. / The situation, despite all its latent black comedy, is desperately low on laughs, though the monologues themselves are almost risibly overwritten. Nightingale refers to the wild, broken music of that stench in the wards at Scutari. Synaesthesia seems a rather fancy figure of speech to use to evoke a retch-making reek. Music, though, is the art form that springs to mind when you sit through this work, which feels more like a recital than a play - and a laboured recital at that. [Available online - accessed ].
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John Kenny, review of A Long Long Way, in The Irish Times, Weekend (26 March 2005): quotes preface to Plays I (1997) in which the writer declares it has never been his intention to immerse himself in the historical archives but, instead, to try and guess the shape of things in the ordinary dark, and remarks: This guesswork has mainly emanated from the private histories of a number of Barrys own ancestors, and his involved sense of urgency is appreciable: What I have to do to tell a story is accept in my mind that these people survive in me somewhere, in a corner of the brain, in the heart, wherever, and somehow or other release their stories. Further quotes: There were people in the past who are not spoken about because the truth about them cannot be admitted to […] A silence grew up around them. So we have a censored past, censored individuals, and a country whose history is erased. Also: [In our society] a game is played with our history and our society, of cops and robbers, goodies and baddies. But there is no such thing. Kenny remarks on [t]he sententiousness of Barrys concept of historical revision and the political transparency of [his] writing, at its worst in the weak dramatic farce that was Hinterland (2002), [which] disables any potential suasive force it might have among those who conceivably need convincing. [ ] (Cont.)
[ top ] Laura Barber, Hear the bleak ballad of Willie Dunne, review of A Long Long Way in The Observer (Sun., 3 April 2005): The authors determination to make something substantial of Willie Dunne is shared by the boys father, an imposing 6ft 6in policeman who has great hopes that his son will follow him into the force. To Willies bitter dismay, however, he never reaches regulation height and only when he goes to fight for King, Country and Empire does he feel hes reached bloody manhood at last. It is not long, of course, before Willie realises just how bloody his manhood will be. The intimate brutality of life in the trenches is evoked in visceral detail, from the stench of raw terror to the sensation of walking on a foul carpet of crushed dead. In this landscape of death, all the normal associations of domestic and natural life are horribly mangled and imbued with a macabre grace: gas folds over the trench like a bedspread and a kingfisher shoots along the river bank like a glistening blue bullet. / The poetic quality of Barrys writing, in which a description of the arrival of winter comes with three dazzling similes, may initially seem to add a layer of inappropriate luxury and beauty to the bleak subject matter, but it serves a deeper purpose here, reflecting Willies faltering understanding of the war. / As the political and moral ground slides beneath his feet and the Irish soldiers are simultaneously despised by nationalists as traitors and denounced by the English as mutineers, Willie clutches at familiar symbols in a desperate attempt to bridge the gap between the world he knows and the one he has stumbled into. / The great achievement of this novel is the restraint with which Barry allows the awful complexity of Willies situation to dawn on him. Early in the story, when he learns something disturbing about his fathers policing, we are told that the knowledge sat up in Willies head like a rat and made a nest for itself there. During the course of the novel, the scampering of confused thought and the constant gnaw of doubt gradually become impossible for Willie to ignore. […; &c.] (See full text, in RICORSO, Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.) [ top ] Fintan OToole, The Former People, review of Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way, and Dermot Bolger, The Family on Paradise Pier, in Guardian (Sat., 7 May 2005): A Long, Long Way is strikingly distinctive, both in the quality of its prose and in its angle of vision. For the Irish soldiers who fought in the British army, the first world war had an added dimension futility. Like American soldiers who fought in Vietnam, the country they were supposed to be fighting for dissolved, as Barry puts it, like sugar in the rain Tens of thousands of Catholic nationalists joined up at the urging of leaders who believed that the war would bring all Irish factions together and thus create the conditions for an amicable transition to Home Rule. But the 1916 Rising caused the ground to shift towards a more militant nationalism. Those who survived the horrors of Flanders returned not as heroes, but as traitors. The home fires had burned out of control, consuming the memory of their sacrifice. / A Long, Long Way recreates the experience of one short life that was wasted in this way, that of his ancestor Willie Dunne, who died aged 21 in October 1918, near the wars end. The name will be familiar to Barrys readers. The Dunne family - Thomas, the Catholic-chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police under British rule, his son Willie and his three daughters - figure in Barrys celebrated play The Steward of Christendom and in his previous novel Annie Dunne. In the play, Willie appears as a silent ghost haunting the memory of his deranged father in 1932. Here, the ghost becomes flesh. [Cont.]
