John Bull's Other Island
Two engineers return to Ireland in 1904: Larry Doyle, an Irishman who fled to London, and his English partner Tom Broadbent, who carries romantic notions of the Emerald Isle. Broadbent expects warmth. He gets it too. He charms the entire town, including, devastatingly, Larry's sweetheart. But Shaw's comedy cuts deeper than a simple fish-out-of-water tale. Broadbent becomes a mirror for English attitudes toward Ireland: earnest, confident, utterly blind to the colonial dynamics beneath his friendliness. Larry, meanwhile, discovers that leaving Ireland didn't just change his homeland it changed what he can feel toward it. The play's brilliance lies in its refusal to let anyone off easily. The English are absurd, yes, but so are the Irish who perform welcome for them. Shaw, himself a Dublin-born Londoner, wrote his only Ireland-set play as a fierce, funny reckoning with belonging, with the lies we tell about home, and with the uncomfortable truth that you cannot miss what you chose to leave. The political specifics may be dated, but the questions are eternal: Can you go back? Do you want to? Who are you when the place that made you no longer knows your name?
