History is a funny business; often, it does not happen when you want it to.

Who will ever forget the large celebrations in Sheffield, led by Neil Kinnock the leader of the Labour Party, a week before the UK general election of 1992? Kinnock arrived at the event by helicopter. To high happy laughter and great joy, he introduced each member of his shadow cabinet as ‘the next minister’ for whatever role he had assigned to them.

He, in turn, was introduced as the next Prime Minister. There were a lot of balloons. The stage show cost a vast sum of money. It did not help that the event was held on 1 April.

Later, Kinnock said: ‘all of the years in which I'd attempted to build a fairly reserved, starchy persona – in a few seconds, they slipped away.’ It helped lose Kinnock that election.

No one, as the 1997 UK election approached, was going to make the same mistake. Tony Blair didn’t need balloons as the date of the vote – 1 May – approached. It was clear that Labour was going to get a huge majority. Blair was young – forty-four years old – and smart, but more than anything else he was modern. I don’t know what that word means now, but I am sure that in the spring of 1997 it sounded better than John Major and the leftovers of Thatcherism, and better, too, than the old Labour Party, the one that was closely allied with the trade union movement.

I was in London just before that election and I decided to stick around and witness the new crowd take over. The weather as the election approached was beautiful. Soon, I discovered that my friend Andrew O’Hagan, who used to be my editor at the London Review of Books, was around and had invites to some parties on the night of the count. He invited me to tag along.

At about nine o’clock that night, it was a done deal - Labour was going to sweep in. We were drinking what we could in the house of a nice English poet. I wanted to let out loud whoops and make up some new offensive anti-Tory slogans. But it would hardly do in a nice North London living-room. And we learned that Labour, wary of sounding prematurely victorious, was not going to have victory speeches until much later.

We wanted to go somewhere, a place where there would be crowds. At first, since Andrew had an invite, we thought of looking into the Guardian party.

But there was another possibility. And that was the Daily Telegraph election-night party, the Telegraph being the most brazen right-wing paper of the age.

We heard that a certain English composer of musicals and some of his cronies had threatened to leave England forthwith if the dreaded, low-rent Labour Party swept into power. They would depart England for France, they warned, with great drama on this very night, they would depart from the Telegraph party, seen off by some of the editorial board of the Spectator magazine.

I desperately wanted to witness this.

As Andrew and myself mounted the stairs to the Telegraph party, we encountered two Telegraph journalists, one of whom peered at us.

‘Here they come,’ she said, ‘the SWM.’ 

I took the SWN to be the Socialist Workers Movement, but I think what she really meant was that the barbarians, personified by Andrew, who is Scottish, and myself, were now at the gates, or at least on the stairs and soon at the bar.

There were Tories everywhere at the party. I had never seen so many. Big bald ones. Ones with bushy eyebrows and hairy nostrils. Loud ones. Laughing ones. Grave ones. Small, skinny prim ones.

There must have been one or two women, but I recall a room full of displeased-looking men. The younger ones seemed oddly old and weary.

Some of them clearly longed for their nannies. Or they pined for some prefect whom they had loved and obeyed in some chilly public school to which they had been dispatched, aged nine, by their chilly parents.

But this might just be me trying to imagine what a Tory’s secret yearnings might be. We stood and watched them, hoping for a bitter speech against socialism, or a gathering around a man who was ready to put his life on the line and flee to France where his assets were already awaiting him.

Surely, they must have been quietly pleased that Blair had become a mild Tory himself! But there was no sign of that. In fact, there was no real sign of anything. Later, someone told me that if you really want to see these Tories properly, then you have to offer them the smell of blood. Then they come to life, even if it’s just the blood of a fox running across a field.

Blair’s victory speech, bloodless enough, would occur a few hours later. No one left the country as a result in fright or in a rage. Huffing and puffing went out of fashion. The weather the next day remained glorious.

