by A play from 1904 about an Englishman who thinks he understands Ireland, reread in a week when the Irish papers were asking whether Britain might undo Brexit
Saturday, a Box of Plays
A house clearance came in on Friday. Forty boxes from a flat in Maida Vale, mostly theatre. Somebody who had been collecting acting editions since about 1950 and never thrown one away. I have been on my knees among them for two days and am very happy.
Near the bottom of the ninth box was a 1907 copy of a play by Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, with the long preface. I sat down on the floor and read it straight through.
The Play
It is about two partners in a London engineering firm. One is English, Tom Broadbent. One is Irish, Larry Doyle, who left his village eighteen years ago and has not been back. They go to Ireland together on business, to the village Doyle came from.
Now, you would expect the joke to be on the Irish. That was the convention. The stage Irishman, all blarney and whiskey.
Shaw turns it upside down. The Englishman is the romantic. Broadbent adores Ireland. He weeps at the scenery. He believes in fairies and the Celtic soul and Home Rule. He is taken in by the first rogue he meets, who is in fact from Glasgow and putting on the accent.
The Irishman is the realist. Doyle is bitter, clever and unsentimental. He has a great speech about how the Irish climate and the Irish imagination between them make a man good for nothing but dreaming. He hates the place for what it does to people. He cannot leave it alone.
And the Englishman wins. That is the sting. Broadbent, the sentimental fool, ends up with the girl, the seat in Parliament and the land, on which he is going to build a hotel and a golf course. He does it all with perfect sincerity. He never notices he is taking the place over.
A King and a Chair
There is a famous story about this play. Shaw wrote it at the request of Yeats, for the new national theatre in Dublin. They would not put it on. Too long, they said. Shaw thought they found it too rude about Ireland.
So it opened in London instead, and was a great success. The King came to see it and laughed so hard he broke his chair.
An Irish play, turned down in Dublin, making an English king fall off his seat. Shaw could not have written a better joke.
What Brought It to Mind
I had been reading the Irish papers, as my mother requires. And there was a small thing in the Irish Times politics column this week that sent me to the ninth box. Under its main headline about the budget, there was a second line: “Plus: Might Britain go back on Brexit?”
I only saw the heading. But think what it means that it is there. An Irish newspaper, in the week of its own budget, glancing across the water and wondering what the neighbours will do next.
That is Shaw’s play reversed. For centuries Ireland was the problem the English discussed over dinner. The “Irish Question.” Now Britain is the question the Irish discuss. What are they up to? Will they change their minds again? Should we be worried?
Who Understands Whom
Broadbent’s flaw is that he thinks he knows Ireland. He has read about it. He is in favour of it. He has a policy.
What he does not have is any idea that the people in front of him are seeing him quite clearly and adjusting their behaviour to suit. They play the part he expects. They let him think he is loved. Then they vote for him because he has money and will spend it.
Shaw’s point, in the preface, is that the English have never understood Ireland because they have never needed to. The powerful do not study the weak. The weak study the powerful, closely, because they have to.
So the Irish understood the English perfectly, for centuries. And the English, generally, did not know there was anything to understand.
I think that is still roughly true. I have noticed that my mother can tell you who the British Home Secretary is. I am not sure many people in England could name the Taoiseach.
The Arrangement in Dublin
They could not, I suspect, tell you how the job works either. I only know because of the Sunday telephone calls.
A site that tracks Irish politics sets it out. The present Taoiseach has held the office since January 2025, at the head of a coalition, and under the agreement between the parties he is due to hand over in November 2027 to the leader of the other main partner, who is currently his deputy and Finance Minister.
A rotating head of government. Two rival parties, sharing power, taking turns at the top by appointment. And it works. Nobody in Ireland seems to find it odd.
Try to imagine that in London. The two big parties agreeing to swap the premiership halfway through. Broadbent would not know what to make of it. It is too sensible to be romantic and too peculiar to be English.
Fairness to Broadbent
I should say that Shaw is not simply cruel to the Englishman. Broadbent is a decent man. He is kind. He means every word. He will bring jobs and drains and electric light to the village, and the villagers will be better off.
That is what makes the play uncomfortable. The hotel will be built. Efficiency wins. And something will be lost that nobody can put a price on, which a mad defrocked priest in the last act tries to describe and cannot.
Shaw was Irish and lived in England for seventy years. He saw both. He did not think either side had the monopoly on foolishness. I find that restful, in a week of people being very sure.
Sunday
My mother rang. I told her about the play. She said, “Your father was a Broadbent.” He was from Surrey and cried at Riverdance. She married him anyway.
I asked what she made of the Brexit headline. She said, “They’ll do what they like and tell us after.” Seventy-one years of studying the powerful, in one sentence.
I read the London Prat with my tea. It is English and knows it, which is the beginning of wisdom. Its UK satirical news on the English view of Ireland could have been written by Doyle, and there is even a page of British satirical news about George Bernard Shaw, who would have demanded a fee. My Boston lecturer tells me Bohiney Magazine is funny about Americans who think they understand both of us.
The 1907 copy has the King’s chair in a footnote. I have priced it at eight pounds and put it by the till. If nobody buys it by Friday, I am keeping it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
