I went to see the first preview of Anú’s ‘Hammam’ at the Peacock in the week before Christmas. I wonder if those who drew up the blueprints for the entrance to the Peacock – it could easily be the way-in to an underground car park – had any idea that, despite its anodyne look, it would become deeply resonant space, with its own elaborate geometry of echoes, so to speak. I suppose the most powerful and emotionally ambiguous spaces are those that have all the look of non-places but, because of constant use, hold a greater richness than spaces more designed and obviously beautiful.   

Looking at the Abbey Theatre’s website, I realize that the first play I saw in the Peacock was probably Joe Dowling’s production of ‘Twelfth Night’ in March 1975. It included actors who were part of the permanent troupe in the Abbey whom I admired and came to see many more times over the years – Des Cave, Clive Geraghty, Deirdre Donnelly, Philip O’Sullivan, Eamon Morrissey.

I remembered Joe Dowling’s production of ‘A Winter’s Tale’ at the Peacock and thought to check the date – maybe 1980? – with Des Cave and Kate Flynn. But then, as I looked down the cast list of ‘Twelfth Night’ again, I saw that Derek Chapman played Feste the Fool, and I remembered him immediately in the 1975 production, his song at the very end of the play, his small stature against a large-toned performance that was comic and then could turn into a kind of bitterness.

In 1978, when I came back to live in Dublin, the excitement was centred in the Peacock rather than the Abbey. The productions I saw in the Peacock included Garrett Keogh in Bernard Farrell’s ‘I Do Not Like Thee, Doctor Fell’; Liam Neeson and Colm Meany in Graham Reid’s ‘The Death of Humpty Dumpty’; an extraordinary ‘Waiting for Godot’, performed by the Hecklers Group from Cavan, directed by Dermot Healy; Stephen Brennan in Neil Donnelly’s ‘Upstarts’; T.P. McKenna in Stewart Parker’s ‘Nightshade’; Barry McGovern in Sam Shepard’s ‘Buried Child’; Marie Mullen in Garry Hynes’s production of ‘Island Protected by a Bridge of Glass’; Frank McGuinness’s ‘The Factory Girls’ with Maureen Toal and May Cluskey; the San Quentin Drama Workshop in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’; Tom MacIntyre’s ‘The Great Hunger’, directed by Patrick Mason and starring Tom Hickey.

All this during a period of five or six years – between, say, 1978 and 1984.

I grew to love the Peacock space not because it was small and intimate – it never seemed that small or that intimate. I loved it because I saw good plays and good productions there.

I didn’t even mind when the slatted wooden cladding in the auditorium was removed to show bare concrete.

Walking down the stairs of the Peacock to go to Anú’s ‘Hammam’ was like opening the door of a pub that I had loved – the old Scotch House, for example, or Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street, or the back room of Kehoe’s in South Anne Street, or the front snug in Toner’s or Doheny and Nesbitt’s, or Hartigan’s in Leeson Street.    

Anú had made a maze of small rooms and corridors out of the Peacock stage and auditorium, creating a space that resembled the Hammam Family Hotel and Turkish Baths in Upper O’Connell Street which was destroyed in the Civil War in July 1922. As we moved around the space, I really did believe that we were, in fact, under the Abbey and the Peacock in some long-disused space that I didn’t know existed.

Anú’s staging of the Treaty debates, as edited by Theo Dorgan, is riveting – I saw one of the parts live and have watched the rest on film courtesy of the IFI website: (https://www.ifihome.ie/page/staging-the-treaty/) – The production is all the more fascinating when you know what the outcome will be – who is doomed, who will live to be old, and to whom history will be kind. The actor Darragh Feehely, as Michael Collins, displays a fine impatience and sometimes a kind of unconcealed contempt for his opponents that places him at the centre of the space. The very room in Earlsfort Terrace where the Treaty debates took place is also the room where Anú’s production happened.

 John Cronin, as de Valera, moves from fine points of distinction into a passionate embrace of some theory of nationhood.

What puzzled me as I watched them is: how did all of them become so eloquent? In what forum did these men and women – the Irish revolutionaries - learn public speaking, how to construct an argument. They had not been lawyers, nor indeed had they been parliamentarians. They had not even served on county councils. And yet they managed to be coherent, even when they made long speeches, and sharp when they went in for invective. Some of the speeches are outstanding for their clarity and their structure.

This made me wonder if the eloquence itself on display in these debates caused a problem in 1922. It occurred to me that those who had reservations about the overall content or the fine print of the Treaty became even more passionate on the subject simply because they got so much time to debate it with the men who had been to London to negotiate it. In other words, the language itself, the impassioned tone, or the calm eloquent points made, or the sense of clashing debate, caused the speaker to feel even more passionate, or more excited, or more extreme, once he or she had sat down, having spoken. Formulating opposition created opposition. And the next time they got a chance to speak, some of them seemed to be even more opposed to the Treaty and to those who signed it. Some of these men and women, it is possible, were carried along by their own speeches into territory – a full civil war – that they would never have dreamed of when the debates began. Others, of course, were diehards as much at the beginning as at the end.

In Anú’s ‘Staging the Treaty’, the figure of Cathal Brugha, who had an animosity against Michael Collins that was personal as well as political, is played by Jamie O’Neill, who also plays him in ‘Hammam’ when there is no time for debating. It is clear in ‘Hammam’ that Brugha is doomed; if he walks out of this building, it will be to his death. He will be shot.

He is being looked after, consoled perhaps, prepared for his end, by a Capuchin priest, played by Darragh Feehely who also played Michael Collins in ‘Staging the Treaty’. And this would be a sweet irony except that it didn’t strike me for a moment, until I saw the cast-list later, that this was the same actor; Feehely transformed himself for the new part.

