Lennox Robinson’s 1926 play, The Big House, resurrected after 75 years at the Abbey Theatre in a production by Conall Morrison, is, on the face of it, something of a curate’s egg. The important questions, whether it is worth reviving, and whether or not I would recommend it, are not easy to answer.

In order to begin to answer them, one first has to ask what a national theatre is for. Yes, that question, again, and again, and again. It always has to be asked, because the answers to it have to change from generation to generation, from year to year, from season to season, because the Irish people pay for it, and it is supposed to be more than just another subsidised theatre.

However, the Abbey is no longer the centre of cultural life it once was in the formative years of the Irish state, when it used to prompt searching debates on social, political and political identity, because theatre has been largely superseded by radio, cinema, television and the internet. Perhaps only with Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show has a similar platform been evident in Irish life since.

On principle, I am opposed to museum theatre, by which I mean the production of plays that are not dramatically compelling in themselves, but because they have a place in history that merits their regurgitation every now and again to please the tourists, who expect to see an O’Casey or a Synge, for a whimsical sentimental experience of “real” Oirishry. However, I realise of course that museums can present their archives in a way that is contemporary and relevant, both educational and exciting. And, if done in the right way, surprising. It is this quality of surprise that I experienced when I was at this show.

One thing leapt right out at me, and spoke to me in a way that touched me personally- this is a play about what it means to “inhabit the hyphen” of being Anglo-Irish. In my own life, with my grandfather who was a courier in the British Army at the Somme, and my great-grandfather on the other side of my family ready to shoot at him when he was called back to put down the rebellion of 1916, I know a little bit of what that hyphen feels like. Even before I moved to England, my accent was always suspected to be English, but once in England, it was always recognized as Irish. Having spent half my adult life in England, I found Robinson’s interrogation of the oil-and-water quality of the relationship between the Irish and English as relevant today as it was in 1926.

The play is a vivid portrait of a time when the English ascendancy was on the retreat, and is a sympathetic treatment of the inhabitants of one Big House in Cork, and the workings of the disintegrating feudal society around it, in a time of rebellion and civil war. It begins on Armistice Day, and although the play seems alarmingly creaky initially, with a quasi-pantomime drunken Irish butler, it begins to become more interesting when the daughter of the house, Kate (played with a shining exuberance by Lucy Gaskell) bursts on with a misleadingly idle-rich bunch of flowers in her hand. Slowly it becomes apparent that the play’s central themes are to be played out primarily through Kate Alcock, as intelligent, passionate and independent a character it is possible to imagine; the play is primarily about her struggle to make sense of her hybrid inheritance, the daughter of a kind Irish landed gentleman father and an English mother (Deirdre Donnelly, the epitome of pained hauteur) whose martyred sufferance of rural Irish living was rooted in a sense of profound but never expressed alienation and fear. The fact that this dread was well-founded and premonitory is evident in the play’s climax.

This is a curiously self-referential piece, in an almost post-modern way. St Leger Alcock, the lord of Ballydonal House, chides a visiting English soldier not to “enjoy us as if we were a comic story or a play”. This is as relevant today as it was then, the painful/curious way the English see the Irish as in some way amusing; after all, it was not too many years ago Eastenders went to Ireland for a couple of teeth-clenching “light-hearted” episodes.

Kate, practical, hard-working, resilient and resourceful, proud that she has “no April moods” and doesn’t “go from tears to laughter in a moment”, states quite matter-of-factly that she hasn’t cried once in ten years. With a fierce stoicism, and a deliberate refusal to wed, or to accept comfort, sympathy or nourishment, this is a woman who commands respect, on her own terms. She learns Irish because it’s part of her make-up, but says she doesn’t much care for politics. The English part of her seems “swamped”, and yet in the second scene it’s brought home to her how much of an outsider she is seen to be by local Irish people. Despite of her awareness of the gulf between her and them, she “threw a bridge over it and ran across it”; but when it came to the crunch, grieving for her nurse, shot dead by the Black and Tans, she became aware of something “deeper, something that none of us can put into words, something instinctive, this ‘them and us’ feeling.” Robinson’s self-consciousness as a writer is ever present, referencing frequently his struggle with the limitations of the form. Kate at one point declares “This is County Cork, not third-rate melodrama”. After her return from living in London for a while, she reflects how everything there seems like fuzzy “sentimental play-acting” – she relishes the return to “real things” in Ireland. Her mother reflects bitterly that if sentiment was something Kate sought, she’d find the essence of it in Ballydonal; and Kate retorts drily that her mother would die for that sentimentality: “it isn’t fuzzy to die”.

When the “realness” that Kate seeks manifests in the destruction of everything real she has ever known, in the last scene, she makes sense of it in one of the least sentimental or expected arguments I’ve heard on stage. She ruefully comments that at least they weren’t ignored; that her family, her Big House of a home, mattered, even if it was at the receiving end of hate. “Say it with petrol” she remarks, blackly, and with that line Kate leaps to take a place in the list of the most interesting protagonists in Irish theatre, male or female.

The play is far from perfect, however. There’s a supernatural element that seems dated, unintegrated, and sensationalist; despite the subtleties of Derry Power’s performance as the drunk Irish butler, the character sticks out like a sore thumb, because it’s a lightning rod for the wrong sort of laughter from the audience, which doesn’t get challenged or transformed into anything meaningful. There are, despite Robinson’s conscious efforts, elements of melodrama, and we are used to a more sophisticated way of storytelling now. Stripped of its history, I would not find this play engaging enough; but one cannot strip this play of its context, in the same way that the Abbey cannot – nor should not – ignore its past.

This is a seriously fascinating evening, for all its flaws. Self-reference, in the Abbey’s case, is no mere narcissism. I am encouraged to know that back in the twenties, such a play was so popular, because it was tackling earnestly what it meant to be English/Protestant in Ireland, and perhaps it wasn’t until Frank McGuinness wrote “Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme” that this theme was tackled again, with a similar degree of respect.

As, finally, there is peace on this island, with real signs of mutual trust emerging, based on honouring profound and often baffling differences between the two traditions, this long-forgotten evidence that the Abbey was once home to intelligent, passionate reflection on the theme is welcome, and deserving of its five-week run. History is not dead; museums can come to life.

Thanks to Lisa Coen for her company, insight and knowledge.