'Sons of Ulster' : powerful antiwar play

WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- The production of Frank McGuinness' play about World War I, "Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme," is all the more powerful for being staged at a time when a similar drama is being played out in combat staging areas all over the Middle East.

Although it is having its New York premiere at Lincoln Center's Newhouse Theater, the play was written in 1985, long before the Iraq crisis could even have been predicted. McGuinness writes about eight members of a platoon of Irish Protestant volunteers, English loyalists to the man, fighting for Great Britain six years before most of Ulster refused Irish home rule and became Northern Ireland.

Irish Roman Catholics opposed military service, but many young Protestant Ulster men rushed to enlist in the 36th Division of the British army, often in the naïve belief that Great Britain's struggle against Germany was related to their own struggle against Catholic hegemony. As McGuinness' play progresses, these misguided volunteers gradually realize they are cannon fodder rather than sectarian patriots.

"I wrote 'Observe the Sons of Ulster' as a plea against war, about trying to survive in war, the cost of war and the effects war has on individuals, particularly the men," said the playwright, himself a Catholic, on a visit for the opening the play, his first in New York since the 1992 Broadway production of "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me."

"One of the methods of surviving war is to offer emotional sustenance to one another. To do that, men have to draw on qualities, like nurturing, that are usually associated with women. They have to use areas of the psyche they would have otherwise ignored."

McGuinness depicts this aspect of war so grippingly that audiences are seen leaving the play at the Newhouse Theater in almost complete silence. No question about it, "Observe the Sons of Ulster" is one of the most important events of the New York theatrical season, stunningly though minimally staged and directed by Nicholas Martin and acted by a superb male cast of nine headed by Justin Theroux.

Theroux plays Kenneth Pyper, the only member of the cast who survives the Battle of the Somme, one of the war's most costly in human lives -- 5,600 casualties for the Ulster division alone, more than half its strength.

The play opens in 1969 with stage veteran Richard Easton playing an elderly Theroux recalling the horror of losing his buddies, then the action jumps back to 1915 for two scenes titled "Initiation," as in getting-to-know-you, and "Pairing," and then moves on to the following year for "Bonding."

The older Pyper is encountered in conversation with God, demanding "Answer me, why we did it? Why did we let ourselves be led to extermination? Or did we lead ourselves?"

Pyper, a handsome chap in his 20s, is from the kind of privileged Anglican family that generally provides officers for Britain's armed forces. He is a sculptor who seems to be experiencing a psychic crisis that makes him so unhappy with his life that he may have joined up as a way to commit suicide. When he seals his friendship with his barracks pal, David Craig, with a kiss, we are tipped off to one of the reasons he loathes himself and why the other men find him an unlikable enigma.

Other pairings in the play are less emotionally fraught. Christopher Roulston, a lapsed clergyman and Martin Crawford, a non-believer and proud of it, wrestle with matters of faith in the face of death. John Millen and William Moore boost each other's confidence, especially when Moore finds it dizzying to cross a rope bridge. George Anderson and Nathaniel McIlwaine share boozy bouts of patriotic bravado brought on by fear and shared ignorance.

The final scene is the most heart wrenching, taking place in the last hour before the men hustle out to face the Hun in what turned out to be a massacre lasting from July 1-Nov. 13, 1916.

All of them have seen battle before in France and are feeling a little like veterans full of gallows humor and merry pranks like riding piggy back, kicking around a soccer ball, trading harmless punches, and singing in harmony. We hate to seem them, wearing jaunty orange sashes, rush out through apertures in the wall separating their bivouac from the killing fields, leaving the stage bare.

Theroux is really first among equals when it comes to the kind of visceral acting that makes the audience feels it knows these men like sons or brothers. Jason Butler Harner is particularly sympathetic as Craig. The others turning in memorable performances are Scott Wolf as Millen, Dashiell Eaves as Moore, Jeremy Shamos as Roulston, Christopher Fitzgerald as Crawford, Rod McLachlan as Anderson, and David Barry Gray as McIlwaine.

They are all American actors but their Irish accents are amazingly good, as verified by an Irish friend who accompanied this critic to the theater.

Direction by Martin, artistic director of the Huntington Theater in Boston where the play had a pre-New York run, is too brisk to be particularly analytical, but he catches perfectly the nimble poetic rhythms with which the playwright has endowed the play. Alexander Dodge's bleak sets, greatly enhanced by Donald Holder's dramatic lighting, are serviceable, and Dashiell Eaves' military costumes seem authentic.

"Sons of Ulster" had its American premiere at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Williamstown, Mass., in the summer of 2001, with Martin directing. It has won a number of best play prizes in Ireland and England.