Seeking "The Mercy of Fathers": Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom and the Tragedy of Irish Patriarchy

Seeking "The Mercy of Fathers": Sebastian Barry's The Steward ofChristendom and the Tragedy of Irish Patriarchy JUDE R. MECHE As a poet, novelist, and playwright, Sebastian Barry has established his reputation , in recent years, as one of Ireland's young literary stars. Particularly through his efforts for the stage and through his 1995 breakout play, The Steward of Christendom, Barry finds himself today compared to and associated with that host of Irish playwrights - including Brian Friel, Fr;nk McGUinness, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh - who have revitalized Irish theatre in the last few decades. Barry also shares a common goal with these playwrights: restaging Ireland. Resolving to move away from the histories and legends that have stereotyped Ireland over the preceding decades (and centuries), these writers show an abiding interest in challenging those narratives from which Irishness itself originates. In The Politics of Irish Oranta, Nicholas Grene notes a trend in Irish drama toward national self-examination (267), and in plays like Friel's Translations, Murphy's Famine, or McGuinness ' Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, this selfexamination results in new Irish histories that, in tum, result in altered Irish identities. And turning specifically to Barry's work, Grene links The Steward of Christendom to McGuinness' Observe the Sons of Ulster, contending that both can "be seen as part of this attempt at re-imagining ourselves" (242-43).' In the case of Sebastian Barry, though, these efforts to restage and challenge history are perhaps even more pronounced. Barry insists that history in Ireland - and particularly Eamon de Valera's version of Irish history - is patently "unreliable and haunted" ("Following" xvii), and Barry's plays attempt to exorcise some of these ghosts. Of course, revisionist efforts on behalf of Irish history are neither new nor rare. The Irish historian T.W. Moody admitted, in 1977, that the more scientific pursuit of Irish history had given way to the formulation of sectarian mythologies (86).2 And, following Moody's aspersions, a significant crop of revisionist Irish histories has appeared. Most notable among these histories is Roy Foster's Modernlreland, Modern Drama, 47:3 (Fal12oo4l 464 Sebastian Barry's The Steward ofChristendom J600-J972, which many readers praised but which also garnered considerable criticism for its moderate treatment of the British.3 However. among playwrights, revisionist efforts have been less overt. Indeed, Sebastian Barry is alone among the playwrights of his generation in receiving acknowledgment for his efforts at what Jim Haughey caBs "Revisionist TheateL'" As Haughey and others, like c.L. DaBat and Fintan O'Toole, have noted, plays such as Barry's The Only True History ofLizzie Finn or The Steward of Christendom (or even novels such as The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty) focus upon Ireland's unwritten histories and upon those people who have been edged out of the Irish mainstream because certain histories of Ireland have been accepted and others have been rejected. However, while his plays engage in projects of troubling nationalist mythohistories , Barry avoids questions concern.ing larger. sectarian ideologies by choosing, instead, to interrogate history through his choice of protagonists for his plays. And Barry's characters are less interested in ideology than they are in simply getting by. Below the broad-stroke accounts of the past offered in support of sectarian ideologies, Barry finds people marginalized until they have been practicaBy erased from official histories. His plays are histories of these marginals. As Fintan O'Toole observes, "Sebastian Barry fills the stage with prodigal people, long lost to the wider world. They are history's leftovers, men and women defeated and discarded by their times.[...J They are misfits, anomalies, outlanders. Yet each is also marked by an amazing grace" (vii). In the case of The Steward a/Christendom, it is the history of Catholic loyalists that has been relegated to obscurity and that Barry hopes to restage. Barry, in fact, describes the playas "the fifth in a series of plays looking for the lost, hidden, or seldom mentioned people in one Irish family" (qtd. in Haughey 290). And picking up on Barry's assertion, Haughey attempts further to define Barry's methods in The Steward of Christendom, noting...