The Clearing : Independent review

By Rhoda Koenig
Wednesday, 1 May 2002

"Clearing" is the name – like "clearances" on our own shores, "cleansing" in our times – given to Cromwell's dispossession and mass murder of the Irish, not in the name of conquest or capitalism, but of moral improvement. The Irish are literally devils, says a British officer in Helen Edmundson's disturbing play for Shared Experience. Some of his men have seen Irish corpses with tails. The Clearing is set in the mid-17th century, when Gaelic has been outlawed, single women are being abducted to servitude in the West Indies, and even Englishmen who have put down roots and sympathies are considered Irish enough to be driven from their homes.
"Clearing" is the name – like "clearances" on our own shores, "cleansing" in our times – given to Cromwell's dispossession and mass murder of the Irish, not in the name of conquest or capitalism, but of moral improvement.

The Irish are literally devils, says a British officer in Helen Edmundson's disturbing play for Shared Experience. Some of his men have seen Irish corpses with tails. The Clearing is set in the mid-17th century, when Gaelic has been outlawed, single women are being abducted to servitude in the West Indies, and even Englishmen who have put down roots and sympathies are considered Irish enough to be driven from their homes.
As the play opens, Madeleine Preston, an Irish woman, is giving birth to her first child, in very modern circumstances.

Her English husband, Robert, says afterwards that watching it was "a changing experience". But their lives are soon to change in a way that is far less benign. Sir Charles Sturman, sent by Cromwell to expedite the clearing, serves notice on the Prestons' friends and neighbours, including an Englishman whose government encouraged him to farm in Ireland. Madeleine's childhood friend is snatched by soldiers and thrown on a ship to Barbados. When Madeleine, citing Christian charity, pleads with Sturman for her release, he answers coldly: "God has compassion, but he also has strength; God is no fool, and neither am I." Madeleine's passion turns to rage, which seals her own and her husband's fate.
Polly Teale's production is particularly strong on the female side.

The stunning Aislín McGuckin makes a passionate Madeleine, warm and yielding in the early domestic scenes, heartbreakingly bewildered, then icy as she realises that her husband's love for her is no match for her love of her country. Amelda Brown is also excellent as a neighbour repelled by sensuality but who, defending her loved ones, is as much of a tigress as her friend. Patrick Moy is unconvincing as an Irish rebel who once loved Madeleine, but Joseph Millson is a fine Preston – amorous, then confused and finally horrified at the widening gap between himself and his wife.

Edmundson's play has many powerful moments – in particular, the scene on board the transport ship, where Madeleine's friend, who has been raped and beaten, refuses to be rescued, saying she is too dirty to go back to her old life. But one has too little sense of that former life – the dialogue is largely declarative and confrontational, and the author's bias toward sentiment and theatricality is at times unintentionally comic. Madeleine's friend gushes about her bearing "a little chyuld with arms and feet and fingers", and Madeleine herself announces that there is at the door "a small boy with the world in his mouth". In the overwrought local idiom, this means he brings news, but to me it sounded as if he needed to be turned upside down and shaken hard.