greatmuldini

As one of the most significant industrial hubs of the United Kingdom, Sheffield in the first half of the 20th century was home to a vast array of steel works and related businesses employing thousands – who enjoyed a broad range of recreational activities before, during, and after the bombing campaigns of WWII.

School leavers returning to the city from their evacuation placements joined the working population during the day and the pleasure-seeking crowds at night. For most of them the local pub or football ground would have been the place to unwind. Alternatively, clubs and societies offered “congenial company” but required more commitment, as did the many charitable volunteering opportunities. Participants in more public-facing associations would usually be of the same sex and similar age for reasons of modesty and decorum – somewhat off-putting constraints for anyone looking to expand their horizons.

Those interested in a wider variety of like-minded collaborators would have had the option of joining one of Sheffield’s many dramatic societies. Founded in late 1938, the Curtain Club was one such open-for-all group under the direction of local playwright Jack Walsh, who also doubled as a writer and actor for the company. By the time the club emerged from the horrors of the war in 1946, a whole new generation of young performers had come of age and some, by early 1947, had already demonstrated their qualities as “juvenile leads” through youth theatre activities or the club’s own productions of popular comedies, thrillers, and melodramas.

The February 1947 presentation of Rope therefore saw protagonist and producer back on familiar territory, although the question of familiarity is an interesting one in the context of early 20th-century theatrical practice. Patrick Hamilton had already published several novels before he wrote his first play in 1929. Multiple cast and venue changes in London alone and a transfer to Broadway, where it also ran for some time, are a measure of the success it enjoyed on both sides of the Atlantic. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Hollywood version did not appear until 1948, and the only other mass media outings in the meantime came in the form of experimental BBC radio and television (!) transmissions in the 1930s. Its largest audiences in the UK would still have been reached through live performances by regional repertory companies.

Older traditions still existed alongside developing trends. Actor-manager Donald Wolfit was touring the provinces well into the 1950s with excerpts from Shakespearean plays, Olivier and Gielgud continued in much the same vein for several more decades, while the growing number of repertory companies (legitimate and amateur) fostered new talent that would be picked up by the West End and the new medium of television. No professional training programmes did in fact exist for actors before a clutch of – highly regarded – drama schools were set up during the period.

Their students would in no small part have benefitted from a new theory of acting that originated in Tsarist Russia, spread to the United States in the 1920s, and was re-imported to Europa via the Hollywood blockbusters of the 1940s and 1950s. Renamed “the Method” by its American practitioners, the new acting style proved ideally suited to the dramatic material being written at the time. In the US, it contributed the development of a distinctive American voice and dramatic tradition that was quickly able to compete with the tried and tested formulas of the all-singing, all-dancing Broadway musical, or the latest hit thriller from the London stage.

The London stage, for its part, was undergoing a similar transformation. Excluding the somewhat separate tradition of the music hall, the late 19th century saw the arrival of the comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan at one end of the spectrum, the other being occupied by the giants of serious international drama – Chekhov, Turgenev, Ibsen, and Strindberg. Firmly in the middle sat the Well-Made Play, in a plethora of permutations, from Shaw and Wilde to the early 20th-century classics of Coward and Rattigan, the lighter fare of Agatha Christie or Edgar Wallace, and countless popular pieces providing comedy or suspense across the United Kingdom throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The Angry Young Men (and they were all men) who would start a theatrical revolution in 1956 were barely out of their teens when the status quo, while still the norm, was already beginning to feel stale and staid.

From a modern perspective, the performing arts appear desperate for “change” after World War II. It was the period before Hollywood gave the world singular, definitive star performances and before new practices were introduced that would avail themselves of the exciting new discipline of psychology to depict fictional characters and their inner lives. Indeed, an individual character’s decision-making processes were of no concern to the Well-Made Play, of which Rope is a prime example.

Set in contemporary London, the action of Hamilton’s thriller takes place in the living room of the protagonist’s apartment. Wyndham Brandon and his flatmate Charles Granillo are students at Oxford and are planning to return to their college later that night. We also learn that they have just brutally strangulated a fellow student whose body is now hidden in a large chest that sits in the middle of the room. Brandon, the “brains” of the duo and instigator of the crime, is conducting an experiment to prove that those who enjoy taking risks can “get away with murder.”

For Brandon, the ultimate gratification lies not in the quiet disposal of the murder victim but in the public display of his intellectual prowess. To this end, he has set up a pre-departure reception, with refreshments to be served on the chest. Their guests – friends and family of the dead student – remain oblivious throughout of the ghoulish game they have been “invited” to play.

One guest seems to have arrived without invitation: Rupert Cadell is a mysterious character from Brandon’s past, a teacher perhaps, and a World War I veteran, who engages his former pupil in a discussion of personal morality that the other attendees mistake for frivolous chatter, in which they blithely participate. For those in the know – and that includes, very deliberately, the silent audience in the darkened auditorium who are watching events unfold in real time, fully aware of the crime but are unable to intervene.

In the course of the evening, Granillo’s already shaky confidence evaporates under the strain. Inevitably, mistakes are made, which do not escape Cadell’s notice. A keen observer of human imperfections, he bluffs his way back into the flat after the other guests have left, to continue his scrutiny of the increasingly uncomfortable suspects.

Brandon and Granillo find the tables turned on them by a relentless interrogator who demands to see the contents of the chest and refuses to leave unless his curiosity is satisfied. When Brandon threatens violence, the (handicapped) ex-soldier Cadell makes a dramatic show of drawing a hidden blade from his walking stick, thus asserting his moral authority by physical means in a bravura defence against the vicious attacker – whose evil nature is confirmed when the chest is finally opened. The gruesome truth is laid open but it comes as no surprise to anyone in the room, on stage, or in the auditorium. The big “revelation” is not the reality of a dead body in the middle of the room, but the complicity, and the culpability, of everyone looking on.

An interesting aspect of the 1947 production are the casting choices for the two opposing lead characters. The youthful killer without a conscience, who prides himself on what he believes to be his superior intellect, is assigned to a junior member of the company who must nevertheless possess the charisma to command the stage, to enthral the audience, and to bring to life in all our minds the dead body of his victim in the chest. It is his plan, his party, and his crime that we have gathered to witness and condemn. This is Brandon’s show. Until it is not. His nemesis is played by the most senior member of the company who also directs the play and is ultimately in control of everything.

And what about the audience? The crime has been discovered; the perpetrators are exposed. We have learned that the murder was far from “perfect” – and neither was it entirely “unmotivated.” In real life, a motiveless crime is one where we do not know the murderer’s intentions. It is a label applied to cases where there is an information deficit. Ironically, we know more than enough about Brandon’s motivations.

But even if we suspend our disbelief and accept the premise of a motiveless murder, there is a motive – and a moral – in the telling of it: Rope gives us the escapism, the perverse (“queer”) pleasure we secretly crave, and the reassuring restoration of the established order at the end. Hamilton’s play is very much concerned with order and orthodoxy, both in form and content: its message is one of unequivocal condemnation for a perverse crime and the secret fantasy that gave birth to it.

In formal terms, the play adheres to the three classical unities of time, place, and action to great effect when Cadell delivers a remarkable monologue on the exact time of night within the play and in the outside world. At “five and twenty to eleven,” as Brandon and Granillo are fast running out of their particular piece of, well, rope, “London theatre audiences are settling down in the darkness to the last acts of plays of which they know the denouement only too well.” And when, after the show, the same crowds – us, the audience – return home to our “cold supper,” we have only the memory to cherish, of the thrill we had at the theatre!

Identity Crisis: In the Gambler’s Den Parts 1-3

Scripted vs Filmed Version Pages 1-9

Passages in red (on either side) indicate rare agreement between written and spoken dialogue

Wall Trophies

Parts 1 (nos. 1-13) and 2 (nos. 14-21)

PMG, Mary Queen of Scots*

PMG, Tony Joe White, Catch My Soul**

United States Air Medal made out to Nelson Brenner

PMG, Joan McGoohan, Heathrow April 1965*

Unidentified “Citation”

Medals: Bronze Star, Army Soldier’s Medal, WWI [!] Army of Occupation of Germany Medal

Medals: Silver Star, WWII Victory Medal, China Service Medal

Harvard degree made out to Nelson Brenner

PMG, The Prisoner: Chimes of Big Ben*

Bergens Tidende, Norwegian Newspaper article/interview

Yale degree made out to Nelson Brenner

Joan McGoohan (“Princess of Siam”)

Manipulated still from This Island Earth (Nelson Brenner and his ”Silver Star”)

Unidentified certificate

Pulitzer Prize, Columbia University, made out to Nelson Brenner

Unidentified “Certificate for Service”

PMG, The Prisoner: Arrival (“driving a racing car”)**

Unidentified certificate

PMG, Lance Le Gault, Catch My Soul**

“American Broadcasters,” unidentified certificate

PMG, early portrait

* see detail picture (part 3) ** I have not yet found a high-res version of the precise image; however, the place holders are from the same context. The Arrival picture on Brenner’s wall differs minimally from the well-known shot I have inserted (for clarity).

“Who is that lady?” asks Columbo, pointing at the portrait of a dark-haired woman with an enigmatic smile. “The Princess of Thailand,” is the scripted answer to the [unscripted] female who is of course no random stranger but a familiar face even to certain eagle-eyed sections of the real-world audience on the other side of the fourth wall. Crucially, the fictional characters are unaware of the real-world implications and continue their conversation in the fictional universe.

Moving on to Brenner’s [unscripted] collection of military mementos, Columbo’s inquisitive chatter turns forensic as he begins to assemble the information he is gathering into a meaningful mosaic. His observation “The medals you’ve won…you did well in the war” introduces a new [unscripted] facet of Brenner’s character, his past military service, and Columbo would be well aware of the overlap between military and intelligence communities. A picture next to the medals shows Brenner posing with a military aircraft. The question “Where was that?” seems irrelevant, but it yields a valuable answer (“Korea”): by not asking about the plane or, even closer to the target, young Brenner’s physical appearance, Columbo maintains his trademark façade of ineptitude while also playing for time.

Apparently satisfied with the information (which indeed he is), the Lieutenant’s eyes continue to roam across the gallery of Brenner’s [entirely unscripted] accolades, and he stops to admire a particularly ornate certificate. “What is that?” he asks, pointing at the framed document with an air of childlike naivety, and being led to believe he is the only adult in the room, Brenner responds accordingly - with supreme [unscripted] condescension: “That you wouldn’t be able to understand it was given to me by the University of Bavaria.”

Brenner is facing the camera with his back to Columbo and the award, which if we are generous could account for the fact that the certificate in question was not awarded by the - entirely fictional - University of Bavaria at all, and that the camera instead reveals an Honorary Degree from Harvard. To explain the discrepancy, we must assume that either Brenner is lying [unscripted], for whatever undisclosed reason the character may have, or that the actor is making “stuff” up as he goes along [equally unscripted].

While on-the-spot ad-libbing is a vital skill for any live performer (or secret agent, for that matter), where it appears to contradict the visual evidence we are once again on the brink of a spillover, the real-life universe threatens to collide with the fictional world of the murder plot (collapsing both the Fourth Wall and our suspended disbelief). Neither actor will allow their fictional alter ego to become distracted by the – quite deliberate – intrusions from the outside world, as Columbo sets out to distract everybody’s attention away from the brink of narrative disaster, and away from his true purpose (confirming the variability of Brenner’s appearance, and his versatility as a master of disguise).

His eye is caught by a curiously phrased “certificate for service,” next to which he finds Brenner engaged in the very opposite of public service, the ultimate private indulgence, “driving a racing car.” A familiar image and a very familiar car to real-world followers of the actor’s career but for Columbo and in the fictional universe of the murder plot, an emblem of Brenner’s energetic lifestyle - and of his all-consuming vanity, which is more than obvious to the Lieutenant not as a strength but as a weakness. By returning to the old photograph of a “younger and more beautiful” Brenner in his Korean air ace days, Columbo is twisting the proverbial knife, and for a fleeting moment at least Brenner appears to ponder the implications of Columbo’s question.

“What kind of a plane is that?” - this time, Brenner’s answer to the scripted question does agree with the visual evidence though the visual evidence does not agree with the scripted answer. Where the script specifies a young Brenner “in uniform,” smiling and standing in front of a Starfighter aircraft, the filmed version gives us Brenner in a rudimentary flight suit climbing into a Shooting Star. Strictly speaking, the answer is correct only if we are willing to entertain the possibility that Brenner may have had associations with the Canadian military. The designation he provides is the Canadian variant rather than the original name for the plane used by the US military: the pioneering T-33 Shooting Star was an early post-WWII jet trainer for the US Airforce and saw service in Korea before being superseded in the late 1960s by the more advanced Starfighter.

It has often been surmised, indeed, by the characters themselves, that for all its secretive shenanigans and promise of psychological depth in the title, Identity Crisis is perhaps most fittingly likened to a frivolous fairground ride: instead of a deep dive into the grim business of international espionage, we embark on a trip through Nelson Brenner's "spies and traitors" wonderland, complete with an elusive caricature of a villain, whose alternate identities include a sharp shooter, a business consultant, a diplomat, and a party animal with a lavish lifestyle and high stakes gambling habit to match.

A key component of every script in the series, and an indispensable part of Columbo’s investigative routine, is the obligatory inspection of the suspect’s home. What sets the scrutiny of Brenner’s property apart from similar moments of professional curiosity on the part of the Lieutenant - and the nonchalance of the villain who feels safe and magnanimous on his own turf - is the extent to which the boundaries between script and improvisation, performance and personality appear blurred, or even non-existent. The confusion arises precisely because we can compare the two: the well-established series format with its carefully scripted stage directions, the "blueprint for murder," and the liberties or otherwise that cast and crew take in bringing the formulaic instructions to life.

Impacting all subsequent action was the decision to use an actual location rather than a custom-built studio set as the site of Brenner's private HQ, any reference to specific details of the space envisioned by the writer had to be modified to fit the existing building: no overhanging upper-storey balcony but a "den" nevertheless in a corner of the spacious mansion (known at the time as the Enchanted Hill Estate, now demolished). In the script, Columbo is supposed to examine Brenner's gaming utensils and to zero in on the collection of poker chips linking Brenner to Henderson, the scapegoat Melville, and the mysterious Steinmetz. The association however is not pursued, and instead we see the introduction of a new recurring theme, also related to gambling but more specifically to Brenner's lifestyle and philosophy: Mah Jongg.

In his eagerness to present their encounter as an "informal" after-hours invitation, Brenner has underestimated his opponent, who reminds him that he isn’t quite off duty yet. Columbo, for his part, refuses to get on “personal” terms with the suspect, or be compromised by an oh-so innocent token of Brenner’s largesse in the shape of a borrowed ten-dollar bill (even though he is not averse to a glass of “red” when offered moments later). In the script, Columbo neglects to mention his on-duty status, and their conversation overall remains lifeless, impersonal, stale. The written dialogue betrays the "filler" purpose of the scene – before the grand denouement – but if the intention was to add complexity to the characters it would have failed had it been enacted as written.

Where the generic conversation has the two men engage in senseless small talk about their sleeping habits, the on-screen conversation takes a different turn. What are we to make, for instance, of Brenner's claim that the sumptuous painting on his wall shows The Discovery of America when it appears to depict nothing of the kind? The ensuing back and forth unfolds entirely from Brenner's unverifiable “explanation” rather than from any concrete detail in the picture itself.

The degree of abstraction in the dialogue reaches a certain comedic climax when Brenner tells Columbo to "relax, relax, take a minute," and then proceeds to demonstrate his ultra-slick "hydrophonic" [sic!] stereo system to the duly impressed Lieutenant. And when he invites Columbo to join him in his "den," the mental image of a would-be-predator pouncing on his prey inescapably suggests itself. At the same time, we are fully aware that it is always Columbo who has the upper hand, and that the roles of prey and predator are in fact reversed.

The chimera of Steinmetz, wholly fictional even in its own fictional universe, emerges as the most life-like of Brenner’s variously fanciful or downright murderous incarnations – a credit that must in part go to the superior skills of the LAPD’s equally fictitious team of airbrush wizards but the ultimate irony lies in the fact that Steinmetz comes alive not because he is a well-rounded recognizable human being but because he is recognizable – as a caricature of one: whether as Steinmetz or in his guise as a wildly successful management consultant, a Korean War hero or high-stakes gambler, Brenner’s ultra-gregarious “way out there” characters never fail to impress their intended audience while the deadly deals go undetected. Until they don’t.

The original “substrate” - the bottom layer - provides the plane and the body of Rex Reason, which must be joined up with the head of Nelson Brenner as he would have looked “15 years ago” (i.e. in 1960). The picture chosen to represent the facial features of the younger Brenner (though not his hair) is a 1965 portrait of the actor Patrick McGoohan, as he appeared in an episode of Danger Man (Loyalty Always Pays). Aside from the incorrect age gap, the new head is too large for its adopted body and sits uncomfortably on Rex Reason’s shoulders at an anatomically impossible angle (with barely a neck to speak of).

The contortions do not end there, however, as the youthful image of Nelson Brenner must clearly display his receding hairline – the third layer to be added to the composition. For the “enlarged” close-up that Columbo presents as “evidence” in the final “gotcha” scene, the hairline was completely redrawn with a new left-sided parting, and the entire image inexplicably rasterized. No changes were made to the face itself, its size or its angle in relation to the rest of the body.

The researchers at Universal Studios retrieved from their own library a suitably-themed photograph of a man in a flight suit posing in front of an early military jet. It would have been a perfect match in every detail except one: the aircraft in the picture is easily identifiable as a Lockheed T-33 “Shooting Star,” a legendary jet trainer first deployed in 1948, and not the ultra-modern, super-sonic “Starfighter” suggested by the script.

While it was safe to assume, in the era before home video, that the amount of scrutiny given to anything shown on screen, let alone a hand-held picture in the middle distance, would be minimal, leaving the production code and serial number for the classic sci-fi fantasy in place seems too obvious a mistake even by 1975 standards. Too obvious, perhaps, to be an inadvertent oversight?

The distinctive outline of the classic plane, at any rate, would have been difficult to ignore, and the scripted “Starfighter” becomes a (Canadian!) “Silver Star” in the spoken dialogue. With the T-33’s historical significance lending a certain gravitas to Brenner’s service record, the script’s vague references to a fifteen-year timeframe take a much more concrete shape in the on-screen dialogue. Not only do we learn that it was exactly 15 years ago but that the picture was taken “in Korea.”

You could be forgiven for thinking this blog has gone rogue and started posting random shots of 1950s sci-fi classics, but if you picture the body of actor Rex Reason in This Island Earth (1955) with the head of young Nelson Brenner, Columbo’s prime suspect from Identity Crisis (1975), you would be well on your way to discovering the secrets of the art department at Universal Studios. Tasked with manufacturing tangible pieces of evidence for Brenner to drop and Columbo to pick up (on), the creative team working on Nelson Brenner’s past had to come up with “an old photo of Brenner in uniform, standing in front of a fighter plane -- he is smiling. Camera moves in very tight on his hatless face.” A smiling Brenner is difficult enough to imagine without the added complication of him being in uniform and displaying his receding hairline.

“In war ... who dies? Usually we don't know. That's God's business.”

Sean Kelly to Michael O’Riordon in The Iron Harp

From the original stage production of the play in 1955 to the condensed 60-minute adaptation for Canadian television in 1959 (and beyond), the historical setting of Joseph O’Conor's The Iron Harp has been an aspect in need of explanation but never has it been in any way considered controversial. This may have been due to the author's shrewd foresight in offering a pre-scripted explanation - which did find its way, verbatim and, remarkably, unfiltered - into many a reviewer's summary of the previous night's events. O’Conor's pre-emptive move certainly paved the way for an open-minded appreciation of the play's artistic merits and possibly its philosophical message as well, but it was symptomatic of the pervasive spirit of disengagement that characterized the post-war period in Britain.

British theatre in the years following WWII was peculiar in its firmly apolitical stance, in part no doubt a consequence of the repressive regime maintained by the Lord Chamberlain who oversaw standards of “decency” in the public arena. Apart from the regular Shakespearean repertoire and a sprinkle of other “timeless” classics of the stage, the London West End (as well as provincial theatres up and down the land) depended on an endless supply of entirely wholesome and inoffensive psychological melodramas, murder mysteries, musicals, and innocuous comedies. Audiences in the mood for an evening of live entertainment could buy their tickets with confidence, safe in the knowledge that the “well-made” play of their choice would contain no surprises whatsoever.

The novelty of Joseph O’Conor's approach did not fail to impress the “provincial” critics who saw it first and went on to predict that the author's “courageous refusal” to deliver a “false happy ending” would prevent it becoming a West End success. With the benefit of hindsight we now know that their predictions were correct and Joseph O’Conor was not destined to change the course of British theatrical history. That distinction fell to a group of Angry Young Men waiting in the wings, rather than an individual writer, even though Samuel Beckett was already stirring controversy - as were the transformative women of the period, Shelagh Delaney and Joan Littlewood, whose work continues to inspire their successors.

What O’Conor did achieve, however, was a strong presence in the repertory circuit both as a dramatist and as an actor performing in his own play. While the Iron Harp never made it to London, in the four years following its Guildford premiere it toured the country and was adapted for television by Granada in the UK and the CBC in Canada. On both occasions, St Patrick's Day in 1958 and 1959 respectively, the play was chosen for its overtly Irish themes and yet the actual historical situation - in a contemporary interpretation, no less - was of little concern, ultimately, for an event of a largely celebratory, and vaguely commemorative nature that is the feast day of Ireland's patron saint.

The ritual celebration of Irish culture took centre stage against a diffuse background of heroic struggle and national awakening, perennial values to be upheld in the abstract while the enduring real-life consequence of past political actions remain conveniently, curiously, out of focus. No one could have expressed the paradox any more paradoxically, and without any apparent self-awareness, than the author himself when he declared that the timeless topic of his play was the tyranny of “military terrorism,” which could even be found in similar contemporary conflicts, such as Cyprus or Palestine. Could O’Conor have been any more to the point and at the same time completely missing (?) the sublime irony of the fact that he is demonstrating his “impartiality” in the Anglo-Irish conflict by citing two other disastrous examples of British military intervention on foreign soil.

When asked about his own personal experience of the conflict, Dublin-born Joseph O’Conor would reply that he was “only a toddler” at the time - a perfectly simple and completely truthful answer to a deceptively simple question which neither interviewer nor interviewee feel the need to query, as both would have been aware that the toddlers of 1920 – or those yet to be born - would have had parents whose lives would almost certainly have been touched by the violence and who would have been a living link to the events of less than 40 years earlier. Ancient history, if the playwright and his obliging critic are to be believed. Not quite so far away from a modern perspective, as some participants even of the 1916 uprising continued to dominate the Irish political landscape well into the 1970s and 1980s.

More than a century after the events of 1920, diverging interpretations of “what actually happened” still have the potential to divide communities - a stark reminder, if ever one was needed, that it is our human business to care who lives and who dies. A reminder, too, of the fact that human history in general, and Anglo-Irish history in particular, is in large parts a history of our collective failure to consider the consequences of our failure for generations to come.

Collective responsibility is a solution rarely called for in the realm of counterfactual speculation, which is surprisingly popular even (or especially?) among professional historians. With its emphasis on singular events as turning points, speculative fiction creates “what if” scenarios and allows those who pursue it to explore a past, a present, and a possible future away from the real-life human cost. Such alternate versions of (relatively) recent and contemporary history have always included speculations about the course of events in Ireland, where the conduct of one man (and one woman) to this day invites counterfactual debate.

“What if Charles Stewart Parnell and Catherine O’Shea had never met?”

So grossly “off topic” a question, it seems frivolous to quote it here but the very contrast it presents in outlook and philosophy when set against the Sean Kelly’s darkly utilitarian and rhetorical question, one is an open enquiry, the other closes in on itself. If anything, The Iron Harp sets out to demonstrate the futility of hope and the inevitability of fate. While O’Conor’s play rests on the “inevitability” of historical facts, we do not necessarily have to accept Kelly’s assertion that we cannot change the present or the future. The events resulting from the fact that Parnell and Catherine O’Shea met and fell in love do however form the prelude and the backdrop to the action in The Iron Harp.

The disgrace and death of Parnell in 1891 precipitated an immediate political crisis that split his Irish Parliamentary Party into a pro and an anti-Parnellite camp, alienated its political allies in the Liberal Party, who would themselves end up torn in two over the troublesome Irish Question, and delayed the passage of a bill granting Home Rule to Ireland for another quarter of a century. By the time the Tory-dominated House of Lords had used up its veto powers in 1914, a new generation of Irish nationalists had come of age, and World War I was about to be declared. The long-term consequences of Parnell's failure to wrest from the British government constitutional change by political means, and the reluctance, or outright refusal, of successive governments since the 1880s to reconsider the status of Ireland within the United Kingdom are woven into the fabric of the modern Republic of Ireland. In 2023 the Republic marked the centenary of its own civil war coming to an end - a war that was itself, it could be argued [as some alternative histories do], a consequence of the opportunities missed in Parnell's time.

Often referred to as the revolutionary period in Irish history, the decade between 1913 and 1923 saw Home Rule finally granted at the outset only for it to be suspended again as Britain went to war against the Axis Powers. With the island of Ireland thus remaining in the United Kingdom, thousands of Irish volunteers joined or continued to serve in the British armed forces. While their contribution to the war effort on the Allied side was generally endorsed by moderate Irish politicians, who believed that a demonstration of Irish solidarity would strengthen the case for self-governance, impatience was growing among the more radical elements. Violence erupted on the nationalist side in early 1916 when armed separatists occupied several government buildings in Dublin. The apparent vulnerability of the British forces elsewhere was an opportunity too good to miss, and the rebels raised their stakes: no longer were they satisfied with Home Rule under an English king, nothing short of full independence would suffice. After proclaiming an Irish Republic, however, the leaders of what became known as the Easter Rising of 1916 were arrested and executed under martial law. The iron-fist approach of the British authorities shocked Nationalists, but even more damaging was the effect on the general population who had by and large not supported the uprising.

The major offensive launched by the German High Command in the spring of 1918 was a last-ditch effort to stave off the inevitable before the arrival of American forces in the European theatre, but its short-term impact was dramatic enough for the British authorities to consider reversing the Irish exemption from conscription. Ultimately the war was won with the help of American volunteers rather than Irish conscripts, but the fact that it had been proposed only heightened already existing tensions. Nationalist sentiment surged during campaigning for the UK-wide general election held in December of 1918, the first such vote since 1910. Coming immediately in the wake of World War I, it saw a whole new generation of young Irishmen and – women - voting for something more radical than Parnell’s careful constitutionalism.

Indeed, nothing could have been further from the minds of the rebellious activists who received the largest share of the vote in every corner of the country. One notable exception to this near-unanimous result was Ulster, where the Protestant and pro-British majority elected unionist politicians to sit in the Westminster Parliament. The reasons for the distinctly Northern Irish identity in (parts of) Ulster are complex and deeply rooted in the close historical, political, and economic ties the region has shared with Great Britain for centuries. Elsewhere on the island, visions of the future left no room at all for the British “colonizers” in a proudly independent nation.