[ top ] Fintan OToole, Bringing a Ghostly Past into Modern Theatre, [in his Culture Shock column], The Irish Times (October 17 2009), Weekend, p.9 [on Tales of Ballycumber]: The play is [...] a superb demonstration of Barrys ability to write for actors. It is not accidental that in spite of having little to work with in the way of conventional psychology or motivation, David Leveauxs production is blessed with a series of memorable performances, especially from Stephen Rea, Aaron Monaghan and Derbhle Crotty. For all the lyricism and artifice of the language, Barry has the knack of shaping it so that it can be fully inhabited by actors. / With such splendours of writing and performance and with highly accomplished direction and design, Tales of Ballycumber ought to feel like a masterpiece. Whats fascinating is that it doesnt. It feels like a piece that anyone with any interest in theatre would want to see. But it also feels somehow incomplete. And since none of the usual suspects can be used to explain this sense of dissatisfaction, it forces you to think quite hard about why that should be. / The easy explanation is that the piece is so static. It has one almost unchanging set, a sequence of long speeches (some monologues, others as near as makes no difference) and very little onstage action. But the same can be said of, for example, Boss Gradys Boys or The Steward of Christendom, and those are wonderful plays. Static in both senses – quiet and electric – is what Barry does. / The difficulty, rather, lies with those two questions: the use of the contemporary and the struggle to find a public myth. And these two issues are, in fact, related. Fixing the play in time is the crux of both. (See full txt, in RICORSO, Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.)
Heinz Kosok, The Easter Rising versus the Battle of the Somme: Irish Plays about the First World War as Documents of the Post-colonial Condition, in Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, eds., Irish Studies in Brazil (Sao Paolo: Associação Editorial Humanitas 2005): Sebastian Barrys The Steward of Christendom occupies a somewhat different position in this context. It is remarkable not only because it complicates the memory perspective by pre-dating it to 1932, but also because it establishes a direct relationship between the World War and the Easter Rising. In the iridescent memories of the former Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the War in France where he lost his only son, is set against that rebellion at Easter time, that they make so much of now (Three Plays, Methuen 1995, p.77). The phrase that they make so much of now could refer to Irish drama as well as to the celebration of the Easter Rising in other spheres of life. The fourteen plays that have been listed in section III of the Appendix [Kosok, p.101] (there may have been even more) clearly reflect the changing attitudes in the Republic to the events of Easter 1916, and, taken together, they are a remarkable document of the important role the Rising has assumed in the collective consciousness of the Irish population. (p.96.) [Cont.]
