Long Apprenticehood Review: 'A Subtle Drama of Life and Art'

Hari Collins looks back on the subtle drama and romance of Long Apprenticehood

Eve Connor

My favourite moment in A Long Apprenticehood was when the elder sister, Sophie, reads the passage in Richard II from which the play gets its name:

Nay, rather, every tedious stride I make / Will but remember me what a deal of world / I wander from the jewels that I love. /
 Must I not serve a long apprenticehood 
/ To foreign passages, and in the end,/ 
 Having my freedom, boast of nothing else /
 But that I was a journeyman to grief?

Closing the book, she exclaims, suddenly shocked: ‘Who would give that to a child?’. The child is her younger brother Jim, whom she left in Ireland as a young boy, to make a life for herself in England (she now works sorting postcards). Jim is now nineteen, full of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and the newspapers, a romantic radical who rejected a university scholarship to work on the farm. The play begins when Jim comes to stay with Sophie; by this point in it, he has gone to join a group of violent republicans, and she no longer knows where he is. She stares at the gun she found in his desk drawer and wonders whether it has gone off somewhere else, leaving her brother dead – a genuinely witty nod to Chekhov.

Sophie’s reading of Richard II is especially effective because it gestures at a paradox of any art form, but perhaps especially theatre: it is simultaneously an object, a pleasant evening out, a device for gaining status, wealth, power – and a potential instrument of the most radical personal and social transformation, a seducer of the too attentive, the armoury of the revolution. The play’s author, Eve Connor, who writes the wonderful Knick-Knacks column in Varsity, is certainly aware of this tension between being an object and forming a subject, and the form she has chosen, the quick two-hander driven by relentless, brilliant argument, exemplifies it in very concentrated style. In a play like this, the greater compactness of setting and situation must turn the stage into a kind of command-centre; images, ideas, scenes from the outside world must be brought suddenly into our mind’s eye, debated, charged with significance, acted upon, exploded.

There are many moves in that direction, and many good things at the object end of the scale, verbal delights and clever ideas. The opposition between the brother who longs for direct action and the sister who has at least half made her peace with a life “like the inside of a craft shop”, of dulling work and romance novels, never droops into a crude binary of male activity versus female passivity, since at every moment the drama explores internal contradictions of each sibling. Jim’s romantic illusions of a lost rural Ireland, the Ireland he believes he is defending, are in part a memory of a gentle world composed entirely of women – his father died when he was a baby – where nothing would go wrong since his sister could get him out of any scrape. And Sophie’s desire for comfort for herself and her brother are in large part derived from the eminently patriarchal finger that her father raised in her direction on his deathbed, as she stood in the doorway carrying the baby Jim. Though then again, Jim points out, in Kierkegaardian fashion, that their father may have been pointing at him, to motion him to carry on his republican legacy. Neither can say that they have finally found the sign, the image that can absolve them of their doubts and fears. And no image is final, none immune from charges of being a contrivance or a performance – though this room is supposed to be a respite from the difficulties of performing being Irish in an England which only wants Irish people, as Jim says, to laugh at, Jim uses his charm with Sophie, just as much as with any of the English at the pub, to hide his true intentions.

The play’s subtlety is thus admirable. Moreover, the sentence-by-sentence quality of the writing, as one would expect from Connor, is extremely high: there is none of the repeated, excruciating wait for hideous anachronism or a disastrously overwrought adjective which ruins some student-written  plays, even when well-conceived. This is helped by the good diction and unemphatic but very well-modulated delivery of both actors – Emily Knutsson’s monologues are particularly exemplary, and Luke Nichols demonstrates Jim’s charm and exasperation very well. 

However, I felt throughout that the play lacked moments where the currents that run through it were crystallised, not resolved but pressed into resonant images or triumphant if troubled phrases. The themes felt slightly more rotated than developed, leaving the play lacking a little urgency. The most persuasive attempt at high-definition was a conversation about the churning of butter when Jim was a boy; he remembers it as a source of fables about fairy-folk or magical powers, fables which would explain why the churning didn’t work, and tells Sophie that he longed to churn the butter himself. She recalls a place of hard and unsentimental work done – for no particular reason she can think of – only by women. This image intriguingly combines a romantic vision of Ireland, the necessity of women’s labour to underpin that vision, the futility of human effort, and then on through tales of fairies snatching human babies into Sophie’s abandonment of Jim for England. 

Unfortunately, this proves slightly too much – instead of reaching for some conclusion, even if an ambiguous one, the image collapses under its own significance and the argument dwindles away. This dwindling is perhaps exacerbated by performances which lack the edge of emotional intensity they need, increasingly, as the play goes on – it makes the revelations and reversals of its final parts seem a little under-motivated. I would thoroughly recommend seeing this play – it’s better written and acted than many professional productions – but it’s so good, it could be better.