Production Language English
Country of Origin England, United Kingdom
Description Winner of several awards, including the London Critics Circle award for Best New Play and Best Actor, The Steward of Christendom offers a stirring, impassioned view of Ireland's monumental struggle for independence.
The Steward of Christendom is a haunting portrait of Sebastian Barry's own great-grandfather, Thomas Dunne, played by the great Irish actor Donal McCann (last seen in Bertolucci's film, Stealing Beauty). As the last Catholic superintendent of Dublin's Metropolitan Police under British rule, Dunne maintained a fierce, paradoxical loyalty to order and the English Crown, despite the revolutionary fervor brewing among Irish nationalists. When the play opens, a decade after the surrender of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins and subsequent civil war, we find a Lear-like Dunne drifting between the grim present of his confinement in a county mental home and the hurtful revelations of his past.
The Steward of Christendom is directed with luminous simplicity by Max Stafford-Clark, renowned for his work at London's Royal Court Theatre.
Identifier 1997s.00606