[ top ] Munira H. Mutran, The Mysterious Dimension of the Human Spirit: Sebastian Barrys Whistling Psyche, in From English Literature to Literatures in English: Vol. V - International Perspectives, ed., Michael Kenneally & Rhona Richmann Kenneally (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag [Winter] 2005), pp.183-93: [...] While a whole lifetime unfolds in the biography, their encounter takes place one night in 1910 (the year Miss Nightingale died) from two to three oclock The Perfect Gentlemans subtitle [1950; by June Rose], eliminates suspense because it informs us that Dr. Barry was a woman, whereas the playwright is able to maintain ambiguity and, therefore, suspense, by referring to the doctor as a figure or person, and by avoiding the pronoun: Takes off the hat and sits, the chair emphasising how small the person is (10). When the doctor finally refers to the pathetic change in his childhood, when the garb of a girl was taken from me, item by item, and my wardrobe of dresses, stockings and privy garments, scant though it was, was discarded forever (32), Miss Nightingale has drifted asleep and cannot hear his confession. Only much later is the suspense broken. [185] / Confessing reinforces the impression that Whistling Psyche is not made up of two biographies on the stage but two narratives following closely the conventions of the autobiographical mode [...] In Whistling Psyche the characters insist on my true story, my story, the spectacle of my private story, from infancy to old age and death. Their monologues are autobiographies transposed from the biographies and hence to the play. Sebastian Barry imagines an encounter between two ghosts, gives them voice and allows them to re-live their past lives through their memories. It is extremely interesting to hear what the author has to say about the process of creation [here quotes letter from Barry]: I had great excitement here in this small room writing both Barry and Nightingale, because they seemed to me to speak so urgently, talking fiercely in my ear. Thats when I trust a play, when it seems to be given, or lent maybe, when you lend an ear to some vanished creature and find they are still capable, livingly and urgently, of speaking, of representing themselves in the strange Victorian courts of forgetfulness and eternities. / Three topics present in Roses biography are emphasised, and acquire additional significance in the play: the doctors isolation, his fondness for pets and his bitterness towards Miss Nightingale. [186 ...] (See longer extracts in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Monographs, via index or direct; for more of Barrys correspondence, see under Quotations, infra.)
Sean OHagan, Irelands past is another country, notice of The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, in The Guardian, (27 April 2008), Barry, a dapper dresser who looks like he might be related to W. B. Yeats, is a great interviewee. He tends to talk as he writes, in sentences full of beautiful imagery. History, he says, has always seemed to me to be an intoxication of facts and it is in the ever-present ruins of history that I work. / It is in these ruins, he explains, that he found Roseanne, who is based somewhat tangentially on one of his great aunts, who similarly disappeared into an institution, having somehow transgressed the rigid codes of Catholic Ireland. In one way, The Secret Scripture is a final breaking of the long familial silence that enshrouded her. I once heard my grandfather say that she was no good, says Barry. Thats what survives and the rumours of her beauty. She was nameless, fateless, unknown. I felt I was almost duty-bound as a novelist to reclaim her and, indeed, remake her. / This excavation of his own family history to underpin his stories is not without its risks. His play, Our Lady of Sligo, based on tales his mother told him of his grandmothers life, utterly incensed his grandfather. He summoned me and asked me how I knew all these things, says Barry, grimacing now at the memory. Then he cursed me and told me he would never speak to me again. Hes gone now but he was as good as his word. [Quotes Barry further:] I am trying to rescue my characters from the cold hand of history, says Barry, and from the silences that surround certain turbulent periods in our own history. And this on Fr. Gaunt: For a long time, all I had was this image of him swishing though the streets of Sligo, bringing morality house to house, laughs Barry, before turning suddenly serious. In many ways, he is an arbiter of the thing that terrifies me most, the absolute certainties of Irish history. (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.) [On Barry as a talker at interview, see Robbie Millen, infra.]