The negotiated nationalism of a Parnell had given way to the uncompromising republicanism of a new political party, Sinn Fein, whose elected Members of the British Parliament did not take their seats in Westminster but formed a separate Dublin assembly instead. This one-party assembly nevertheless considered itself the legitimate parliament of the republic proclaimed in 1916, and it recruited its “official” fighting force from the ranks of the “Irish Volunteers,” a Nationalist/Republican militia formed to “defend” against similar groupings on the Unionist/Loyalist side. In the play, Michael O’Riordan alludes to having fought alongside Sean Kelly in the 1916 uprising, most likely as a member of this group, now renamed the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

On 21 January 1919 the renegade “Irish Parliament” (Dáil Éireann) convened in Dublin, while at the same time two policemen were killed in an unauthorized IRA ambush. The incident may not have triggered the events that followed but it is today seen as the beginning of a low-level armed conflict that never reached the threshold for open warfare but was hardly any less violent. It pitched paramilitary organisations fighting on the separatist side against the defenders of the status quo, which in most cases meant the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).

The government in London was reluctant to be drawn into what appeared to be a home-made Irish problem. Violent clashes continued throughout 1919; at the same time civilian activists staged a campaign of civil disobedience, encouraging the population to shun British authorities and institutions, and to patronize “mock” Irish equivalents instead. The campaign demonstrated to Republicans the viability of an imagined Irish state while it demoralized the representatives of the existing arrangement. The rising number of casualties gave the grim news from Ireland added urgency and put pressure on the British Government. To make up for the losses, finally, recruits from “across the water” were sent to reinforce the RIC, but by the end of 1919 it became clear that manpower alone would not quell the insurgency. A more systematic approach was needed, and this meant that a whole new branch of auxiliary forces was created from the vast pool of demobbed (and unemployed) British servicemen, officially to “assist” the Irish police. First deployed to Ireland in March of 1920, one such body gained a reputation for brutality and lack of discipline. The Black and Tans were so named after their makeshift uniforms, and these men in turn gave their name to the Black and Tan War, otherwise known as the Irish War of Independence.

The Iron Harp

We’re all in prison together, Johnny, one way or the other.

Act 1

Outwardly, Joseph O'Conor's play is a simple tale of love and loss in times of war: set in rural Ireland in early April of 1920, the action takes place on the property of an English industrialist whose mansion has been taken over by a contingent of IRA volunteers. Their leader is Michael O'Riordan, a gifted poet-musician in civilian life and conveniently the peace-time manager of the Englishman's estate. Michael has recently been wounded in action; now blind as a result he is no longer on active duty but still responsible for an English prisoner of war. Being a man of his word, Captain John Tregarthen has made no attempt to escape, earning Michael's trust and eventually his friendship. He also earns the friendship and love of Michael’s cousin Molly Kinsella, with whom he spends long days roaming the extensive grounds of his idyllic prison. Dreaming of a future life together, the lovers are oblivious to the feelings of their “best friend” – who ends up sacrificing his love for Molly in what he hopes will be a lasting gesture of selflessness only to find that Fate intervenes, with devastating consequences for them all.

Completing the quartet of characters is the dark and “indistinct” figure of IRA commander Sean Kelly, a dark and "indistinct" figure who emerges from the shadows to immediately assert his authority not only in military matters but - crucially, and disturbingly - in those of the heart as well. Specifically, it is the heart of Michael O’Riordan that Kelly claims to know better than O’Riordan himself. As a flesh-and-blood character Kelly is difficult to pin down: cold and calculating by his own admission, he expresses admiration for Michael's hot-blooded fighting spirit. Michael's own startled response to Kelly entering "like Nemesis himself" is ambiguous at best, and even his description of Kelly as a “good friend” comes on the back of a warning to Johnny that "he won't like you."

When Kelly tells Michael that he has never been wrong and does not know what it means to feel regret, the sense of foreboding is inescapable, yet Michael never seems to give in to the negativity emanating from his old wartime comrade who admonishes him to see his friends “as they really are” and not as “you want to see them.” Ironically, Michael refuses to see an enemy in John Tregarthen, but he is equally stubborn in applying the same criteria of honour, loyalty, and friendship to Sean Kelly, who seems troubled by this flaw in Michael’s character: "you love people too much."

Michael's emotional warmth stands in stark contrast to Kelly's impersonation of infallibility - which Michael seems to accept as a token of his friend's unassailable integrity. He continues to defer to Kelly's judgment when a messenger arrives with bad news from the front: three IRA fighters have been killed in skirmishes with British forces, and reprisals must be carried out. Twisting the metaphorical knife in the very real emotional wound, Kelly as the commanding officer nominates blind Michael to be the impartial instrument of God's justice. Forced to select three victims for execution, Michael all but collapses when one of the chosen names is that of Captain John Tregarthen.

Act 2

After he has persuaded Johnny to flee the country and reunite with Molly back in England, Michael is left alone to guard the now empty house. Blind and unable to defend himself, Michael is powerless against two marauding Black & Tans who break into the property and proceed to taunt and abuse the solitary occupant. It does not take them long to realize their victim is an IRA member rather than a civilian enjoying certain protections. Further violence is prevented only by the surprise return of Captain Tregarthen, armed and in uniform, who holds the attacker at gunpoint until Kelly and his entourage arrive to take the men away. Where any other human being would have expressed relief or gratitude at the discovery that the life of his friend has been saved, Kelly’s reaction is characteristically impassive, betraying, if anything, a degree of irritation at the unforeseen complication that has shown the condemned prisoner – the enemy – to be capable of compassion and self-sacrifice in saving the life of his friend. Human qualities that Kelly explicitly claims not to possess. As if to prove the point, he responds with the formal announcement of Tregarthen’s impending execution.

The order is to be carried out within three days, enough time for Kelly to travel to headquarters - and return with a firing squad. But first he must interrogate the captured Tans. While Kelly is thus occupied, Molly manages to convince the love of her life to take her with him. Johnny only agrees to the plan on the promise that Michael will convince Kelly to rescind the execution. If Johnny and Molly can make their way to Belfast on the early morning goods train, and from there to England, all will be well. Michael knows how to distract the guards, and Molly can bribe the train driver to let Johnny jump aboard. Three loud whistles will give the all-clear. With hopes of future happiness rekindled, Molly and Johnny each rush off to their respective tasks, and Michael is left alone with three empty glasses that he cannot see – a detail that does not escape Kelly’s notice as he re-joins Michael to formally accept his plea for clemency. Which he says he will duly submit to "the general," but in his estimation the chances of success are slim. "For God's sake, don't build up hope," he tells Michael before agonizing – to himself – over how to soften the blow for Michael: by bringing the execution forward and keeping it secret, he is certain he can spare Michael the pain and the guilt of having to witness the event.

Act 3

In the pre-dawn hours of the following day, Michael and Johnny are wide awake and waiting for the sentries to change and the train to whistle. Thinking the house empty and their enemies far away, they pass the time in a dreamlike state of high anxiety, reciting heroic poems and melancholy songs in whispering voices, so as not to miss the stroke of six to mark the end of their nightmare and the beginning of a new life – only to see Kelly standing in the door, with orders for Johnny to be executed at dawn, 24 hours earlier than they were told originally. Michael's world is falling apart, he pleads with Kelly, he begs him to show mercy, but an almost equally distressed Kelly reminds him that "I have never promised you hope." Johnny declines the comfort of a priest or minister and is led away to meet his fate offstage while, also offstage, Molly will be waiting in vain for the love of her life to board a train that will never arrive.

Left on stage for their final confrontation are Michael and his Nemesis, both knowing full well that nothing they can do or say will change what Kelly might term the preordained outcome of their efforts. To Michael's accusation of "trickery" (by which he means Kelly's surprise return before the agreed time), Kelly offers no subterfuge, no defence, and no evasion. Instead, he says, Michael’s agony is self-inflicted: it was, in fact, his own stubborn insistence on hoping against hope that has now led to anguish and pain. The only way for Michael to end all suffering, Kelly explains, is to give up hope. Unless he manages to see past the private pain of the moment and becomes a distant observer, Michael will forever be "tortured by hope."

Here Kelly is borrowing from the Conte Cruel tradition made famous by Edgar Allan Poe but named after a collection of short stories by the French symbolist writer Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. A useful definition of the genre is that it concerns "any story whose conclusion exploits the cruel aspects of the irony of fate." Not only does Kelly borrow the concept, and the title from Villiers' tale, The Torture of Hope, he even recounts the plot to underline his point: a hapless victim of the Inquisition escapes his prison cell only to stumble into the arms of the Chief Inquisitor. The lesson for Michael is that, like the victim, he keeps on hoping for release only to suffer defeat over and over again. There are no similarities, however, between himself and the sadistic Inquisitor, Kelly says: his mission is to ease Michael's suffering, not to prolong it.

