Sebastian Barry’s play The Steward of Christendom tells the story of Irishman Thomas Dunne, the former chief of the Dublin Metropolitan Police who is now confined to an asylum. He reminisces about his personal and professional life, going back and forth between lucidity and seeming incoherence. A Roman Catholic still loyal to the British crown, Dunne looks back at the consequences of that loyalty.
The play opens with a monologue by Dunne as he appears to be reliving a scene from his childhood, but that wasn’t always the opening monologue. The first opening monologue was cut from the original production of the play due to transition challenges it presented for the actor.
In a fall production of the play by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the director drew upon the Sebastian Barry archive at the Ransom Center to re-integrate the deleted monologue back into the play.
In the omitted speech, Dunne describes breaking up the famous 1913 labor protest at which Irish trade union leader James Larkin appeared to address a crowd of 20,000 striking transit workers who had been locked out by their employers.
Director Steven Robman first read about the deleted monologue in an academic essay written by University of Texas at Austin English Professor Elizabeth Cullingford. The essay appeared in a compendium about Barry’s work called Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Catholic University of America Press, 2006). Robman asked Barry about the deleted monologue, and the playwright asked the Ransom Center to send scans of the original manuscript material to Los Angeles.
“This [event] is extremely important in Irish history, but it is little known to Americans,” said Robman. “It is also a crucial event in Thomas’s personal history, as it underscores his fall from grace in the eyes of Irish republicans.”
In the published version of the play, Dunne makes multiple references to Larkin, but there is no detailed description of the 1913 protest. Robman thought that adding the speech back in might help the audience understand the context of Dunne’s “vanished world.”
Robman learned that the monologue was cut from the original version because the transition between the Larkin speech—intended as a sort of prologue—and the speech as he’s reliving a childhood memory felt too awkward for Donal McCann, the lead actor in the original production.
Robman experimented with different placements of the monologue, finally inserting it later in the play almost as an aside that Dunne delivers to himself while one other character is on stage. Barry himself called the Larkin protest “the moment that made Thomas hated in Irish folklore and history.”
Robman also worked with the playwright to add a few words or substitute words throughout the script to allow an American audience to have an easier time with certain historical references or unfamiliar vocabulary, though the monologue is the largest change.
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