Fire in the Head

Fire in the Head tells the story of Kate Kelly, sister of Ned.  Her story has been overshadowed by his – ignored by ‘history’.  The play is a combination of research and imaginative speculation.  It is beautifully written and it’s fascinating because it takes us into the unknown life of an historical figure.  Kate’s story, as remembered and told by her, is one of police persecutions suffered by her family (to which she attributes Ned’s crimes) and the varied routes and careers she took to escape hardship and poverty – horse breaker, showgirl, farm worker, wife, and mother.  Her endurance and stubborn resilience are admirable.

It is a story, as the playwright’s program notes tell us, that ends in 1898 with her death by drowning – although whether by murder or suicide is not known.  Here, both are possible, and both are understandable. 

But the telling is not straightforward, even if it is linear.  It all takes place in Kate’s head just before, or just as, she is dying.  She narrates her life forcefully and poetically – but her tale, although not naturalistic, is always convincingly within the bounds of what Kate would say.  In her collage of memories, which include Ned, her brother Dan and other members of the ‘Kelly gang’, and the violent men who exploited her and abused her, her aim is to make us understand why things were as they were.  She angrily justifies her own actions, lashes out at her persecutors, and sticks to her loyalties, for instance insisting that Ned murdered those police in self-defence and was wrongly hanged. 

The Kelly family’s Irish roots are inescapable.  An example is the Irish belief that, Death is a Young Man.  I confess I would not have understood this without the playwright’s notes.  Until I read them, I wondered at this character’s presence on stage.  Here, Death is accompanied by a fiddler (Peter O’Shea), whose music sometimes fights the dialogue - and wins.  But Death, his face divided by a vertical white stripe, is handsome, sympathetic, kindly, and attentive – as if Death is a temptation for an exhausted Kate and would be welcome.  He and Kate even briefly dance together…

However, allowing for and acknowledging the quality of the writing per se, and our interest in the forgotten Kate, the play’s narrative simply tries to include too much (like a bio-pic movie that tries to tell the whole life rather than some key and representative episodes).  As a result, it feels repetitious with Kate having all too brief episodes of freedom and happiness.  Too often she is the put-upon victim and there is insufficient variation of emotional tone.  At eighty minutes and with its relentless catalogue of ‘this happened and then that happened’, the audience’s emotional engagement becomes strained. 

There are, nevertheless, some marvellous performances and I would commend some in particular, but the program follows the current (and annoying) habit of simply listing the cast. The violent blacksmith husband finally becomes a character who is terrifying – and pathetic. Of the three actor Chorus, all draped in black, one also plays Kate’s father and is excellent, adding some Irish twinkle and what little humour there is in this tale of woe.

Fire in the Head began as a radio play in 2018 and then was reworked as a highly commended theatre text in 2020 at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.  I can imagine the text working very well as a radio play, as a ‘play for voices’.  (C.f. Under Milk Wood, which should never have been put on stage.)

Put on stage, Fire in the Head presents problems for director Rodney Hall.  It is predominantly narration by Kate, downstage centre, leaving other cast present but often stranded: the Chorus upstage left, and the blacksmith upstage right (and most distracting), with his back to us for three quarters of the play. 

The writer’s program notes tell us that ‘the project explores topics such as violence against women and [the] disparity of justice.’  But does it ‘explore’ or just state instances in Kate’s life?  There is no doubt, in this telling, that Kate struggled her whole life against racist and sexist persecution and discrimination.  Such things matter, but their presence does not necessarily make for good drama per se.  To my presumptuous mind, this text needs further reworking to add movement, variation, and more dramatic interaction – more show, less tell - taking it further yet from its radio play origins.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill