Early in The Pride of Parnell Street—a gorgeous new monologue-play by Irish playwright Sebastian Barry brought to New Haven courtesy of the Festival of Arts & Ideas — a lower-class Dublin woman tells about those heady days during the 1990 World Cup. Ireland’s national soccer team strung together a series of unexpected victories and came as close to the championship as they’ve ever come. Dublin went mad, “happy mayhem” ruled, and this depressed, terror-wracked, still-developing nation felt something rare. Janet — that’s this storyteller’s name — doesn’t try to shoehorn this oceanic feeling into one word, but surely the nearest word would be “pride.”
Oddly enough, the rapturous, irrational pride of the sports fan proves the perfect place to begin this exploration of Janet’s decayed marriage and its path to redemption. What is this overwhelming feeling of identification that a fan feels? How do the displays of grit and grace by 11 men become not only emblematic of a nation, but deeply personal for thousands of that nation’s citizens? And how did this improbable string of victories manage to create or revive a sense of national unity and identity?
These are not questions the play poses outright, but they suggest the complexity of the feeling that Barry is trying to illuminate. How does a feeling like this manage to sweep away reality and cast even the grittiest Dublin life in the golden light of mythological, world-historical grandeur. And how does this swelling pride in “our boys” relate to the similar feeling that accompanies love? How does pride in one’s conflict-torn nation relate to love in an abusive marriage?
In an interwoven series of monologues, delivered by Janet Brady and her husband Joe, we hear not only about historical events spanning a decade of Irish history, we also hear the story of how the Brady marriage was destroyed by domestic violence and gradually, painfully redeemed by that irrational sensation of love — of pride in the ones we love.
The script is simply stunning. Barry began his career as a poet, and his plays display has the poet’s knack for subtly weaving repeated imagery through the fabric of completely naturalistic story. This almost-unconscious poeticism is, again and again, matched by an ear for the perfect, startling image. For example, when Joe tries to explain the absurdity of Irish politicians’ attempts to “clean up” Dublin — mostly by clearing out the likes of him — he blurts out that they wanted Dublin so clean that salmon would jump out of the Liffey and frolic in the streets of dear, dirty Dublin.
Beyond these verbal pyrotechnics, though, Barry’s greatest strength is his ability to capture the zeitgeist of an entire historical period in the stories of a few individuals. Barry is best known for historical dramas that reach further back into Ireland’s past (and his own family tree), but he manages to bring that same subtle connection of the personal and the historical to this more contemporary subject. When Janet and Joe make offhand comments about the re-development of Dublin, the influx of African and Eastern European immigrants, and the establishment of this former third-world capital as “one of the richest cities in Europe,” we get a vivid picture of the forces of globalization that shaped the 1990s worldwide — amplified to the extreme in Ireland’s late-blooming economy.
This production, directed by Jim Culleton of Dublin’s Fishamble theater company, does justice to Sebastian Barry’s excellent script — and then some. A faint, tasteful sound design (by Denis Clohessy) adds depth to the play’s richest moments, and a semi-abstract set (by Sabine Dargent) heightens the poetic qualities of the script. Rusted panels and a rain-washed window remind us of the urban underbelly of Dublin while amplifying the images of water that crop up insistently in the script.
Director Jim Culleton’s staging suggests that each monologuist has his or her own, private space within this abstract set, while also showing the interpenetration of these intimate spaces. The sheer spareness of the play’s staging lends each movement toward or away from each other, each retreat from or advance on the audience, a palpable symbolic effect.
Culleton’s two performers — Mary Murray as Janet and Karl Shiels as Joe — wield Barry’s language beautifully and prove themselves to be master storytellers. Ms. Murray fills Janet with nervous energy and stiff humor that make this character simply riveting, and Mr. Shiels uses Joe’s elliptical speech-patterns, punctuated with the empty coughs of a fatal illness, to create a complex and deeply contradictory character that richly rewards our finest attention. What makes these performers most engaging, though, is their exploration of that fine line between retelling history and reliving it. How appropriate for a bittersweet play in part about nostalgia — for a ruined marriage, for pre-globalized Dublin, etc. — that we should constantly feel as though the characters were swooning in and out of the past, as if they were hovering between sleep and waking life.
However invested this play may be in Irish culture and Irish history, it ultimately explores something of truly universal significance. Early in the play, Janet muses, “See, love between a man and a woman, it’s … private. It happens where you never do see it. In rooms.” But Barry also suggests that there’s a kind of continuity between this private love and the more diffuse, more public feelings that bind a community of individuals together — and I don’t mean merely the communitas following another World Cup win.
Joe may think of Janet as his “Pride of Parnell Street,” but Janet applies the label to someone else: to Patty Duffy, a woman who ran a shop in Parnell Street when, on May 17th, 1974, a car-bomb ripped through that street’s storefronts during the evening rush-hour. Janet recalls with gut-wrenching detail having witnessed this atrocity. As she tore her eyes away from the carnage, Janet saw Patty Duffy there, tending to a severely wounded stranger as if he were her own child.
The grace, the sheer human goodness of a community — united by the violence meant to divide them — emanates from this climactic story in particular, but it shines behind all of The Pride of Parnell Street. The play entrances because Barry and Culleton, Murray and Shiels (without fussiness and without undue sentimentality) plumb the depths of this feeling — call it “pride,” a sensation of grace — and its ability to transcend the violence that separates a country or a marriage.