Helen Edmundson is probably best known for her stage adaptations of classic novels, including Anna Karenina and The Mill on the Floss. The Clearing is one of her earliest professionally produced works; it premiered at the Bush Theatre in 1993, where it directed by Lynne Parker, and won a Time Out Award and the John Whiting Award for best new play. It has since been staged off Broadway (1999) and at the Oxford Playhouse (2002). This is its first Irish production, and it centres on a period of Irish history which is rarely dramatized though it has a powerful presence in popular history and the collective imagination: Cromwell’s devastation of Ireland. 

 

The play is set in 1652, immediately following the defeat of the Confederate and Royalist forces, and it focuses on the dreadful impact of these events upon one small group of neighbours. Robert Preston (Kieran Griffiths), an English settler, is married to the beautiful Irish Catholic Maddy O’Hart (Megan Armitage). Her childhood companion Killaine lives with them, while Pierce, another childhood friend, is now a ‘Tory’ (rebel) on the run in the forests. The Prestons’ neighbours are Solomon and Susaneh Winter, English settlers who fought for the Royalists and who are therefore threatened, early in the play, with the confiscation of their lands and forced relocation to Connaught. The play opens with Maddy in labour, her off-stage screams audible to the audience and to Killaine and Pierce who meet in the forest to exchange information. Killaine speaks of Robert’s love of his wife and his remaining by her side throughout the birth in defiance of convention. These early scenes of devotion set up the later disaffection and eventual hatred between the two.  

 

In Martin Vaughan’s set, a stylized bare tree signifies the forest; upstage right a comfortable interior space is represented by a table, chairs, a stool and a rug. Tableaux are sometimes used to signify simultaneous actions that juxtapose the security of the Prestons’ home with the wilderness and desolation of the land beyond the Pale. The design makes generous use of dry ice to create a mist that almost obscures the set at times: this is often effectively atmospheric, suggesting the confusion and disorientation of the population. Above the stage and appearing to be carved in stone is the motto of the New Model Army: Pax Quaeritur Bello – “peace is sought through war”. 

 

For the indoor scenes in the Prestons’ house and the house of the Governor (an historical figure), the domestic props are rearranged between scenes by stage hands costumed as servants. This strategy works quite well in the first half for, although it is unnecessary, the scenes are reasonably long and the interruptions are quite infrequent. In the second half, however, it becomes a distraction, before it is abruptly abandoned and the final scenes are performed on the bare, misty stage: a better solution in many ways than the earlier shifting of furniture.

This is quite a strange play. It is dramatically engaging, using the gradual breakdown of the the Prestons’ marriage to represent the destruction of Irish culture and society. Yet its romantic representation of the ‘native Irish’ in the characters of Maddy (beautiful and tempestuous), Killaine (dreamy and imaginative, gentle and pure), and Pierce (the proud rebel in the forest) in opposition to logical, pragmatic English characters reiterates oddly outdated stereotypes. 

 

Alongside these uncomfortable characterizations is a representation of an extraordinarily brutal repression which is most clearly conveyed in the chilling performance of Leslie Clack as the Governor. His lines are often direct quotes from historical documents, and express ethnic hatred and contempt, based in part on his Puritan religious beliefs and opposition to Roman Catholicism. His chilling warning that ‘We will wrench her [Ireland’s] teeth out like a toothless whore. We will make a nun out of her yet’, is only one of the many lines that suggest both the violence of the conquest as a military mission and its interpersonal manifestation. Through the character of Killaine, the play stages the mass deportations to indentured servitude in the West Indies, and the sexual violence that must inevitably have been part of the conflict. 

 

It is interesting that the play should be chosen for production in Derry, where it seems to speak to the post-conflict situation: firstly in the dialogues between the Governor and Solomon Winter, the former frozen in hatred and the latter willing to move forward in mutual respect – and secondly in the depictions of the family torn apart by circumstances and a conflict it cannot control. But in the lines spoken by the Governor, it resonates far beyond the local context, to raise the spectres of ethnic cleansing, massive expulsion of populations, and this century’s ‘War on Terror’. Using the metaphor of Cromwell’s invasion, a history which of course is very different framed in England, Edmondson’s play challenges its audience to confront the evil that good men do.