Lucy Gardner, notice of Pride of Parnell Street, in The Guardian (7 Sept. 2007): See, love between a man and a woman, its private. It happens when you never do see it. In rooms, says Joe. But it is not private in Sebastian Barrys two interweaving monologues, which dissect the fractured marriage of Joe and Janet, whose love for each other echoes their love for their home city, Dublin. / Like so much of Barrys work, this is a memory play in which the protagonists pick away at the scabs of the past - in this case a happy marriage scarred by the death of six-year-old Billy, killed by a lorry in Parnell Street, and an act of senseless violence that took place on the night of Irelands quarter-final eviction from the 1990 World Cup as Dublins men turned their disappointment on their wives. When the Irish team lost, they realised they were losers too. / This is a portrait of reasonably happy lives that take a wrong turn - petty thief Joe loses wife and children, his liberty, his dignity and his health, but saves himself through an act of redemption, though even this is founded on someone elses blood and a miraculously timed arrest. Lifes random bricks and bouquets, suggests Barry, can make us or break us. Given that Barry writes in a honeyed prose spiked with a wormwood humour, and the monologues are performed with exquisite restraint by Mary Murray and Karl Sheils, there is hardly a dry eye in the house by the end. But though you would require a heart of stone not to warm to this 100 minutes, there is something lazy about its monologue construction, and if Janet and Joes story was supposed to have wider implications for modern Irish life, I couldnt fathom it. What it is is very nice, but nice is not quite enough. (The Guardian, 7 Sept. 2017, Stage - online; access 30.05.2017.)
[ top ] John Wilson Foster, All the Long Traditions: Loyalty in Barry and Ishiguro, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture, Dublin: IAP 2009) - [prev. printed in C. H. Mahony, ed., Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (2006) [contents as infra]: [...] The Steward of Christendom is on one level a political tragedy, the tragedy of a man marooned in his opinions and allegiances by the changing tide of Irish history. The source of this tragedy is Dunnes resistance to the idea of changing sides, declining to accept fully the new Ireland and preferring to remain in heart with the old dispensation, that being the nobler choice. For he recalls that when Dublin Castle was signed over to Michael Collins (to whose personality he was in fact drawn), most of the men in his division of the DMP would have gladly transferred their loyalty to the Big Fella: And for an instant ... I felt the shadow of that loyalty pass across my heart. But I closed my heart instantly against it (Steward, Methuen 1995, p.50). Loyalty puts honour and principle over feeling and pragmatism. / On another level, The Steward of Christendom is a domestic tragedy - in the way King Lear is a domestic tragedy - about a widower with three daughters and who in the end goes mad with the weight of authority, the weight of historical change and the rewardlessness of loyalty, the weight of the years. (pp.79-80.) [Quotes We did our best ... &c., as given under Quotations, infra.]
Stuart Jeffries, Sebastian Barry reveals the secrets of his Costa prize win, interview, in The Guardian (29 Jan. 2009). [...] Throughout [his career], as Barry wrote in an earlier novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, his concern is with scraps of people, blown off the road of life by historys hungry breezes. One scrap, Roseanne McNulty, is nearing 100 as she records the story of her life. / The novel was catalysed 10 years ago by his mother. We were driving through Sligo, and my mother pointed out a hut and told me that was where my great uncles first wife had lived before being put into a lunatic asylum by the family. She knew nothing more, except that she was beautiful. / [...] Barry admits to plundering his family history for fiction: I cant seem to do anything else. While he was at work on the book, his mother, a famous Irish actor, became terminally ill. This family drama fed into the novel. Theres a scene at the end when Dr Grene, the psychiatrist charged with assessing Roseanne, goes back to the mental hospital not so much to visit her as to go to see if she was alive. I was pulled up short with this elemental sense of a mother and a son that I hadnt felt before. We had had a difficult relationship, not speaking to each other for a year at a time. / Barrys seeming miserablism has exasperated some English critics (those unremittingly sunny people) who perhaps yearn for Irish fiction to be like a mini-break to Dublin, all craic and no downside. But Barry refuses to cater to them. His first agent, one Sophia Sackville-West, told him at the outset not to write about Ireland. She