We are given no reason to doubt Kelly’s sincerity, but neither can we reconcile the apparent contradiction between his declared intention and putting Michael’s best friend before a firing squad. If Kelly wants to end all suffering, as he says, surely, a good start would be to save Captain Tregarthen’s life? It is the argument that Michael himself is trying to make, by reminding Kelly of his god-like powers. Michael’s understanding of those powers differs fundamentally from Kelly’s own. Michael’s life-affirming principle of hope and Kelly’s seductive all-consuming fatalism are the two opposing philosophies that take centre stage in the final scene – while John Tregarthen dies a largely symbolic death offstage.

Johnny’s death is symbolic in that it is not the tragedy at the heart of the play. Michael O’Riordon is the conventional male protagonist whose existential crisis we are witnessing; Michael is unable to prevent the execution of his best friend; and to make that very point, his best friend must die. Michael’s blindness contributes to this failure in the course of the play but read as a metaphor it turns Michael into “one of us.” His blindness leaves him vulnerable to attack and it echoes our own sense of powerlessness in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. The reverse, however, is also true: being blind, and being a poet, puts Michael in the illustrious company of the Blind Bard, an archetype of Western literature since at least the (mythical) time of Homer: the blind singer/seer whose “inner vision” surpasses that of sighted humanity. His Irish equivalent – and explicit model for Michael - is the (dwarf) Harper of Finn, whose iron-stringed instrument has the power to move its audience to tears. Michael O’Riordon is both vulnerable and endowed with the superpower of emotional insight – fundamentally human qualities that Kelly admires in Michael, and which he admits he does not possess.

Kelly is an abstract concept in human form; even while he is evidently the cause of human suffering, in his denial he appears to be channelling the sadistic Inquisitor. The apparent contradiction is of our own making, though: Kelly is Cruel Fate personified. He represents that which we like to imagine as the source of all our woes - the betrayals, the injustices, the disappointments which inevitably end in what we define as tragedy and what to the rest of the universe, that hostile universe, is of no consequence whatsoever. If we substitute “hostile” with “indifferent,” then Kelly becomes the antithesis to Michael’s humanity – his indifference is as inhuman as the infinite, indifferent universe. Conversely, Michael is not concerned with an infinite universe; his frame of reference is on a human scale, and very finite. When Kelly challenges Michael to take his place and adopt his abstract, God-like perspective on life, death, and the universe, Michael does reject the responsibility – but also the indifference required for the position. If the promise of a pain-free existence did not convince Michael to abandon hope, Kelly's failure to shame him into admitting defeat is a testament, at the very least, to human perseverance: we will forever be prolonging the agony to delay the inevitable.

The events of 6 December 1890 were neither preordained nor were they premeditated. Nothing that transpired on the day was inevitable or irreversible: participants chose to stay in character, and to act out their roles in what would eventually be described by biographers and historians as the Parnell Tragedy (Jules Abels, 1966).

Everyone at the time would have been aware of the historical significance of their actions, if not the long-term consequences - excluding of course, the one female member of the cast who could not possibly have known what she was doing. By dint of this congenital deficiency she would also quite naturally be blamed for causing "Ireland's misfortune." Simple and satisfying in terms of its mass market appeal, feminine impulsivity does little to explain the supposedly rational decisions taken by the men around her in the name of patriotism and political expediency - which far from producing an amenable solution served only to exacerbate the crisis. Whereas the exact circumstances and full cast of characters have faded over time the larger-than-life figure of Charles Stewart Parnell still towers over the events of 6 December 1890 as the one man who could have had it all - and lost it all.

Sixty-four years later, the Fall of Parnell inspired an episode of the BBC's "experimental" television series You Are There which set out to present the known historical facts, faithfully, but with an added dimension unique to the new medium: actors would impersonate the key personnel as in a conventional re-enactment. While going about their "business," however, they would be interviewed by modern television reporters. The curious anachronism underlined the artificiality of the concept; it meant the programme was deliberately drawing attention to itself which would have been an unwanted distraction, for You Are There it was the defining feature. Neither the programme nor its - fictitious - journalists were interested in the exploration of alternative histories or in-depth character studies: the point was to demonstrate the possibilities of "live" television, ironically, in a simulated setting. Fact and fiction are trading places as the reality of 1890 becomes the subject of a 1950s fantasy, and the medium of the future interrogates the evidence of the past. For the actors it would have been a challenge to navigate between imaginative portrayal of a fully formed human being and the faithful rendition of the intrinsically incomplete historical record.

The historical record states that Charles Stewart Parnell was born in 1846. The son of a Protestant Irish landowner and an American mother was not naturally predestined to champion the cause of destitute Catholic tenant farmers; indeed, nothing in his early life pointed to any such leanings. As an aristocratic country gentleman he had nothing to fear and everything to gain from the firm imperial rule exerted by the British Crown over the Island of Ireland.

And yet it was Parnell, the English-educated man of pedigree, who emerged as the voice of the starving rural population. Having decided to enter politics for reasons that are still unclear, he found his calling as the Westminster MP for County Meath not in the defence of privilege but in the vocal support - initially for land reform and then increasingly for Irish nationalism ("Home Rule"). Over the next five years Parnell gained a reputation and a following as a fiery orator back in Ireland and a force to be reckoned with in the House of Commons, where is name became synonymous with the new parliamentary tactic of "obstructionism." If the English politicians could not be moved to act in Ireland's interest Parnell vowed to meddle in English affairs. And meddle - or obstruct - he did. After a century of inaction and neglect, the Irish Question seemed relevant again, if only because its proponents made it impossible for English laws to be passed. Parnell seemed to thrive on his tactical manoeuvring which he was prepared to carry to painful extremes, on multiple occasions – including arrest and imprisonment, at the risk of damaging his already fragile state of health.

By 1880 Parnell controlled both the radical grassroots movement in Ireland and the parliamentary representation of Irish interests in London. The position made him a frequent dinner guest in the homes of friends and allies, where on several occasions he also enjoyed the hospitality of Mrs Katharine O'Shea, the English wife of a fellow Irish MP, who was sympathetic not only to the cause but to the man who personified the struggle. Mrs O’Shea had a discreet arrangement with her husband, Captain William “Willie” O’Shea, the Member for County Clare and Galway: their marriage would exist on paper only for the benefit of Willie’s career; while he conducted his business in London she would reside at their official family residence and entertain important visitors. Parnell would often stay as a guest of the family - to recuperate after gruelling campaigns in Ireland, was the official explanation given.

For the next ten years the couple conducted an illicit affair that produced four children and saw the singled-minded saboteur of the political system lead a double life away from Parliament and in the company of Katharine O’Shea. The relationship was not as one might assume a tempestuous whirlwind romance but a curiously claustrophobic still-life of Victorian domesticity - an alternate, self-contained reality where Parnell and his "Queenie" could act out their fantasy of living simply as husband and wife. Their apparent longing for simplicity may also help to explain the ease with which they expected to lead two entirely separate and parallel lives, apparently unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the inherent paradox and inevitable complication.

In the political arena Parnell was for most of the 1880s an extremely effective manipulator of moods and opinions, always weighing and adjusting the demands of Irish nationalists against the calls for the use of force from the British press, the public, and its politicians. Anyone looking for a core belief or deeply held conviction would have been disappointed by the vagueness of Parnell's own stated aims - which he used to great advantage because it allowed him to gain the confidence of the British side and the respect of his own following. As a small but significant minority, the Irish (or Home Rule) Party under Parnell's skilful machinations was able to make demands in return for the votes it lent to either one of the two dominant forces in 19th century British politics: the Tory (Conservative) Party or the slightly more reform-oriented Liberal Party.

Parnell’s elusiveness became his trademark: the less he said in public, the fewer appearances he made in Parliament, the taller he grew in stature. In 1887 he was accused of having endorsed the murders of two British politicians in Dublin. When the alleged endorsement turned out to be a forgery two years later, the popular reaction was one of relief and renewed admiration for the noble freedom fighter who had been so horribly maligned. By 1889, it seemed as if nothing could go wrong for Charles Stewart Parnell.

Home Rule seemed within reach when, in May of 1889, Katharine O'Shea learned of the death of a wealthy aunt whose fortune she was to inherit. The additional funds would have been a welcome boost to Katharine's finances had it not been for her husband's unexpected interference. Captain William “Willie” O’Shea chose this moment to strike, possibly to exact revenge, more likely to improve his own pecuniary situation. And thus, Captain O'Shea went ahead and contested the will, citing his wife’s infidelity, and his intention to divorce her. Surprised but hardly alarmed, the lovers welcomed what they thought would be an opportunity for them to make their relationship official, the sooner the better.

 From the very beginning their affair had been an open secret in political circles, but the Captain’s announcement put the fact of their adultery in the public domain. With their case not due in court for at least another twelve months (i.e. late 1890), Katharine and Parnell were powerless to stop the scandal from spreading, and their silence on the matter allowed grievances to fester. No public statement was ever published, nor did the couple make any public gesture of remorse. They did launch a half-hearted and unsuccessful counterclaim not to deny the adultery but to accuse Captain O’Shea of adultery as well, presumably to shame the Captain into withdrawing his allegation.

