About the Play:

The Steward of Christendom was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

The Steward of Christendom is a full length drama by Sebastian Barry. Thomas Dunne, ex-chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan police looks back on his career built during the latter years of Queen Victoria's empire, from his home in Baltinglass in Dublin in 1932. Like King Lear, Dunne tries valiantly to break free of history and himself. A lyrical account of playwright Sebastian Barry's great-grandfather, James Dunne, who served as the head of Dublin's Metropolitan Police.

The Steward of Christendom tells the story of Irishman Thomas Dunne, loosely based on the author's great-grandfather, the last Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, an organization devoted to the British crown but then disbanded after the Irish war of independence of the 1920s. Considered by some to be a traitor to Ireland, and after some seven years of confinement in the County Home, Dunne is a broken man, both mentally and physically. Alone in a barren room, barely clothed and in little control of his faculties, Dunne, at 75, reenacts scenes from his past, taking refuge in the memory of his three daughters and a son who died in World War I. The parallels between Dunne's family life and the political life of Ireland are all too apparent. Chaos and murder resulted from the revolution, and Dunne could only stand watching as his way of understanding the world dissolved. Similarly, he was an aloof father who couldn't tell his son how much he loved him until it was too late. Near the end of the play, the arrival of Dunne's daughter, Annie, puts the last nail in the play's thematic coffin as her anger and resentment over her father's neglect compete with her pity for this elderly man who now needs her the way a baby needs its mother. Bereft of any solution to his life, Dunne recounts a childhood memory about his own father, in which he seems to be asking us for forgiveness and understanding. The Steward of Christendom is the fifth play in a cycle of plays about the author's Irish family.

The Steward of Christendom premiered in 1995 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and took London by storm, winning the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the Ireland/America Literary Prize, the Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play and the Writers' Guild Award (Best Fringe Play). It transferred to off-Broadway in 1977 at the Majestic Theater in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, toured around the world, and established Sebastian Barry as one of Ireland's most powerful contemporary playwrights.

Cast: 4 female, 5 male

What people say:

"Magnificent … the cool, elegiac eye of James Joyce's The Dead; the bleak absurdity of Samuel Beckett's lost, primal characters; the cosmic anger of King Lear…." — New York Times

"A great play, like a great punch, is sometimes hard to see coming, but you know when you've been hit. You are rocked to your toes; and long after the event your body carries the memory of that unforeseen power." — The New Yorker

"Sebastian Barry's compassionate imaging of an ancestor he never knew is among the most poignant onstage displays of humanity in recent memory." — Variety

About the Playwright:

Sebastian Barry is an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and is considered one of Ireland's finest writers.