127: Innocence

Frank McGuinness’ Innocence is another wildly imaginative play based on a historical, biographical figure. This time he’s chosen the painter Caravaggio as his central character and what a passionate protagonist he is!

John the Baptist, by Caravaggio (1571-1610), from Web Gallery of Art.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist in the sixteenth century, famous for getting into fights, spending time in prison, killing a man and having a Papal death warrant placed on his head. It was no surprise that he died young. He drank to excess, flared to temper quickly and loved recklessly.

In Innocence, Caravaggio lusts for young men, acts as a pimp procuring their services for Cardinals, and loves a whore, Lena (Magdalena). No wonder the play caused an outcry in Catholic Ireland.

I love the way McGuinness blends dreams, art, lust, carnality, religion and gender politics in this play. Lena the whore loves and cares for Caravaggio, bathing and washing his wounds. Together they play fantasy games where they marry and have a child, but Lena knows all too well that Caravaggio lusts for boys, not her. In one moment his temper flares with her and she hits him.

LENA: Who the hell do you think you are? Who do you think you are dealing with? Some penny piece of pansy rough you scraped off the streets? By Jesus, boy, you should know better than to try that caper.

Caravaggio does have a penchant for a bit of rough:

CARAVAGGIO: Their shirts were white. The body underneath was brown. I could hear the white of their shirts touch their flesh. I knew they could see me listening in the dark. […] They were as near to me as you are, but in their youth and desire they were as far away as the stars in the sky. I wanted to raise my fist and grab them from the sky and throw them into the gutter where I found them. I wanted to dirty their white shirts with blood. I wanted to smash their laughing skulls together for eternity. I wanted the crack of their killing to be music in my ears. I wanted them dead. I wanted red blood from their brown flesh to stain their white shirts and shout out this is painting, this is colour, these are beautiful and they are dead.

Later he does kill a man, but it’s not one of the young boys he described above. The murder means he has to flee for his life, leaving behind Lena, who loves him still.

LENA: I dreamt I stood in a room, a beautiful room. All bright. Pictures on the walls. All yours. I was in the centre of the room but I wasn’t in the painting. I looked at them and I looked up and I saw you looking down at me. […] And I started to laugh because it hit me you were looking at them from above, so you must see them all upside-down, and I knew then somehow we’d won, we turned the world upside-down, the goat and the whore, the queer and his woman.

Publisher: Faber and Faber (published in Frank McGuinness: Plays 1)

Cast: 6M, 3F

120: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Frank McGuinness put himself firmly in someone else’s shoes when he wrote Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. The playwright is a proud Catholic Republican, but in this play he immerses himself in the hopes, fears and dreams of the other side: the Protestants.

McGuinness has written a historical play peopled with invented characters. After decades forgotten or reviled, he’s given voices to the young Protestants who volunteered to fight in the 36th (Ulster) Division in World War One. The play begins with Kenneth Pyper, the sole survivor, as an elderly man, haunted by the memories and ghosts of his friends. He speaks to the empty air until he slowly conjures their shapes.

PYPER: I do not understand your insistence on my remembrance. I’m being too mild. I am angry at your demand that I continue to probe. Were you not there in all your dark glory? Have you no conception of the horror? Did it not touch you at all? A passion for horror disgusts me.

The elderly Pyper reaches out for his young self and we are propelled into the past and the day the young men met in their makeshift barracks. Kenneth Pyper is an artist, an upper class boy at war with himself and his ancestors. He appears quite mad and with a certain death wish, and yet he is the only one of the eight to survive the Battle of the Somme.

CRAIG: I’d say you’re a dangerous man in a fight, Kenneth.
PYPER: Would you, David?
CRAIG: I’d say so.
MOORE: How do you fight, Pyper?
PYPER: Dirty.

Part of what has driven Pyper to enlist is his homosexuality: he cannot be who he is anywhere in the world, so he might as well cease to exist and take out some of the Huns with him. When he falls in love with Craig, a young blacksmith in the regiment, he is given a reason to live and a reason to want out of this mad war. But they’ve enlisted and the army will let none of them go.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme is a play about war and its terrible waste. We see eight young men fighting for one-upmanship in the first part (which McGuinness has tellingly titled ‘Initiation’), forming close ties on leave after their first stint in battle, and then bonding as a team before their final battle.

