‘All of Us Strangers’ is one of the best Irish films of recent years. It is, of course, an English film also, as indeed it is a film where much is deliberately blurred and just as much is sharply realized. Andrew Haigh, the director, is, as far as I know, Irish enough to be eligible to play for the Irish soccer team and to travel with an Irish passport – he has an Irish grandmother. In the film, the Irish actor Andrew Scott uses his own Irish accent. This is because Adam, the character he is playing, after his parents die in a car accident, is taken at the age of twelve to Ireland to live with his grandmother.

There is another Irish element in the film, which is the performance of the English actress Claire Foy. In certain key moments, especially when she hears from her son Adam that he is gay, Claire Foy looks like an Irishwoman. What does this mean? It means that she looks nervous, afraid, uneasy, worried in a way that suggests that she is not certain that her place in this world has ever been entirely secure. Her family life has been put together carefully; it could all fall apart.

Foy, in fact, is Irish on her mother’s side. She told Irish Central: ‘We're a massive Irish family on my mum's side and I've been thinking about this a lot recently, the things we used to do. There would be 30 of us. Everyone would stay at my nan's house in Edgware and we would have breakfast the next morning.’

‘My nan and grandad would be cooking a fry up. It was the late eighties, early nineties, and all my aunties had massive hair and massive glasses and we were all sat around the children's table.’

English actresses like Angela Lansbury, Judi Dench and Julie Walters, when playing Irish characters, drew on aspects of their own Irish mothers. Lansbury, when she was playing Dora in the adaptation of my novel ‘The Blackwater Lightship’, told me that, for the part, she drew from how her mother, who was Irish, would move or speak.

Foy in ‘All of Us Strangers’, without becoming heavy-handed, plays a sort of Irishwoman in England. Her son, then, is brought up in that ambiguous world, fully English and also oddly Irish, that we know from the childhoods of Boy George, Shane McGowan and Martin McDonagh.

This is what first set Adam apart, and then, after the accident, he was set apart a second time by being sent to Ireland. As the film opens, he is in England again, or an England of the imagination, and it is easy to see that much for him is unresolved.

It is easy also to have a theory of the film: that the Paul Mescal character Harry is dead almost from the get-go, that the love scenes between him and Adam are imagined and don’t really happen. And that Harry, after his initial appearance, is a kind of ghost.

But this reading of the film seems to me too schematic. Everything in the film is ghostly. The apartment block itself, Adam’s life without friends or associates, Adam’s work, Adam’s journeys, the first encounter between Adam and Harry. And then Adam’s meetings with his father first and then with both his parents.

In this interpretation of the film, it is a dream-play, filled with shadows, oddly-angled shots and nourished by the mumble, the mutter, the half-said, the whisper. Even when it is daytime in the film, it feels like twilight.

But the opposite of this is also true, and that is created by the four actors whose gestures and tones are astonishingly exact. (The part of Adam’s father is played by Jamie Bell.) While the background is dreamy and the edges are blurred and much is uncertain and uncanny in the film, the four actors live in a precise time, they come from precise places, they have precise responses and have emotions that are sharply delineated. It is as though they have become all the more real because around them reality is questioned or it is ghostly or it melts away.

The gap between the performances and the inner texture of the film, however, is not always as deep as I have outlined. This is because Andrew Scott manages to suggest that he lives in a real London, a place in which he is fully alive, and also that he is haunted. Seeing ghosts comes naturally to him; he may even be a ghost himself. There are parts of the past that, for him, have not happened yet. Time is a trap. He is Hamlet with no possibility of soliloquy.

Although I had seen Andrew Scott on stage in Dublin – he played Lord Alfred Douglas, for example, in Tom Kilroy’s play about Constance Wilde at the Abbey in 2000 – it was not until I saw him in the role of Casimir in Brian Friel’s ‘Aristocrats’ at the Cottesloe in London in 2005 that I realized what an outstanding actor he is.

That 2005 production, directed by Tom Cairns, offered an entirely new interpretation of Friel’s play. In a way, it had been simple and staring us in the face since the first production of the play in 1979: Casimir is gay. He might seem fey – in a review of a 2018 production of the play, Michael Billington calls him ‘fey’. But he is not fey, he is gay, which is different.

In 1979, ‘Aristocrats’ dominated the Abbey Theatre’s programme; it opened in March and was revived in July and again in November. Altogether it had sixty performances at the Abbey that year, as well as a tour outside Dublin.

At its centre is the figure of Casimir, home from Germany to the family big house in Donegal. In that 1979 production, it was hard to know what to make of Casimir. He seemed not to be quite there, and much of what he said was edgy, often hysterical. He was easily frightened. His efforts to phone his wife in Germany were as ineffectual as his general presence. Since he was so ethereal, it was hard to see how drama could be wrested from him.

Towards the end of the play, Casimir makes a speech about himself: ‘I suddenly realized I was different from other boys. When I say I was different I don’t mean – you know – good Lord, I don’t for a second mean I was – you know – as they say nowadays “homo-sexual”…’

Having added that he is ‘vigorously hetero-sexual ha-ha’, Casimir goes on to talk about his own difference: ‘What I discovered was that for some reason people found me…peculiar. Of course I sensed it first from the boys at boarding-school.’