said theres no market for Irish stuff, write about England. Why did you not take her advice? I couldnt. Its like salmon fishing. Its so hard to catch a book in the nets of time. Hard enough catching an Irish one. I dont think I could catch an English one. (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.) Alex Clark, review of On Canaans Side, in The Guardian ([Wed.] 20 July 2011). [...] Barry resists filling in complex historical detail with a heavy hand, although he is more heavy-hearted than might meet with Lillys approval. His method is to imply a dreadful strangeness rather than a straightforward working-out; conflict and tumult blind-side his characters rather than staring them full in the face. Tanks. Wounds received. Nothing, reports Lillys friend Mike Scopello tersely, when asked about the Purple Heart he received in the second world war; elsewhere, Americas brimming racial tensions and its participation in the Vietnam war are similarly obliquely sketched, their force and magnitude evident from the damage and alienation that they leave in their wake. Sometimes those effects are bizarre and mysterious: in the sinuous strand of the novel that charts Lillys marriage to policeman Joe Kinderman, his subsequent abandonment of her is eventually revealed to be the result of a painful neurosis that is all the more powerful for its unpredictability and oddness. / By anybodys reckoning, Lillys life is a traumatic one, encompassing multiple bereavements and separations, material hardship, numerous upheavals and unrelieved exile from an oppressed and divided homeland. Her indomitability – she is, she tells us, thankful for my life, infinitely – derives in part from the very invisibility and stoicism that she has had to cultivate and for the joy in small reliefs and pleasures to which that has led. Paradoxically, shrinking her life to escape the assassins gaze has induced in Lilly a deep appreciation of Americas vastness and mobility, a mental relief from claustrophobia. Arriving in New York, slinking through the streets with Tadg, she is at once terrified and awed: I almost laughed at the memory of Dublin, with its low houses, their roofs tipped like deferential hats to the imperious rain. Much later, in Cleveland, in a marvellously conjured episode in which Lilly visits Luna Park with Joe, the generous American sky threw its arms open above us, and above the brightened factories, and the stretching wilderness of the human streets. / Barrys prose is overwhelmingly poetic, its lyricism yielding a seemingly endless series of potent and moving images [...] (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.)
[ top ] Niall MacMonagle, review of On Canaans Side, in The Irish Times (30 July 2011), Weekend Review: Voice is everything. As you move through this story, Lillys voice becomes the voice inside the readers head, a voice that is private, self-conscious, deliberately rich in imagery. At times the language is quaint and idiomatic, and at times limpid and beautiful, as when Lilly looks on her son Ed when he tells her that hes been drafted to Vietnam: I was gazing at him. I was seeing I thought something for the first time. His features were regular, square, like a portrait. He stood before me, and I gazed at his face. I think I saw how doubt wavered there, and courage, and of course the blessed ignorance of what was truly to come. / Love and hatred feature. When Mr Nolan, both friend and enemy, reveals a shocking truth, Lillys hatred is as vivid as the tender love she shows for her son Ed, now a Vietnam vet, who returns to Lillys porch but will not come in. And the truly observant passages in which Lilly tells of watching her son and grandson grow, the deepest, most important poetry of my life, are clearly written out of felt experience. / Though Lillys mother dies in childbirth, though Lillys own first love dies suddenly and subsequent events bring terrible sorrows, On Canaans Side is not a bleak book. Its remarkable wisdom and spirited openness save it from that. Clearsightedly, Lilly says: I am dwelling on things I love, even if the measure of tragedy is stitched into everything. / Desmond MacCarthy, writing about E. M. Forster, differentiated between the masculine and feminine ways of life. The masculine way is to handle it departmentally but the feminine impulse ... is to see life as more of a continuum. Barrys Lilly Bere brilliantly encapsulates that continuum in a book beautifully and rhythmically woven. Though the similes are overdone, the plot revelations are handled much more effectively here than in The Secret Scripture. [...] This new novel forms, together with A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture , an impressive triptych celebrating the lost names in the history of the world. I enjoyed and admired this one best. (p.10; see full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.)
