George Bernard Shaw wrote this jolly satire just over ten years before the first Republican uprisings in Ireland and the disastrous introduction of home rule in 1916.
It's not just his casual anatomising of the religious, political and cultural schisms within and between Ireland and England, however, that ensures this rarely performed play still speaks loud and clear to a modern audience for whom the Troubles remain an ongoing problem.
With the play's principal target, Thomas Broadbent (Charles Edwards), a politically astute Shaw emphasises paternalism as the great lie of colonialism. Broadbent is an affable but wholly deluded liberal Englishman who believes he is the perfect candidate to represent Roscullen in the forthcoming Parliamentary elections - not least because he also has his eye on some lucrative real estate.
Shaw has enormous fun, too, in lampooning not just English romantic perceptions of the Irish - their blarney, their spirit - but also in sending up those very qualities within his own raffish cast of characters.
Gerrard McArthur's quietly cynical Larry Doyle is an effective dramatic counterpart to Charles Edwards's dangerously foolish Tom Broadbent, while Niall Buggy's Father Keegan - with his light but firm criticism of Broadbent and Doyle's spiritual bankruptcy, is both the play's moral anchor and its most enduring voice. Shame that the horribly fussy set should prove such a distraction in Dominic Dromgoole's entertaining, if occasionally clumsy, production.
John Bull's Other Island