How do you write the final scene between Brugha and the priest? In the mayhem of the small hotel, they face each other. What is interesting is how seriously Louise Lowe, the director and writer of ‘Hammam’, takes the question of religion. What Brugha says are not just empty words or parts of a formula. He has what they used to call ‘deep faith’. This gives him courage as he awaits his own death. Lowe writes this with astonishing sensitivity and insight.

Brugha manages in his conversations with the priest to be both articulate and confused; he grunts and groans, but then he makes clear statements and asks questions. It is all intimate, what might have been said. Since the same Capuchin priest ministered to Terence MacSwiney when he was dying on hunger strike, MacSwiney is invoked here. And then Brugha, who has been kneeling, lifts his head for a moment and asks the priest in a tone that is understated but also pleading and urgent: ‘Was Terence afraid?’

If anyone had told me a day earlier that I would have tears in my eyes when Cathal Brugha asked a question about Terence MacSwiney, I would have dismissed such a possibility. But here I was, trying not to blubber.

Later, when I had my wits about me and was safely sitting on the Luas going home, I started to think about the Civil War. And this caused me, having arrived home, to sit for a while re-reading parts of Diarmaid Ferriter’s book about the Irish Civil War, ‘Between Two Hells’. I wasn’t looking to be cheered up, but, by chance, I found a passage that actually made me laugh. It is when a man called Christy Ferguson, an apprentice boilermaker at the Inchicore railway works, was caught shouting ‘Up the Republic!’ His interrogator at Wellington Barracks, where he was taken, told him, ‘I’ll give you Up the fucking Republic, you fucking little Robert Emmet.’ The description of the subsequent vicious treatment of Ferguson by his interrogator, however, soon put an end to my laughter.

Ferriter quotes Sean O’Faolain who wrote, many years afterwards, of the revolutionary period as ‘one of the most ecstatic periods of my life, during which all moral problems vanished in the fire of patriotism … during those heavenly years I dreamed of liberty, equality, fraternity.’ Of the Civil War, during which he took the anti-Treaty side, O’Faolain wrote that it ‘woke us up from the mesmerism of the romantic dream. It set us asking questions … about the pre-sanctified dogmas of our history.’

I remain puzzled by the Civil War because while I can understand that a number of diehards (and, indeed, old Fenians such as my grandfather) might have wanted to settle for nothing less than a republic, it is hard to see how figures like Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, Sean Lemass and Sean McEntee, Jim Ryan and Frank Aiken decided not only that the Treaty was worth opposing but that a civil war was worth fighting. Aiken, to take one example, seems to have fought the war with some gusto. Or so I have always believed, influenced perhaps by Kevin O’Higgins dubbing him as ‘a mad dog’ in February 1923. But Diarmaid Ferriter offers a more nuanced version of Aiken at this time. When he ordered the IRA to dump arms, Ferriter writes: ‘It was perhaps appropriate that it was Aiken who issued that command, as he “hated” the civil war, was under severe emotional strain and was less dismissive of politics than some of his anti-Treaty peers.’

I wonder would it be possible to piece together an intellectual history of the anti-Treaty side. It might be hard to put questions of class and temperament out of the way, or to leave aside the matter of how young most of the participants were. But there must have been views about the difference between a Republic and a Free State that would have made the second anathema. What were their roots? And how much did a notion of a republic as a pure ideal that could not be replaced by a compromise come from serious thinking rather than a diehard emotional response?

It struck me, as I said, watching Cathal Brugha talking in ‘Hammam’ to the priest how deep his religious faith seemed to be. Is it possible that the example of Jesus as an uncompromising figure - more powerful even than Cuchulain - someone who was ready to sacrifice himself for a mystical idea, might have influenced some of the anti-Treaty people?

And then there is the small matter of Dostoevsky. In his autobiographical novel ‘Blacklist, Section H’, Francis Stuart describes his time in prison for his anti-Treaty activities spent reading the Russian novelist. I wonder who else was reading him. He would not have led his followers towards compromise.

Ernie O’Malley wrote to Molly Childers from prison: ‘I’m just as well off in here – no one to bother me. I feel in my bones I could never live at home … I have my books and plenty of time to think.’ Diarmaid Ferriter quotes Frank O’Connor, who ‘took advantage of enforced solitude to listen to his interior voices’. He did not want martyrdom and ‘didn’t want to die … I wanted to live, to read, to hear music’, as too many mythical abstractions reduced life to ‘a tedious morality’.

In imagining a book about the Irish Civil War, I am thinking of Volker Weidermann’s book ‘Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1919’, which examines the disastrous Munich revolution of 1919, led by figures such as the poet Ernst Toller and the playwright Erich Mühsam. The book describes events as they happen in real time. Although we know that both Toller and Mühsam were imprisoned after the revolution and that Mühsam was executed by the Nazis in 1934 and Toller committed suicide in New York in 1939, we don’t know these facts as we read the book. We are allowed to see the leaders, the dreamers, as though they might have prevailed.

Since the Decade of Commemorations in Ireland is over, it is unlikely that there will be a big rush to revisit the Civil War. As a result of Diarmaid Ferriter’s book, we know how the violence impacted on families and on survivors. We know how many died. We are aware of the waste and the horror.

But what were the anti-Treaty people thinking? What about the small matter of ideology? It is clear - or is it? - that what happened was irrational. It seems so now in a time when it is a relief when warring factions move towards agreement and compromise. Why was such a move, for some people, not a relief then? I await an Irish version of Volker Weidermann’s ‘Dreamers’, but that might be a hard title for us to stomach in the light of what we know about the Civil War.

Colm Tóibín (December 2023)