Terry Eagleton, Overdoing the Synge-song, review of On Canaans Side, by Sebastian Barry, in London Review of Books (22 Sept. 2011). [..] Barrys fiction does not resolve political conflicts by personal means. Even so, the personal in his novels quite often displaces the political. His great-grandfather was a Dublin chief superintendent of police who early last century led a baton charge on strikers in which four men were killed. In his play The Steward of Christendom this historic personage appears as the protagonist, Thomas Dunne. But though Barrys embarrassingly arch introduction to the play leads one to expect that the incident will figure, ther is strikingly little allusion to it, even though it constitutes what one might see as the original sin or primordial crime of the Dunne family, which was to spread its sickness down the generations. The only trenchant criticism of Dunnes actions comes from a foul-mouthed nationalistic prison warder, whose snarls are easily discounted. [...] [Cont.]
[ top ] Claire Kilroy, review of The Temporary Gentleman, in The Guardian ([Sat.] 29 March 2014): I will put my hand up and confess to having had a fleeting change the record moment with Barrys last novel, On Canaans Side, only to be bowled over by the unexpected power of the ending (so many writers have tried and failed to capture the moment of death). The states of goodness that his previous narrators maintained in the face of startling iniquity were beginning to strain belief, but then, Barrys writing is inspired by his family so it is natural to write with tenderness. The Temporary Gentleman, however, is narrated by the bad guy. Jack is a drinker, a gambler, an absent father, a neglectful husband, a gunrunner and, at the end, a coward, afraid to return home. The hallmark heightened lyricism and stylised idiom of old is still there, but it is tamped down by Jacks rueful voice. / The novel seems part of something bigger, almost a prelude, in fact; and this is not a flaw but, rather, an indication that new life is being breathed into the Barry project. Watchers have been planted within the text in the shape of Jack and Mais two unfortunate daughters, Maggie and Ursula. They are almost entirely silent: terrified children in an adult world, witnesses to misery and - in one vicious episode - subjected to violence. They appear at windows, or at the top of stairs, observing their parents abject state as they drink themselves into oblivion. Their presence is electric, because you know that it is only a matter of time before Barry will get round to telling their stories. Maggie, the oldest, becomes an actor, locating her in his immediate familial terrain: his late mother was the actor Joan OHara. Ursula emigrates to England to become a nurse, fearful that her father will disapprove of her engagement to a Nigerian. The novel ends as Jacks testimony ends, having succeeded in intriguing the reader. If anything, the work is getting more exciting as it broaches contemporary times. / Barry is drawn to complicated subjects. [...] (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or attached.)
Kate Kellaway, The Temporary Gentleman: Sebastian Barrys hard-drinking, continent-spanning love story, in The Observer [Sunday] (20 April 2014): This novel is an elegy – not for a temporary gentleman but for his wife. The prose has the black-bordered elegance of a Victorian mourning letter yet it is, at the same time, a restless recollection of the life of a couple – animated but doomed. It is written with a redeeming artistry – almost as if good writing might have the power to save a marriage or contain the secret of happiness. It manages, with the lightest of touches, to be a politically adroit sketch of Ireland and of colonial Africa in the last century. / Barry [...] lets slip here that Jack McNulty is brother to Eneas (from his 1998 The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty). Jack fought in the second world war, although his commission was never permanent, and became a UN observer and a gunrunner in Africa. We meet him, in 1957, in Accra lodgings, waited on by a houseboy, Tom Quaye, whose marital circumstances partly parallel his own. / Jack is at work on a memoir and with Barrys help we get to know him better than he knows himself. The pleasures of reading this novel are not dissimilar to reading Jane Austen – although darker – in that one is allowed to make moral judgments in advance of the characters themselves – although Jack is, eventually, permitted to catch up – writing his way into culpability. [...] Like a series of magic lantern slides, we view Jacks past. We follow him and Mai to the Gold Coast and see them return to Ireland when Mai is pregnant with their first child (she causes a stir by bringing back an outlandish pet monkey too). A brilliantly abject scene describes the moment she realises her family house in Sligo must be sold to pay off Jacks gambling debts – the bright smile she gives him when she realises he has gambled away her last sovereign is devastating. No surprise then when Mai takes to the bottle too. Yet, in the end, this rare and heart-breaking novels subject is not drink at all - it is erring, selfish, enduring love. (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or attached.)
