Michael Kitchen

The Hanging Gale
The Guardian Manchester; May 15, 1995; Nancy Banks-Smith;
The Independent; London; May 15, 1995; Thomas Sutcliffe;
The Times; London; May 15, 1995; Lynne Truss;
The Times; London; Jun 5, 1995; Lynne Truss;
The Guardian Manchester; Jun 11, 1995; John Naughton;

The Guardian Manchester; May 15, 1995; Nancy Banks-Smith;
In The Hanging Gale (not a pun, a reference to impending rent) the new English land agent arrives in Donegal just before the potato famine. Townsend (Michael Kitchen) is a humane man and as upright as his hat. His predecessor has just been murdered in a scrambling, ghastly way, splashing like a gaffed fish, and Townsend has hardly sat down before he is half strung up. You get the four gifted McGann brothers, lovely horses and fine photography in the wild and woeful west. The most cheerful aspect of The Hanging Gale is that it is produced by BBC Northern Ireland in association with RTE.

The Independent; London; May 15, 1995; Thomas Sutcliffe;
The Hanging Gale (BBC1) opened with the brutal murder of an Irish land-agent after a hedgerow trial ("Who spoke in my defence?" shouts the terrified man. "I did," replies one of his murderers dryly, "I wasn't very convincing.") It ended with the sight of one of the more sympathetic characters parting company with his brainpan, courtesy of a policeman's bullet, a sequence played in slow motion lest you miss any flying fragments. But the violence here isn't simply a designer flourish - it testifies to the sudden, chaotic release of suppressed anger and apprehension. There's fear on both sides, a dangerous circumstance which can only advance the ratchet of violent retaliation. If the series looked a bit of a joke on paper - an Irish Famine saga designed to boil the McGann family pot - it actually turns out to be very good. It has a didactic strain to it which Gerry Adams would almost certainly approve of, but this is a disregarded episode of history and besides, the drama has room for nuance alongside its instructive outrage. There was a lovely scene in which Michael Kitchen (the replacement land-agent, essentially decent, bound to break because he will not bend) has his wine glass filled to the very brim by his Irish housekeeper. Dumb insolence or peasant manners? Kitchen can't tell, which tells you a lot about him and about a drama that doesn't always feel it has to make speeches.

The Times; London; May 15, 1995; Lynne Truss;
Rain. Irish coastal landscape. Black clouds. A crash of thunder. "We must lift the potatoes!" yells a man in black clerical coat and white collar, bursting into a lowly abode, soaked from his frantic journey. "What, now?" yell back the peasants. They emerge into the wet and recoil from the smell of the potato crop. "There is blight in the valley!" he roars. And as they pull up each plant to find squishy midget spuds in the earth, they sink to their knees in the mud, and think, "Funny, a climactic line that goes `We must lift the potatoes'? But you've got to hand it to them. It works."
BBC1's Irish Potato Famine drama The Hanging Gale started last night in this highly diverting manner with big drama every ten minutes, more coastal brooding than Rebecca, and an embarrassment of nice-looking McGann brothers to feast the eye on. To be fair, the life of an Irish peasant in the 1840s probably enjoyed less incident from day to day, but for the purposes of Allan Cubitt's four-part The Hanging Gale, events came in legions, each hurtling tragically out of control before you could say "Mashed or sauteed?" The Irish extras toiled and moiled threateningly in brown fustian; an English land agent was killed on the road; his successor (Michael Kitchen) was nearly lynched. "Brady, read the riot act," was a particularly thrilling line, delivered coolly by Kitchen on a white horse. Kitchen lowers his voice for emphasis; no wonder he is in such demand.
I ought to explain that a former boyfriend of mine was obsessed with the Irish Potato Famine, and had somehow reached the point of blaming me personally, so The Hanging Gale comes as a great relief. My only concern about last night's episode which was beautifully filmed, cinematic in its depth and colour was the McGann problem. Modestly mingling into the other peasant characters, the lookalike McGanns (the Phelans) eluded a head-count until about halfway through, at which point it transpired that a McGann was missing. Only three out of four had turned up! Luckily, the fourth McGann appeared before I phoned the Duty Officer, quoting the relevant page number of Radio Times. Angel-faced Paul McGann was the priest who brought the bad news about the spuds. "Liam!" cried his family, and I exhaled with relief. The containment of chaos was all around in the weekend's programmes.