But something else happened in those days in London in late April and early May of 1997 and it is much harder to be sure about. There was a new production in London of Tom Murphy’s play ‘Bailegangaire’ with Rosaleen Linehan, Bríd Brennan and Ruth McCabe. It was produced by the Royal Court, but my memory is of a much smaller theatre nearer the West End and not in the actual Royal Court itself.

I went to the play with Andrew O’Hagan the night after our adventures with Tories and the Daily Telegraph. I suppose the whole point of London means that you can be peering at Conservatives one night and the next evening be found watching the strangest and most thrilling new Irish play.

I have located one review of that production, from the Independent in London. It concludes: ‘Ms Linehan's performance is a tour de force, though not one that will be necessarily all that intelligible at first to English ears. Luxuriating in the preposterously literary diction of the tale and hawking up the various types of laugh from her prodigious vocal plumbing, she lets you hear a woman whose rapt, ravingly grandiloquent manner is a shelter from the meaning.’

The evening on which we went to see the play was sweltering outside. I think the play might have started at seven pm, and it was going to be long. Who was in the audience? On that night, hardly anyone.

Even though Andrew O’Hagan is Scottish and has a sharp ear, I was unsure as Rosaleen Linehan, playing Mommo in ‘Bailegangaire’, began to cackle and call, let little screeches and then start a story in mixtures of high English and low Irish, or vice versa, if it might have been better with surtitles.

There were moments, however, when Mommo had lines to say that were crystal clear, enough for her to be both an old woman in real time and someone locked in a maze, in a story that circled and swirled. Her long speeches often sounded like a literary text and then they were all vernacular. She was rambling one minute, and then her tone was urgent and direct. Sudden bursts of pure soaring clarity were followed by snatches and echoes and hints and half-said things.

I had seen the play in its first production at Druid in 1985, the part of Mommo performed by Siobhan McKenna. I had read it a good number of times.

In those years, some people in Dublin worried about Irish writing that did not travel - poems that were too local or too obscure or by poets who were too cranky; or novels that would never interest those who listened to BBC Radio 4; or plays that, however good, would never make the West End or Broadway.

Perhaps the Royal Court was a space in between. That year – 1997 - would also see ‘The Leenane Trilogy’ by Martin McDonagh and ‘The Weir’ by Conor McPherson at the Royal Court. As the Royal Court website says of ‘The Weir’: ‘It has since been performed all over the world.’ And the same was true of ‘The Leenane Trilogy’.

‘Bailegangaire’ did not go to Broadway as the other two above-mentioned works did. It did not win all the prizes. And it might be too easy to say that its very purity and mystery made it a play that audiences resisted. But the same could be said for ‘Endgame’ or ‘Faith Healer’.

The play we saw that night in May 1997 resisted the world outside. That much can be said. Nothing seemed further away that London and New Labour or even Old Tory. Neither Andrew nor myself wanted to escape the great spell that the three actresses and Murphy’s play had created.

‘Do you know the actresses?’ Andrew asked.

‘I do,’ I said.

‘Well enough to stand at the stage door and say hello?’

‘Yes.’

Andrew was a member of Soho House. At the time it was the trendiest place in London, offering food and drink long after the bars and restaurants had shut. We went there that night with Ruth McCabe and Bríd Brennan – Rosaleen Linehan had another dinner to attend – and we sat in the rooftop restaurant.

It was perfect – the warm night, the good food and drink, Labour in power, and the company and the afterglow.

The play offered a glimpse, an opening, a possibility, a sense that nothing that was as good as this would ever be easy. Andrew went back a number of times to see that production and he encouraged friends to go, and all of them marvelled at the work of the three actresses and the writer.

And I like to think that some of them guessed that while New Labour might pass, or come to seem like nothing much, the play ‘Bailegangaire’ was beginning its life.

For the days afterwards - those early days of May 1997 - as I set out for home, I had both in my head – images of old Tories, their day done, and the sight of old Mommo, ready to start again, or maybe finish the story this time.

Colm Tóibín (April 2024)