The age of reason is dead and consigned to the dustbin of history. This is the age of feelings, where the heart is more important than the brain and emotional health is taken as the cornerstone of human wellbeing. Ever since Freud, accessing the emotions has been seen as the key to mental well-being. “Don’t tell me what you think,” we are told, “tell me what you feel.”
Old-fashioned intelligence tests have been supplanted by the notion of emotional intelligence. The language of popular therapy, loaded with words such as denial, co-dependency and recovery, has become part of everyday speech. The ascendancy of therapy culture is everywhere in Empress of India, Stuart Carolan’s second play. Its title alludes to Queen Victoria and her 40-year mourning for Prince Albert, her dead consort. Victoria’s stoical widowhood has been replaced by the hegemony of the chat show: today, even royals are expected to share their pain.
The holiest commandment of our new religion tells us that it’s good to talk. No matter what twisted, brutal tricks fate has in store for us, no matter how savagely we are battered by a capricious universe, sharing our feelings is the royal road to recovery.
Carolan offers us a test case. Seamus Lamb, once a promising actor, has retreated into a wilful, perverse kind of dementia. The death of his beloved wife nine years earlier — the climax of a series of acutely painful personal losses — turned him into a recluse. But now his only daughter is missing, presumed dead, and his dysfunctional family are crumbling under the multiple stresses.
It is a bleak scenario, but Carolan uses Lamb’s madness as the vehicle for some brilliantly corrosive rants about every holy cow in sight: religion, faith, hope and feelings are savaged by the protagonist’s nihilistic anger. His sons, Matty and Martin, are viciously spurned whenever they try to communicate with him.
His stance is both infantile and intellectually sophisticated. His refusal to engage has all the capriciousness of a child’s tantrum. But it is also an exercise in intellectual nihilism, a Nietzschean insistence that nothing is true and everything — from blasphemy to character demolition — is sayable.
Despite his obvious dysfunction, Lamb also represents the reductio ad absurdum of therapy culture’s central tenets. If emotions are to be expressed, why not hurl gobbets of twisted rage at those around you? If feelings have primacy, what’s wrong with provoking them? And if the old God has failed, why not insist on dismembering any shreds of faith that have lingered past their bedtime? Carolan bravely tackles all the big themes — sex, death, life, love and faith, echoing Long Day’s Journey into Night and more recent works by Tom Murphy and John McGahern. Yet the result is curiously lopsided. Dismissed by one British broadsheet last week as simply a “turkey”, Carolan’s play is neither as bad nor as simplistic as the term might suggest.
The sons are pale figures in the shadow of their demented Lear-like father. Martin’s failed relationships and Matty’s unhappy sexuality are presented as consequences of the same underlying fault. Yet both appear trivial when set against Lamb’s brilliant rages.
It is a superb performance from Sean McGinley, whose absolute dominance on stage is a precise echo of his paternal role. Even when trying his hardest to act the part of a bad father, he can never undo the hold he has over his sons.
Nor, indeed, does he want to. He affects indifference to the fate of his family, callously greeting one offspring with the line “Well? Has anyone else died?” He revels in his power while pretending to have abdicated it.
Lamb’s retreat from life is masked by his claim to be courageously probing the truer levels of reality. It is everyone else, with their weak feelings, illusions and shallow beliefs, who is out of step. He bombards his sons with abstract questions about faith and feeling, tossing in blasphemies and paradoxes whenever he senses they might have the power to hurt.
Buddhists, Jews and Scientologists all come in for a verbal lashing. He is particularly coruscating whenever the topic is guarded by convention, political correctness or even common decency. He picks on gays and Jews as targets because these are such sensitive zones, where naked prejudice — whether anti-semitic or homophobic — seems doubly shocking, especially when it comes from a member of one’s own family.
Of course, Lamb is not a simple bigot. He is using lines for effect, trying to wound and to shock himself as much as anyone else. He is not, as the cliché goes, hurting himself in order to feel something: he does it to harden himself, to get the jabs in first before fate can damage him again. He is trying to demonstrate the futility of feeling.
In the play, as in popular therapy, such a strategy is doomed to failure. It is, in the lingo, self-defeating behaviour. In a final regression into needy baby talk, Lamb haltingly explains that his actions have been governed by unconditional love for his children and a terror of further pain.
Having loved and lost too often, he cannot bear the prospect of yet more agony. The loss of Kate, his daughter, tips him over the brink: he crumbles into real madness as the protective facade of his previous performance caves in under the pressure.
There is something disturbingly banal about this. It is a validation of the therapy culture and its truisms. If only, we think, he had opened up earlier. If only he had known how to share his pain. If only he had reached out to his sons instead of trying to turn them into vulcanised versions of his own armoured self. If only he had worked through his denial. Serves him right, we say to ourselves: this is what happens when feelings are repressed and denied.
But it is a cop-out on Carolan’s part, a refusal to allow that there might be some truth to Lamb’s fury. Perhaps some losses really are too deep and painful, and no therapy in the world knows how to make things better. Even if the truisms happen to be true, falling back on them is too simplistic a solution to the play’s problems.
The matter of religion is another point where Carolan steps back from the brink. Lamb raises a crucial question: is faith really a panacea for those who have suffered a devastating loss? And if it is, does this not undermine its truth value, turning it from a true account of the cosmos into a therapeutic tool? Empress of India offers no answers, merely a confused rejection of traditional faith coupled with an uncritical acceptance of its new-age therapeutic successor.
Garry Hynes’s direction has touches of brilliance, but is less assured than one would expect. The set, dominated by a huge mirror, neatly reflects the infinite maze in which the characters are trapped, while suggesting that self-scrutiny — a vice that Lamb carries to excess — may also be a therapeutic blessing.
At one point, Lamb takes a typically self-reflexive turn, quoting Chekhov’s theatrical dictum about guns on the stage. If a gun is seen in Act I, he says, it should be fired in Act III. But in today’s topsy-turvy Ireland, where guns appear to be everywhere and organised religion is in retreat, a different version might be more fitting.
When a statue of the Virgin Mary appears in the first act, she too should be “fired” before the end. In a play so resolutely devoid of miracles, we can hardly expect her to go for a walk. But it would have been interesting to hear her views on therapy.
The Empress of India, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Three stars
