The Steward of Christendomby Sebastian Barry
Patent Trader (10/22/99) - Edward Buroughs
North County News (10/27/99) - Kathy Grantham
Patent Trader - Weekend 10/22/99
"The Steward of Christendom" is Time Well Spent
By EDWARD BUROUGHS
Thomas Dunne has devoted his life to his country and family. He was always unshakable in knowing that he made all the right decisions. But now at age 75, locked up in a dreary mental institution, he endlessly struggles within his swirling mind to pinpoint what happened to his life. This personal setting of Sebastian Barry's impossible to categorize play, "The Steward of Christendom," is challenging in itself. But Mr. Barry adds greater issues to explore.
The play is set in the newly independent Ireland of 1932 and Thomas Dunne was the last supervisor of Dublin's, crown-loyal, metropolitan police force.
Clad in long underwear, Dunne shifts from striking clarity to imagined reenactment of key events in his life. He spins long passages of both image-filled, lyrical stories and chaotic, rambling observations. In memory scenes distinguished by soft lighting, his three daughters and one son appear on stage. In real time scenes of harsh light, two prison guards establish the terms of his current sad existence. Throughout, glimpses of family squabbles, hopes and tragedy mesh with the rise of Irish revolution like pieces of a puzzle struggling to assemble themselves.
This complicated tableau is exactly the type of play that the Bluestone Actors Project and its head, director
It is not an easy evening, but a worthy one. It helps to have some familiarity with Irish history as the author is a young Irishman and he rightly takes his country's background for granted in this play, written in 1995. For some of us not so educated Americans, the program includes a helpful, concise abstract of the political context that centers on the surrender of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins in 1922. But, that said, the play truly focuses on the human impact of events, leaving the political arguments to others.
Always at that center is Thomas Dunne. It's a prodigious role for any actor.
As Dunne's three daughters,
In Dunne's current real world of the mental hospital,
North County News 10/27/99
"The Steward of Christendom" reflects the family of man
By Kathy Grantham
Writhing on the hard, thin mattress is Thomas Dunne, bouncing in and out of memories and madness at the Baltinglass County Home in Ireland. And so "The Steward of Christendom" is introduced at the Schoolhouse Theater.
In its final week - Thursday, October 28 thru Sunday, October 31, the Bluestone Actors Project is directed by
"The Steward..." is Irish playwright Sebastian Barry's play about Thomas Dunne, a great-grandfather he never knew, the last chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, an organization devoted to the British Crown. However, it. was. disbanded after the Irish war of independence of the 1920s, and Dunne was considered by some to be a traitor, his life in shreds. The play opens on a once vital man, now broken, both mentally and physicaIly, hanging on to a sliver of reason, after seven years of confinement in the county home.
Alone in a barren room, barely clothed and in little control of his faculties, Dunne, at 75, reenacts scenes from his past, finding solace in the memory of his three daughters and a son who died in World War I. Barry writes about raising children, particularly fathers and sons "what it could be to be a father, even a bad father, an accused father, which may be the only sort of father there is."
A consummate actor from Verplanck,
Hepburn doesn't pretend to be an old codger, neither does he look like a septuagenarian. When he retreats into childhood, crying like a baby, or re-enacting his memories, he doesn't employ acting tricks to camouflage a retreat to youth. Presented on stage clad only in soiled long winter underwear, there is no time to pity him because he moves so quickly between past and present.
Nagging at his soul is the fact that now he's an outcast in the Ireland he loves so dearly. Dunne had risen as high as a Catholic could, and perceived himself as the steward of Queen Victoria's England. He was caught in the turmoil of Ireland's struggle for independence. That was the end of a grand life for Dunne, a 45-year career in ashes.
Bitter and disappointed, Dunne's daughter Annie has withstood a lifetime of scant affection and criticism from her father. Now that he is old, and she cannot control his erratic moods or give him the custodial care he requires, she has him admitted to the county, home. At, times, he's a raving lunatic or sweet as a lamb.
The audience encounters Dunne as Mr. Smith (John Adair) arrives to bathe him, since the patient in his crusted underwear "smells like pork." Frightened to death by 'Black Jim,' his nickname for the gruff attendant who strips him bare, he clings to himself; it's all he has. Perhaps working in a mental ward robs the paid staff of their humanity at times.
On the eve of a costume party in town, some time later, a genial Mr. Smith appears in Dunne's room outfitted like Texas cowboy with leather boots, jeans, red kerchief and wide-brimmed hat "Who am I?" he asks, twirling a six shooter, imitating Gary Cooper. Of course, the old man thinks of a family named Cooper living nearby; he never attended the movies.
But Smith's changed demeanor is striking. Was it the costume that allowed this moment of kindness? The respectful cowboy even offers to read aloud to Dunne a treasured letter from his son written at the front. Yet, this is 'Black Jim, who scrubbed down a filthy lunatic tic, while declaring, "I'd a mind once I join my brother on the Hudson River. He has a whale flensing business there. Would that I had joined Jack, I say when I have to wash down an old bugger like you. I would rather flense whales and that's a stinking task, I'm told."
The supporting cast --