[ top ] Robbie Millen, Sebastian Barry: I wrote this book so my son could be safe on trains;, in The Times (25 Jan. 2017): "[...] Sebastian Barry is a very Irish novelist. / If an English novelist were to say that we have just been through the age of Heaney or describe Irish as that beautifully capacious adjective or refer to another person;s soul as a radiant thing, well, Id want to snigger or mock. We English dont do grand, baroque or full-blown emotion. / Yet say these things in an Irish brogue and it feels right, even laying aside the incongruity of it being said in a clone coffee shop in Harlesden, an unromantic corner of northwest London. I suspect no one else has declared over a latte there that the native Americans put their medicine in the dried scrotums of - writers need a dried scrotum of a buffalo with good things in it or described writing a novel as spring clean[ing] the little house of your imagination. / On Tuesday, the 61-year-old Barry will find out whether his latest novel, Days Without End, has won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year [...] Further: He likens writers to a kind of rotten Jesse James and writing a book as trying to rob a train and get down to Mexico before Pat Garrett [the lawman who killed Billy the Kid] gets hold of you — and Pat Garrett would be the more conventional members of your family, representing good citizens. And I am only really interested in the renegades and the outlaws. (Available online; accessed 15.03.2017.)
Allan Massie, review of A Thousand Moons, in The Scotsman (25 March 2020) - Barry has found a wonderful speaking voice for Winona: lyrical, youthfully innocent, yet darkened by her memories and awareness of the genocidal destruction of her own people and their way of life. Here one must get out of the way the accusation of cultural misappropriation that some will surely bring against Barry: how dare he, an Irishman in his sixties, adopt the persona of an 18-year-old Native American girl, and provide her with a voice? Well, its a stupid charge, but then we live in exceptionally stupid times. Fiction is a work of the imagination and Barry is as entitled to invent Winona and find a voice for her as Hilary Mantel is to enter the mind of Thomas Cromwell. In both cases there is only one intelligent question: is it well done? In both cases it is supremely well done, and thats enough. A Thousand Moons is, like so much of the greatest fiction, a crime novel. There is private crime – a rape, a beating, a murder – and there is public or political crime, the aftermath of the terrible Civil War in the divided state of Tennessee, where the defeated Confederates seek first revenge, which takes the form of lynchings, murders and arson, and then the re-establishment of their political power, which sees a terrorist become a judge, and justice first denied, then horribly perverted. / How do you survive in such a diseased climate? Winona has dark memories from her ruined childhood, memories of her mother and a way of life in harmony with nature. These memories, an accuser might say, are sentimentalised, but they are memories which Winona was justified in retaining, and it is the richness of her memories which make for the alertness of her response to the physical world, to the shimmering beauty of the landscape and to its birds and wild animals. / Then Winona is strengthened by the love that surrounds her: the love of McNulty and Cole for each other and for her, the loving support of their employer, the framer Lige, the love of the two emancipated slaves Rosalee and her brother Tennyson, and finally the love of Peg, a girl whom she first fights and then befriends./ So in the end she may conclude that while the world was strange and lost and that there was no place that was not perilous, the reality of love is the truth self-evident to behold. In this realization, the crime novel becomes an affirmative one. / Barry writes with the freshness and beauty of an early summer morning when the dew sparkles and the air shimmers with the promise of a glorious day. He is also a masterly craftsman, modulating the pace of his narrative, alternating vivid scenes of action with tranquil moments in which time seems to stand still. It is common for novelists to do their best work when they are in early middle-life, between say 35 and 50, before energy begins to fail and many years at the desk have dulled their response to experience, and so they come often to repeat themselves or at best offer new variations on familiar themes. Not Barry; his writing is better than ever. Days Without End and A Thousand Moons are equally marvellous; together, one of the finest achievements in contemporary fiction. (Available online; accessed 22.07.2020.) [ top ] |