George Bernard Shaw wrote just one play about Ireland, only to have WB Yeats turn it down. It was obviously too prophetic for the Abbey Theatre. Written exactly 100 years ago at the height of the home rule debates, before two sets of 20th-century Troubles further bloodied the waters between Ireland and England, it is an unforgiving and fantastically funny dissection of the rights and wrongs of the relationship.
Shaw turns stereotype on its head by having a romantic English businessman, Broadbent, set off to "save" Ireland with his fearfully reluctant Irish friend Doyle - at once a self-flagellating representation of Shaw himself and an uncanny vision of the rapacious Ryanair capitalists who have now emerged to ride the Celtic Tiger.
About this and so much else, Shaw was right. If only we'd listened. Shaw the dramatist was always a little didactic, but his defrocked priest Keegan, played with near-mystical magnetism by the remarkable Lalor Roddy, is surely one of the great poetic creations. This wandering seeker - who, having spent his youth in the universities of Europe, finds himself driven mad by Ireland - is the only one to see through the false dawn of neo-liberal efficiency offered by Broadbent, who is played with more than a hint of Tony Blair by Alan Cox.
Worthy as it is to reproduce the original text to the last syllable, it's doubtful whether Shaw's bony bottom could have taken the full three hours of John Bull; even his characters complain of how much "they go on". But with talks about home rule for the north bogged down again this week, the lesson was never more needed.
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