Dear Mr Butterworth

Dear Mr Butterworth,

I went to see your latest play, ‘The Ferryman’ at the weekend. Due to the array of five star reviews it has garnered, I was really looking forward to seeing it. But, alas, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. In fact, to be totally honest with you, I despised it. Therefore, I am writing to you in the hope of unburdening myself of the contempt that I feel for your play. But, before your reciprocal contempt for this letter is expressed in the shredding of it, l offer you the promise of a solution that will redeem your play from being what it currently is: an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys transposed to 1980s Armagh.

First though, I need to do the unburdening. I am a family man. I grew up in a large family in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I work with families as a job. In my experience, there is no family as disgustingly happy as the Carneys in the first half of your play. I get it that happy families are hard to write, hence why soap writers exclusively serve up a diet of dysfunctional families, but the Carneys make the Waltons look like the Manson family. When Oisin breaks the kite, the younger children seem a bit sad and confused. In reality, there would have been tantrums and tears. I believe you yourself have children, so why did you depict the Carney children as so unrealistically angelic? Was it because they were Irish and therefore somehow different from or better than children anywhere else in the world? I thought what you were playing at was setting up this family idyll in the first half of the play in order to expose it as a sham in the second half but I was wrong. The Carneys are just all very very lovely and very very Irish. They drink, they dance, they swear, they sing, they make Classical references, they talk about fairies and banshees and they count their years in harvests. They are, in fact, a British suburbanite’s representation of the folk across the water.

And now we come to the second half and the entrance of the Baddies. (Boo! Hiss!) Contrasting with the lovely, lovely Irish family, you presented us with three members of the IRA. They have had to travel a long way to interact with the Carneys because obviously there were no members of the IRA residing in South Armagh at the time. This distance between the Carneys and the IRA is highly significant because it suggests to the audience that each party inhabits its own separate world. But that is misleading because, as I’m sure you know, Mr Butterworth, IRA members and lovely lovely Irish families were not different entities; they were, most often, one and the same.

After a busy afternoon’s sniping, the South Armagh Sniper probably returned home to his loving wife and children. He probably read a bedtime story to the kids. It might have been about fairies and banshees but I doubt it. After which, he probably kissed them good night and then went to do a night shift in a factory, although there weren’t too many of them in Armagh in the 1980s. The same was true for the Loyalist paramilitaries. After a pleasant evening spent torturing a Catholic in the back room of a pub, in front of an invited audience of lovely lovely friends and neighbours, the Shankill Butchers returned home to their lovely lovely wives and mothers who, the following day, discussed the best detergent for getting Fenian blood out of a denim jacket. This was the reality, Mr Butterworth, and I’m sure you know it. (The British Army certainly knew it when they introduced the policy of Internment but you can’t lock up an entire community without drawing the opprobrium of the entire world. ) So why did you present IRA members as operating outside society when they were embedded within it? As an Englishman, did you feel that this might disturb the cherished post-colonial guilt of your middle class British audiences towards all things Irish?

Or, did you not wish to offend members of the Diaspora and their ‘Oh So Irish’ British-born kids who you knew would flock to a play about the Auld Country, in which Irish families are lovely and Irish terrorists are The Other? I would genuinely like to know.

So onto my proposed solution for redeeming your play. You will be pleased to learn that you can keep most of the first half, except for the opening scene which was totally superfluous anyhow. So lovely lovely Oirish family, tiddly dee tiddly dum, potty-mouthed kids (not funny, by the way, even if audiences laugh) etc. etc. The second half is, however, where the changes will have to be made because, in the rewritten version, we come to realize that Quinn Carney, the lovely, lovely Quinn Carney, farmer and family man, is implicated in the execution and disappearance of his own brother. For the last decade, his whole life has been a lie. I’ll leave you, the greatest playwright of his generation, to work out the denouement. You might want to incorporate Tom Kettle into this somehow. In the play at the moment, he’s just a cypher – an inversion of the Irish fool or Lenny Small with an estuary accent. Perhaps he could be the only one who knows the truth about Quinn. Perhaps he is really a British Army deserter. Whatever. He needs a real back story, (currently he doesn’t have one) and that could involve Quinn’s deceit. (Incidentally, we had Social Services in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, so the primitives wouldn’t have been able to adopt a lost child with an English accent without some sort of legal process.)

I know the play in its current form is transferring to Broadway, where I know the Yanks will love it because it will present them with a nostalgic view of Ireland that avoids the implication that they’re related to terrorists but, is that what you want? Your play is a huge hit but so is Mrs Brown’s Boys and Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl. Like your play (in its current form), neither of these masterpieces tells the audience anything about Ireland or the Irish. So, Mr. Butterworth, here’s your chance to transform your play from something popular into something important. You have a couple of months before it transfers to Broadway. I saw an interview that you gave to the BBC in which you said you were a last minute sort of guy. So two months should be more than enough time to re-write the second half and to dispense with that awful, clunky second interval while you’re at it. Good luck with it.

Do not let me and my fellow Irish men and women down. Tell the truth about us.

Regards

Mark Hamill (Yes, it is my real name)