For an entire year the unresolved state of their private affairs overshadowed Parnell’s political battle; it affected his health and continued to corrode confidence among his allies in parliament and at home but most significantly among the ranks of the Liberal Party led by Prime Minister William Gladstone. Ironically, and with tragic consequences for Katharine and Parnell, the earliest and most vociferous condemnations came not from the Catholic Church (both Parnell and Katharine were Protestants) but from the other “Nonconformist” denominations outside the established Church of England, which was traditionally a preserve of the Tory (Conservative) Party. An influential group among the Nonconformists were Methodists, whose large working and middle-class following had found in Gladstone’s Liberal Party their political home.

When the divorce eventually came through in November 1890 (decree nisi), Parnell was branded a “convicted adulterer” but also won the legal right to marry Katharine after completion of the obligatory six-month waiting period (decree absolute). The salacious - and uncontested – testimony offered in the course of the trial was, however, fresh on the minds of his party colleagues who were meeting to decide on his future as party leader a mere fortnight after the court’s decision. Gladstone had already warned Irish MPs of the danger to their alliance, the implication being that the Liberal Party would lose the support of its Nonconformist base if it continued to cooperate with a “convicted adulterer.” The message was clear: Irish MPs had no hope of winning Home Rule with Parnell as their leader. They needed the good will and legislative might of a strong Liberal government - and Liberal voters had strong ideas about marriage and adultery. Gladstone did, in effect, issue an ultimatum to Irish parliamentarians: lose your leader or lose Ireland.

Party activists in Ireland meanwhile re-elected Parnell as leader of the Home Rule Party before news of the ultimatum reached their shores, creating an awkward situation which allowed Parnell to claim he had the backing of the party rank and file, while Gladstone faced the beginnings of a split in his own party over the very issue of Irish Home Rule.

Parnell promptly refused to stand down, declaring instead that he considered the matter of Mrs O’Shea’s divorce closed and that, far from being a friend of Ireland, Gladstone had betrayed their cause. Whether or not the accusation was based in fact [substance] hardly mattered in the greater scheme of things. It was Parnell's word against that of the Prime Minister, and a decision had to be made: should the Irish Home Rule Party defy Gladstone and keep Parnell as their charismatic leader, or should the convicted adulterer be deposed in return for English concessions?

On 6 December 1890, after seemingly endless negotiations, Irish parliamentarians convened another marathon session to break the deadlock without destroying the party, its leader, or their country. Obstacles proved insurmountable as Parnell himself chaired the meeting and overruled any motion calling for a vote. Members present at the meeting noted his increasingly autocratic behaviour with concern and were alarmed by the apparent disintegration of his mental and physical identity. What they were witnessing may have been, on one level, the self-evisceration of a disgraced politician, but the concrete struggle of the individual to control his own destiny, and the narrative about it, had gained additional layers of meaning that transcend literal explanations for Parnell's fate.

The extent to which he did control the mythology of his downfall as well as his subsequent (and posthumous) apotheosis is a fascinating subject for debate: was he drawing attention to the opposing forces behind his identity or trying to deflect attention away from his failure to reconcile the two when he claimed that Gladstone and the Liberals were the true enemies of the rightful Irish claim to self-determination? No longer was the crisis a moral dilemma but a question of national pride. The private transgression becomes an affair of state - no longer is it a moral dilemma but a question of national pride: if it was up to the English to dictate who is to be their leader, then Gladstone truly was the master of the Irish Party.

Parnell's rhetorical masterstroke elevated his imminent ouster as party leader to an affront of international proportions by blurring the very boundaries he had otherwise hoped to maintain between the private man and his public persona. It also drew an instant reaction from the assembled party colleagues. "Who is to be the mistress of the party?” put paid to Parnell's noble-minded aspirations and reminded those present once again of the sordid scandal and the root cause of their troubles. Unable to vote the party leader out of office, 44 of his fellow members stood up and left the room, 26 remained with Parnell. It is this moment You Are There chose to dramatize, for the sheer symbolism of the scene: the leader without majority, his party crippled for decades to come. The Liberal Prime Minister ruling unencumbered.

Parnell's story, the story of Ireland's struggle, could have ended here. Or it could have ended differently. If each of the protagonists had chosen a different course of action. Parnell, for his part, chose to fulfil what he must have thought of as his destiny: within hours of the party meeting that left him - it must be remembered - still nominally undefeated, he embarked on a tour of Ireland to speak at rallies and unite the crowds behind the candidates he chose to stand in by-elections. Any hopes of regaining the momentum lost in London were slim at best; the winter weather and Parnell's failing health reduced the schedule and, compounded by his ever more radical oratory, crowds became more difficult to control, and enthusiasm for the struggle was waning. But just as the chances of a concrete, real-life settlement were growing increasingly remote, the idea of the struggle captured the imagination of contemporary and subsequent generations, and Parnell became its idealized figurehead - not without considerable work from Parnell himself, who cultivated an air of steely nerves, superhuman strength, and emotional detachment in public while being fiercely protective of his privacy. The polar opposites that defined his existence, through their very incompatibility, presented an impossible conundrum: unable to reconcile the two, incapable of compromise, the Parnell machine was at a crisis point.

Campaigning in Ireland continued throughout the summer but none of the chosen candidates were victorious. Parnell and Katharine finally became a married couple on 25 June 1891, but their life together as husband and wife only lasted a little over three months and ended with Parnell’s death on 6 October 1891. They were both 45 years old at the time.

In poetic terms, Parnell had committed the ultimate sin of the tragic hero: to think of himself as indispensable. In the eyes of his supporters, and presumably his own, Parnell had become the personification of an idea, an idea that without him was thought to be non-viable. Parnell and Irish Home Rule were interchangeable; the means and the end had merged into one. Much like the fatal flaw carried by every tragic hero in the history of human endeavour, Parnell's hubris made him both unique and universal, gave him superhuman powers and made him vulnerable - not in a simple case of crime and punishment but in the pursuit of a noble mission that is ultimately larger than the man who has internalized it as his own.

To paraphrase Hilary Mantel, we tend to fictionalize those who can no longer speak for themselves; in Parnell's case there is perhaps a greater need than with many of his peers to interpret where we cannot explain, and to speculate were we cannot know.

Any household equipped to receive the television service of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1954 would almost certainly have done so on a “table-top” set not unlike the moderately priced and now iconic “TV-22,” which featured a circular 9-inch Mullard “television picture tube” capable of displaying the 405 lines its electron beam had to travel to draw the “high definition” images coming from London’s Alexandra Palace or the Birmingham transmitter in Sutton Coldfield. First manufactured in 1950 by Bush Radio, then under the umbrella of the Rank Corporation, the Bakelite-clad receiver came with connections for a dipole aerial and AC mains power, and no option at all to change the channel. What today would be considered a serious limitation was in fact a pragmatic decision as long as the country's airwaves remained limited to a single channel. (The set would have been ready for three additional channels which were proposed but never implemented.)

Growing audiences and an expanding schedule forced the new medium to create new content if it intended to fulfil its mission as a public broadcaster to “inform, educate, and entertain.” While the BBC's radio service had famously been on the air since 1922 and earned its merits during the war, television remained for a long time an experimental technology of questionable utility. Early programming therefore relied heavily on the spoken word and the conventions of live theatre, including the singular, and ephemeral, nature of each performance: very little was pre-recorded (on film), and once a programme was broadcast it ceased to exist. Much of the BBC's live programming and even material recorded on tape is now lost; what we do have from the era before and just after the introduction of magnetic tape in 1956 was routinely filmed off the television screen in a process known as kinescoping. Preservation of its output did not rank among the BBC's priorities; recording everything on film would have required vast resources dwarfing the convenience of "canned" content: repeat showings on the BBC often meant repeat performances – bringing the original cast and crew back to the studio was, after all, a well-rehearsed operation and more efficient than any existing technology. Similar traditional arrangements continued well beyond the arrival of effective technical solutions.

The lack of definition, in every sense, at first prevented the new medium from being recognized as such not only by those who worked in it but also the sceptical consumers into whose living rooms the images would be beamed. The privacy of the viewing experience would prove decisive: like its theatrical rival, television was visual, and it was live. With radio it shared the spontaneity of the live broadcast and a large audience that would not need to come together in a single room. Film could offer none of the above, certainly not in combination, but where television (and radio) opted for intimacy on the small screen, film went big and promoted the communal experience – a very basic, fundamental division which remained in place for more than half a century and is only now being challenged by the most recent innovations in streaming and subscription services.

In 1954 the BBC, as the sole operator of the new technology in the United Kingdom, looked to other pioneers abroad for suitable formats with which to fill their expanding schedules. In the United States, commercial television was in full swing by the early 1950s, with major broadcasters such as NBC and CBS competing for viewers and, more importantly, advertising partners – sponsors in the terminology of the scheme developed for radio that had businesses pay for the right to name an entire programme (today's wealth of "archival" recordings from the era is a direct result of the legal requirement to provide proof to the customers that their money was well-spent). Here, too, tried and tested radio content was being adapted for television and, in the process, began to take on hybrid features. One promising concept on the CBS network that appealed to the BBC decision makers was a former radio show turned televisual experiment: You Are There fused (fictitious) contemporary radio reportage with historical re-enactments – easily done on radio but more challenging – and more rewarding – as a live spectacle for audiences to see. Not quite ready, in technical terms, to rival the offerings of the film industry but arguably an alternative to a night out at the theatre, the "night in" promised to become an event in its own right.

