"The Broken Jug"
A Note from the Director

Author John Banville, novelist and literary editor of The Irish Times, has a taste for the provocative. His most recent novel, The Untouchable, renders in fiction an Irish-born equivalent of Anthony Blunt, the British traitor and mole for the Soviets who was also chief custodian of the Queen's art -- told from the subject's own cold and unsympathetic perspective.

Similarly The Broken Jug offers the unedifying spectacle of a small-town judge who is moved, not by a love of justice, but by insatiable appetites and rationalizations that are pathetically false -- often even to himself.

As the play opens, Judge Adam awakens following yet another night of debauchery. He is informed by his slyly ambitious clerk, Lynch, that the British inspector of courts, Sir Walter Peel, is on the way. The day's first case is that of Widow Martha Reck, who wants restitution for a family heirloom, the titled Jug that was broken by a mysterious intruder in her daughter Eve's room the previous night. As the court room is drawn into the vortex of scandal, the spectre of blight stalks the village and surrounding fields.

Banville's The Broken Jug is a re-working of an early 19th German comedy of the same name by Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). Von Kleist struggled for recognition in his time and eventually consummated a suicide pact with an incurably ill married woman. The sensational and macabre manner of his death drew attention to his work, and The Broken Jug came to be recognized as one of the classics of the Romantic period that continued to be performed in the 20th century.

Banville's re-construction, published in 1994, plants the action firmly in Famine-era Ireland. Banville supplies colourful nuance that helps the play transcend any clichéd vision of Ireland in that desperate era. Widow Reck rhapsodizes about Ireland's ancient history, offering odes to Cuchullain and Brian Boru, while at the same time, as a Protestant landowner, she mocks her Catholic tenant Willie Temple with proud references to King Billy's glorious victory at the River Boyne. Banville once again exhibits a contrariness that provokes and stimulates.