The middle section, where they are on leave, shows them fractured by what they’ve seen. Some are falling apart, most are terrified, none want to go back to the battle front. It’s the ties of friendship that keep them going.

MOORE: I’m drenched.
MILLEN: That’s with sweat.
MOORE: Not with muck? Not with flesh? Not with blood?
MILLEN: Just with sweat.
MOORE: I think it’s blood. But it’s not my own. I never saw that much blood, Johnny.
MILLEN: It’s not ours.
MOORE: The whole world is bleeding. Nobody can stop it.

Publisher: Faber and Faber (published in Frank McGuinness: Plays 1)

Cast: 9M

87: Mary and Lizzie

Frank McGuinness based his play Mary and Lizzie on the often glossed over fact that Freidrich Engels lived for a long time with two Irish sisters, Mary and Lizzie Burns.

LIZZIE: Years ago in this country they say two women met a man and they went walking through Manchester. The women gave the man safe passage through the dangerous poor, for he believed in changing the workings of the world, and because they loved this world, they believed in him. They showed him the poor and they showed him their father and they showed their race and themselves to him, the two women, Mary and Lizzie Burns, sisters in life, sisters in love, living with Frederick Engels, for they believed in the end of the world. Listen to the world changing. Listen to the world ending.

In McGuinness’ poetic and playful telling of the story, both sisters were Engels’ lovers (not just Mary as is commonly recorded). The sisters are mythologised as elemental, lustful creatures, not entirely of this world. The play is told through song and ritual, poems recited and repeated, stories told. It’s not a chronological narrative and makes no attempt at historical accuracy. What McGuinness is doing is painting a bigger picture about gender relations, communism, colonial views of Ireland and suffrage.

FIRST WOMAN: Where are my hands?

SECOND WOMAN: You cut them off to send to your soldier.

THIRD WOMAN: So he could find his touch upon you.

FIRST WOMAN: (Showing her tongue) Where is my tongue?

FOURTH WOMAN: You bit to its root and spat it from you.

FIFTH WOMAN: The last words of love would be to your man.

FIRST WOMAN: Where are the legs that walked after him?

SIXTH WOMAN: You took an axe and chopped them off you.

FIRST WOMAN: Here I would stay until he returned.

Lizzie and Mary travel into the earth, discourse with the dead (including their mother), see pageants and hear prophecies, including one from a gentleman pig, before meeting Engels and Marx.

PIG: We’ll call the butcher empire and the knife we’ll call its greed,
And it cut the throat of Ireland, leaving it to bleed.
But what care for the Irish, aren’t they dirty pigs?
Leave them in their squalor to dance their Irish jigs.

McGuinness’ play is deeply political but will no doubt offend many with its portrayal of Engels as a randy goat, climaxing under the sisters’ attentions while he discusses class distinction. Marx and his wife Jenny are shown as repulsed by the antics and disapproving of the sisters. Despite Engels’ relationship with Mary and Lizzie and his work with Marx on communist theory, he still saw the Irish as a lower order of human being as Marx’s wife Jenny tells the sisters with some glee.

JENNY: Have you heard how he talks about you? Have you seen what he’s written?

MARY: We don’t read.

JENNY: Shall I tell you what he’s said?

LIZZIE: He never mentioned our name.

JENNY: He’s mentioned your race, however. Do you think he loves you? Listen to ‘The Condition of the Working Class’. This extract is so amusing. ‘Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman’s life worth living. His crudity which places him but little above the savage, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkeness […] For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane.’

LIZZIE: Read on.

JENNY: I can’t, you don’t find it funny.

McGuinness has given voice to the voiceless Burns’ sisters, rendered them poetic, linked to the land and filled with song. Whether they’d like or appreciate his efforts to show them as pagan and incestuous is another matter altogether…

Publisher: Faber and Faber

Cast: 13F, 6M (some roles could be doubled)