You Are There set out to transport the viewer back in time and to bring them face to face with historical figures, who are moreover prepared to pause and be interviewed by modern-day (all-male, often real-life) TV news correspondents. The deliberate anachronism of the programme, examining a fictionalized version of history with the most modern tools available and presenting it to the viewer in the privacy of his own living room was the message and the medium rolled into one: the historical subject under scrutiny was by no means chosen at random or pre-determined by the American creators; licensees around the world dramatized historical events from their own national perspectives. Only seven episodes were produced for the BBC in 1954, none of which exist today. Press reviews and summaries confirm the use of exterior location sequences pre-recorded on film to supplement the live performances in the Alexandra Palace studio, but we can only speculate on the precise treatment of each subject.

Anyone visiting the headquarters of the Rank Organization at Pinewood in early January of 1957 would have found the studios operating at peak capacity, with films like High Tide at Noon, The Gypsy and the Gentleman, and Hell Drivers in pre- or post-production and others, like Zarak, on limited or general release. Hundreds of employs would have been toing and froing between soundstages, workshops and dressing rooms, scene docks and exterior lots, working hard to help create, from scratch, the Shakespearean "stuff" our dreams are made of. The irony of the inversion, from Prospero's memento mori to an artificial fantasy sold to millions was perhaps not lost on Rank executives and those who laboured under them.

Far more than the actual product, it was the marketing of the material, the selling of the dream, that proved to be Rank's lasting legacy. The bustling beehive may have impressed on the awe-struck visitor an image Rank were keen to project, of a globe-spanning entertainment empire, but the perfect picture belied a reality of decline underneath the shiny façade at the precise point in time, ironically, when the hiring of artists and other personnel reached its peak. The abundance of available talent, and the urgent need for Rank to advertise its capabilities, allowed the publicity department not only to mount Rank's own promotional strategy but to define the - albeit brief - era of Hollywood gloss in the British film industry.

Central to Rank's strategy as a self-styled entertainment empire was the photographic image. In addition to the obvious moving pictures this also comprised still photography, and here it was the easily mass-manufactured 8x10 studio portrait that lent itself in particular to advertising purposes. Reproduced in their hundreds, if not thousands, they would be distributed to advertising agencies, various media operations, sponsoring partners, and Rank-owned cinema chains to beguile potential audiences - so successfully, in fact, that they began to be appreciated in their own right, or as one marketing executive remarked, it was rarely if ever that one saw on the silver screen the "luscious confectionery" beckoning from the display boxes outside.

What made Rank's displays so uniquely irresistible in the eyes of adoring fans and competitors alike was their sheer visual impact: Cornel Lucas joined Rank in 1951, and his position at the time was something of a novelty - and considered an outrageous extravagance in an industry which continued for the most part to rely on hiring theatrical photographers on a film-by-film basis or as needed. Cornel Lucas, by contrast, was employed full time, with his own studio facility, a permanent staff of several electricians, hairdressers, and make-up artists, as well as an endless supply of sitters under varying degrees of duress. The free-lance colleagues of earlier times had been theatrical photographers in the tradition of 18th and 19th century theatrical painters of ornate tableaux, and we see the tradition continue certainly in the theatre but also in "staged" film stills until well into the 1950s and sometimes beyond (e.g. All Night Long, 1961).

Using a large-format Kodak "Model B" view camera, Cornel Lucas embarked on a busy schedule of three to four sessions for each day of the working week, helping the actors develop their on-screen character (experimentation was to an extent encouraged) and, crucially, helping them feel at ease with their Rank-assigned persona. In a view camera, the lens forms an inverted image on a ground-glass screen at the back. The photographer then has to calibrate light, shadow, and general composition to achieve the desired exposure, under a dark hood, in advance and from an upside-down, full-open aperture preview of what will hopefully be the final result. Once he is satisfied, the glass-plate is replaced with an 8x10 sheet of Kodak Super XX Panchromatic black & white film for maximum texture and tonal range. Other than cost and ease of reproduction, it is unclear if any artistic considerations influenced Rank's preference for monochrome photography, or whether it was a conscious decision on the part of the photographer to discard the well-worn utensils and standard techniques of previous decades.

Cornel Lucas has stripped away the scenery, and even most of the actor's own tools, by focusing the camera on his subject's face to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Neither can our eyes stray far from where the lens is pointed. The actor and his audience are locked in an intimate exchange of glances; nevertheless, it is an illusion of intimacy - and a one-way mirror for the actor. The captured character remains behind the fourth wall, in a state of public solitude. Constantin Stanislavski's definition of the actor's task before his audience would seem to suggest there is such a thing as a perfect moment that can be captured in a single photograph when in fact the opposite is the case: developing the character is a gradual process and Cornel Lucas has documented the journey over multiple sessions and in dozens of photographs, each capturing a unique moment along the way.

The exceptional, from Rank's perspective: excessive, abandon with which Cornel Lucas went to work on "G Redman" in January of 1957 has indeed remained something of an outlier in the Organisation's handling of publicity and in the industry as a whole. Against a backdrop of unlikely circumstances (rationing of fuel and paper, dwindling audiences), the sophisticated and, yes, laborious studio session was allowed to flourish for a brief period before it gave way to the more dynamic approach of the 1960s which introduced small-format, hand-held action shots, and new notions of immediacy and authenticity. By 1959, the Rank Organization as a Hollywood-style production company had ceased to exist, and with it disappeared the need - and the demand - for posed portraits. Free-lance still photographers now worked on the set alongside the actors, who could even be entirely oblivious of their presence.

[expect he has lost most of his shirt by now and some nice whip weals will add to charm of back view]

Blacklisted by Senator Joseph McCarthy for alleged "anti-American activities" and unable to work in Hollywood, Joseph Losey along with dozens of like-minded actors, directors, and creative personnel fled to Britain in the 1950s. Since before WWII, the trans-Atlantic relationship between the two entertainment industries had been a complicated one but in the prevailing climate of disintegration and consolidation, the influx of major (and minor) Hollywood talent was warmly welcomed. The Rank Organisation cultivated a reputation for going on indiscriminate spending sprees but invariably found itself having to release its expensive acquisitions for lack of meaningful employment.

Among the post-war Rank recruits, content creators were the exception, and this affected the quality, if not the quantity, of the Organisation's cinematic output. When Joseph Losey finally did receive his first assignment, to direct The Gypsy and the Gentleman, it bore the hallmarks of a case in point: no records have as yet emerged that would explain the somewhat eccentric choice, for the politically left-leaning Losey, of a lavish costume piece about the demise of a weak-willed nobleman at the hands of his ruthless gypsy lover - unless one is inclined to see in the material a parable of Western decadence, as Marxist observers have done.

While a strictly ideological interpretation produces interesting speculative conclusions, perhaps the more productive approach is a purely visual one: dismissive of the subject-matter and unable to shape the material to his liking, Losey never attempts to explain his characters or their motivations. The result is a very deliberate focus on the process of telling the story rather than why it is being told, and Losey turns to the expertise of the painter and art school teacher Richard MacDonald to direct what he would later describe as a study in style. Losey and MacDonald subsequently collaborated on a number of films but it is in the development of The Gypsy and the Gentleman that their idea of "pre-design" begins to emerge.

And concrete shapes are Richard MacDonald's primary concern: long before the cast arrived for initial rehearsals in June of 1957, MacDonald was creating actual three-dimensional spaces (rather than trompe-l'oeil, i.e. painted, theatrical backdrops) for a quasi-authentic Regency environment. Faithfully executed by the Pinewood workshops, the sets delivered exactly what the director had ordered: a static tableau of period décor, unlikely to interfere with the dynamic action of the living, breathing human beings assembled to animate the scenery. Ideally, it would have been assumed, they would somehow combine to form a meaningful whole. The dynamism of the human component and the critical role of capturing the perfect - moving - image is not lost on MacDonald. From the final shooting script of 12 April 1957 he prepared a frame-by-frame storyboard pre-visualizing camera angles, editing suggestions and emendations where the script omits important visual clues.

The final dramatic coach chase in SCENE 226 lacks precisely such clues. It has Jess and Belle racing after the vehicle containing Deverill's sister Sarah - and their last hope of swindling the young woman out of her rightful inheritance. Jess deftly dispatches Sarah's fiancé before catching up to Belle's commandeered coach. The script describes how Jess clings to the back of the coach, then climbs over the top and joins his partner on the box, taking the reins from her. Translating the verbal instructions into "actionable" images, the sketch artist is faced with crucial choices: whose point of view will we be sharing, where are we in relation to the characters, what are the characters doing and how are they doing it?

In MacDonald's concept the camera follows the coach and allows us to watch Jess, from a slightly elevated vantage point and at a medium distance, which frames his figure framed atop the speeding coach. His technique, crouched low on his stomach, and the fact that he is moving with a natural ease and grace suggests he has done this before: Jess knows what he must do to get what he wants. The "savage" man's essential virility (in stark contrast to Deverill's effete decadence) is sketched out by MacDonald in a few sparse pen strokes not of his face but of his obviously well-endowed body in the act of taking control. We do not need, indeed it would be beside the point, to read his face for signs of physical strength and determination, which are required in the situation and which Jess does have in abundance.