In the Dublin of 1979, it was possible to take Casimir at his word.

By the end of that year, I hoped not to see ‘Aristocrats’ again for a good long time. Since in that same period Brian Friel had also written his two masterpieces, ‘Faith Healer’ and ‘Translations’, there was no real reason to complain.

It was not until the Cottesloe production that the character of Casimir was played as a neurotic, closeted homosexual, someone in denial and in pain, or a gay boy out to his friends but not to his stifling family. In that riveting version of the play, Casimir made sense and his uneasy homecoming and his hiding in plain sight made drama.

Andrew Scott as Casimir held the stage, all nerves and coiled gestures. He captured Casimir’s fragility in the family home but also suggested that Casimir was performing this part for his family, that elsewhere he would play another part. He could put an antic disposition on; he could invent a persona; he could seem very frightened; he would be different when he got away from these people. It was not merely an electrifying performance but it rescued a flawed play. It was the only interpretation that made any sense.

I have never been sure if Brian Friel, who gave few interviews, had intended Casimir to be played in this way. But it is, on the other hand, hard to imagine what else he might have intended.

‘Aristocrats’ is, as everyone who has seen it says, Chekhovian. But it also is part of a strange and uniquely Irish tradition – plays and stories and novels by straight Irish writers that have gay characters at the centre, gay characters who are often neurotic, disruptive and untrustworthy.

Tom Kilroy’s ‘The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche’, for example, was first performed in the Olympia Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1968, having been rejected by the Abbey Theatre, which eventually produced it five years later. It dramatized the disruptive power that homosexuality has on a number of men. Mr. Roche, even before he appears, throws a ghastly shadow on a drunken evening. The play dramatizes what manners look like when they have lost their moorings, to be replaced by banter, cant, abuse, alcohol and sexual tensions.

Without the gay character, the play could not take place. So, too, Kilroy’s ‘The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde,’ performed at the Abbey in 1997, needs the disruptive presence of two gay men – Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas.

This is not to suggest that writers who are not themselves gay cannot or should not write gay characters. Some of the best descriptions, for example, of sex between men are written by Annie Proulx in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and by Pat Barker in ‘Regeneration.’

However, a remarkable feature of Irish writing from the 1960s onwards - and not something that has been replicated elsewhere - is the sheer number of Irish non-gay writers who have created a gay protagonist.

It is hard to write a gay character. But, oddly enough, it is perhaps even harder if you yourself – the author – are gay. Maybe you know too much about what it feels like to be gay and too little about what it looks like.

And, really, it doesn’t feel like much.

I suppose it is like being Irish.

In other words, an Irish novelist writes Irish characters as if their Irish characteristics and their Irish nature hardly mattered against more interesting questions, such as what kind of person they are or where exactly they come from or what kind of literary style is needed to create them and evoke them.

The question is: someone is Irish as opposed to what? In an Irish novel, the Irish part is taken for granted. The rest is what is exciting. (Being Irish, as an intrinsic condition, is hardly exciting.)

The question also is: someone is gay as opposed to what? And the answer is a dull one – the opposite of gay is straight.

If I look out of the window at bare trees against a blue sky, is it important that I am Irish and gay? Could I ever look in a way that is neutral or not governed or determined by my being gay or Irish?

If I were to appear in a novel, would I always have to be disruptive, hilarious, hysterical, flamboyant, neurotic, emotional, untrustworthy, drunken and loquacious? Which of these characteristics are Irish? Which are gay? Which are both?

Could a gay man ever be dull in a novel – work reliably in an office, say, go home early, be quiet and easy to trust, reasonable, a floating voter, well-balanced? But what would the point of his gayness be then? Why bother making him gay? Maybe he could just be Irish?

In ‘All of Us Strangers’, Adam is Irish and not Irish, but he is in England now. His Irishness and Englishness are not dramatic, however, since a hyphenated identity is part of the English mainstream.

And because Andrew Haigh, the director and script-writer, is gay, he has had to put serious thought into the making of a gay character. It is not simple. It is not the task of Adam, played by Andrew Scott, to disrupt the peace. Disruption for him is internal. It shows in his expression, his movements, the timbre of his voice. He is quiet.

His sexuality, just like his nationality, is not a large problem for him, something he now must face. There is no drama here. Adam’s sexuality has been made ordinary. And this is something that only a gay screenwriter might know how to do. A straight writer would want to make Adam more ‘gay’. And only straight people, it seems, might know what more ‘gay’ is, or what it looks like.

I myself, having been gay for almost as long as the Queen was on the throne, have not a single clue what ‘more gay’ might look like.

Adam is in search of an unrecoverable past. He is locked in a dream of his parents. And this dream, in turn, has locked out other things, perhaps even his sense of reality. Adam is on a quest. Andrew Scott as Adam exudes a lostness that wavers. Sometimes he seems to manage. He can also be openly desolate, vulnerable. Nothing he wants, it seems, will be granted him except a dark encounter with what cannot be recovered.

I don’t know whether this makes him the most gay character in recent film, or the least gay. There might even be those who would claim that it hardly matters which.

Me? For me, it’s a relief to watch a film that holds on to its mysteries.

Colm Tóibín (February 2024)