MacDonald would have drawn his inspiration from the characterizations of Jess throughout the script, but he goes above and beyond the written word where continuity is less than assured and actions must and will have visible consequences. Following the coach man's ferocious use of the whip against his attacker, MacDonald's instinct is to zoom in on the gory details - with a flair for unflinching hyper-realism only the true aficionado would have appreciated had the sequence been filmed as planned. Unfortunately for the aficionado, in the finished film the coach man no longer wields his whip, and the only drastic imagery we are being exposed to is the crude back projection footage that has taken the place of MacDonald's charming back view proposal. Ultimately, of course, only those images that make the transition from sketchbook to screen will live to tell the tale.

Making those life-and-death decisions is the director's prerogative; his omnipotence however does not extend beyond the telling of the tale: Joseph Losey does not choose his fictional characters, nor does he decide what happens to them. His selection criteria are practical rather than ideological, aesthetic rather than commercial - or they would have been, in an ideal (fictional) world. The bold proposals of his draughtsman may have presented Losey with a variety of stubborn obstacles, but an equally plausible explanation for the use of conventional studio footage in place of the more experimental tracking shot could be post-production objections to the pre-designed perspective. Scenes could have been rewritten and re-enacted at the behest of unhappy Rank executives, to add close-up shots of the actors' bankable faces amid the racing carriages.

The situation is a little more complicated than we had expected.

Colonel Rumford may be in no mood to make a full confession at this stage, but by choosing instead to state an undeniable fact he is also revealing a weakness that even he cannot yet fully articulate. For Cadet Springer, the unexpected complication comes in Rumford’s use of the first person plural: neither a slip of the tongue nor a deliberate misrepresentation, the inclusive we suggests a collective responsibility where in reality no such unity of purpose ever existed.

In the ideal, self-contained world of Rumford’s imagination, Haynes’ untimely departure would have registered as the tragic, if self-inflicted, accident it clearly was. No one would have raised suspicions, no one would have investigated. Any questions of culpability would have been handled under Rumford’s own military jurisdiction. Springer would have been responsible because he would have cleaned the gun. Above all else, the board of trustees would never have heard of Haynes’ plans for radical change - plans that emphatically do not include Lyle C Rumford. You're so used to playing God you figure nothing's going to work without you, quips advertising man William Haynes Jr, who clearly relishes the prospect of firing his old nemesis but will not live to see the day.

The bespoke method of his execution even has an – almost – ironic twist in the element of divine retribution when Haynes is quite literally hoist with his own petard. But Rumford's attention to decorative detail is strictly limited, both by physical and imaginary boundaries designed to protect Rumford’s ideal self-contained world from the depravities of external temptation.

William Haynes Jr epitomizes the depraved inhabitants of a world beyond the pale; his reading of Rumford’s dilemma however is to the point: the decision to shun the outside world and remain aloof in splendid isolation has not only created mental barriers an top of physical ones, it has isolated Rumford from his fellow officers and other members of the Academy. With no one to share his responsibilities or indeed his principles, Rumford’s chosen path is ultimately unsustainable – unless he can find an eleventh-hour ally in whom he can confide and with whom he can share the burdens of his office.

When he tells his reprobate protégé to expect a murder charge, Rumford's intention is not to intimidate Springer but to appeal to his sense of duty and, crucially, his loyalty. Rumford needs Springer to be that good soldier who is willing to endure the hypothetical adversity of a murder trial  for the sake of a vision that he hopes is as dear to Springer as it is to him personally: the preservation of his beloved, idealized Academy.

Rumford offers to stand by Springer against the evil intrusions of the outside world (aka Lt Columbo) but he does so in the mistaken belief that he is in control of the situation. and that it will help him to remain in control. While it is true that Springer has no insight into what caused the deadly explosion, he knows it could not have been his doing. The advantage is not immediately obvious to Springer, but it is Rumford’s false sense of superiority that will result in a cascade of unintended consequences.

According to Rumford’s logic, Springer was given a task, and therefore Springer is responsible for its proper execution – a closed circuit that begins and ends with the supreme authority of the commandant to assign duties and discipline infractions. By appealing to the good soldier he still wants to see in Springer, instead of winning the young man’s trust Rumford forces him to choose between being punished for not cleaning the gun and being accused of murder.

Instead of manipulating Springer in his favour, Rumford’s declaration of solidarity has exactly the opposite effect: Springer seeks refuge in the outside world. By being a bad soldier Springer demonstrates his true humanity: as a creature of both worlds, he is contaminated by outside influences and far from perfect, yet he speaks the truth and does so with a clear conscience. Ironically, and fatally for Rumford, it is his own – unattainable - ideal of the good soldier which has been diminished, perhaps most substantially by the one individual who we know is struggling to be that perfect soldier, to create that perfect world for himself and his white roses. Who has already lost the fight even though he has yet to acknowledge the fact.

As improbable as it may sound to modern audiences, the Rank Organisation emerged in the 1930s from the flour milling business of the Rank family with the self-declared aim of producing wholesome entertainment initially for a domestic market awash with unwholesome American imports.

When best-selling South African writer Joy Packer published her latest, much anticipated, romance novel in the summer of 1957, Rank – looking for spectacular yet wholesome family entertainment – jumped at the opportunity and acquired the rights even before most booksellers had stocked their shelves. A film script was drafted, and by the autumn locations had been explored in preparation for the arrival of cast and crew. To build anticipation at home, a flurry of positive press releases chronicled the travails of the film team while it waited for the weather to improve and hospitalized photographers, continuity girls, and camera operators to be released or replaced.

By Christmas work had all but ground to a halt, and what little was left of the cheerful charade evaporated in January when two of the leading players became abruptly incapacitated in separate but similarly self-inflicted circumstances. With Rank unwilling to abandon the project, and key participants no longer interested in its continuation, February saw frantic attempts to tie up the remaining loose ends.

The long-lost safari party finally returned to London in mid-March of 1958, where their employer put them to work while they still remained the property of Rank. The technical term for Rank actors was contract artist, and for them it meant yet more torturous sessions with the studio photographer and promotional interviews about the making of the film; on a higher plane, the director was assigned to extol the educational benefits of starting a bushfire or harassing a herd of elephants.

The three essays to which Ken Annakin lent his name are perfectly happy to follow up anecdotes about the "local" wildlife with the purely pragmatic decision not to show them being mown down by machine guns because “it would be impracticable to get permission … to film such brutality.” Burning down part of the reserve was deemed more practical instead. When after weeks of bad weather two days of sun caused the undergrowth to become “very dry,” the film makers, being wholly dedicated to their art, proceeded to “pump over 800 gallons of paraffin on the scrub in order to make our flames realistic.”

Realism and authenticity clearly motivated Ken Annakin when he personally dropped a live cobra into the heroic game warden’s Land Rover before said game warden crashes said Land Rover (the exercise took seven heroic attempts, we learn) and is then attacked by not just one but an entire pride of lions. Indeed, so engrossed did the director become in this “very exciting true-life adventure,” the story of how the "poor game warden” who had “just sufficient strength to remember that he had a knife" could easily have filled the allotted 90 minutes in Ken Annakin’s version of the film.

Lions, snakes, and rogue elephants are expertly handled by the eminently capable and eminently eligible young men whose job it is to risk their lives in defence of, yes, the wildlife but more importantly, British interests at the outskirts of the Empire: the Rank Organisation by now viewed itself as a key player of the post-war industrial expansion at home and abroad, eagerly looking to forge partnerships with market leaders in other sectors of the British economy.

Ironically, this is where the question of authenticity in a work of art becomes one of life imitating art, as cast and crew bravely faced down death on more than one occasion in the course of their ordeal.  Torrential rain caused the entire film to be shot in authentic locations, but it also forced the editor to come up with a new fairy-tale ending to accommodate for changed realities: an instance of art imitating life’s essential unpredictability?

Once again, the boundaries begin to blur: Nor the Moon by Night stands out perhaps not as the artistic masterpiece Rank never attempted to make but as a milestone of a different kind - marking the passage of an era of film-making that relied on a studio system steeped in the traditions of the theatre, and the artificiality associated with it. The “vertical integration” strategy of the Rank Organisation in the post-war period was coming under pressure from two directions at once, television delivering its product directly into people’s homes, and the growing taste for independent film-making, with its own brand of emotional authenticity-for-its-own-sake, in stark contrast to Ken Annakin's highly selective kind, which serves a clear purpose.

Annakin would have seen no conflict between the message of the film and its making, between art (in the widest sense) and commerce; indeed, Nor the Moon by Night was explicitly designed not only to fill Rank-owned theatres but also to sell other commodities, from South African holidays to British-made off-road vehicles. Implicit in this fantasy is the reassurance that everything will be exactly as advertised. Potential visitors need not fear any change in the status quo. The idyllic picture of life in the South African wilderness is exotic enough to be exciting and static enough to be reassuring.