The Times; London; Jun 5, 1995; Lynne Truss;
I was right about The Hanging Gale (BBC1). "Things will get worse," I predicted, and by jiminy they did. Towards the end of last night's final episode of this excellent Irish potato famine drama, the toll of misery, tragedy and waste was having the same effect as the later novels of Thomas Hardy heaping great paving slabs onto your stoically braced sensibilities until finally a feather is laid on the burden and you crack.
Maeve Phelan (Fiona Victory) had lost husband, parents, father-in-law, brother, home and livelihood, but it was only when her little son succumbed to the pestilence that the waterworks spouted in this house. "Forgive me for letting you die," she pleaded with his little corpse. At which point I struck the board and cried "No more!" The suffering, the injustice The Hanging Gale was not about laughs, certainly. Against a cinematic background of cliffs and strands, each of the four upstanding Phelan brothers (played by the four famous McGanns) chose a different policy against oppression: Liam, the priest, believed in reasoning with the English landlords and The Times; Daniel believed in vengeance and terrorism; Sean believed in passive tenantry; and Con believed in raising money for food by risking his life in stick-fights. Naturally, none of these beliefs was vindicated by the unfolding events, and Allan Cubitt's epic script left all the brothers either dead, or empty shells, or cheerlessly embarked for America.
Meanwhile the improbably enlightened English agent played by Michael Kitchen continued to operate with Christ-like forbearance, and was finally shot dead in the arms of the Irish servant, Mary (Tina Kellegher). Kitchen's performance hollow, gentle, lonely was superb. Ever since his role in To Play the King, Kitchen unavoidably brings a little bit of the Prince of Wales to all his roles: the selfless man with his hands tied; the sad man nobody can reach. In The Buccaneers he attempted cool vindictiveness, and I didn't much believe it. No, Townsend was a terrific role for him. On receiving a death-threat, Townsend hands the letter straight to Mary, explaining that she may be in danger too. The crisis of conscience this brings to Mary the enemy within means that the quiet scenes inside the house were always quite as big as anything raging outside.

The Guardian Manchester; Jun 11, 1995; John Naughton;
Early in 1994 small ads and posters appeared in shops, bars and village post offices round Letterkenny, Co Donegal. wanted: thin people for film, they read. An unusual specification, you might think, given that most films require extras drawn from the normal distribution of avoirdupois. But then this film was something different: it was about what in Ireland is known as `the Famine', aka the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-48.
This was uncharted territory for television drama. Indeed, until recently, it was territory which most Irishmen and women preferred to ignore. In 1945 the centenary of the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe went largely unmarked in the country in which it occurred, and over which it still casts a bleak shadow. It was as if the Famine were some kind of shameful family secret, best left unmentioned. Yet this was the cataclysm which shaped modern Ireland. And continues to shape it, because the pressures currently being exerted by the Clinton administration on the British government are a direct result of the hunger which drove a million landless Irish peasants to the United States in the middle of the last century. Their 40-million odd descendants carry a powerful folk-memory of `the Great Hunger' in which British governments figure mainly as Cabinets of heartless villains who disdained to provide the relief which would have saved the Irish from starvation and the coffin ship.
The anti-British resentment generated by this myth is now being channelled into the mainstream of American politics, which is why Gerry Adams is a star over there while the Brits fume and wonder whatever became of the Special Relationship. As material for film drama, the Famine is almost as tricky as the Holocaust, which I guess is why - until The Hanging Gale (BBC1, Sundays) - it was studiously avoided. The mini-series Holocaust provided a terrible warning of television's capacity for trivialisation. It took a Spielberg to break that particular spell. And it has taken the McGann brothers to break a similar taboo in relation to the Great Hunger.
I mention the McGanns because The Hanging Gale is very much their project. They are four Liverpudlians of Irish extraction and the idea for the series came from Stephen McGann's search for his Irish roots. In the end, the script was written by Allan Cubitt (of Prime Suspect fame) but it is the McGann brothers who dominate it from start to finish. The Hanging Gale told the story of the Famine as it affected a small community in Co Donegal.
It opens with a grisly murder of a land agent and his driver. The agent is replaced by Captain Townsend (Michael Kitchen), a decent Englishman who is rapidly embroiled in a tragedy which eventually destroys him. The McGanns play the four Phelan brothers: hot-headed schoolteacher, Daniel (Stephen McGann); the young priest, Liam (Paul); steadfast farmer, Sean (Joe); and the idealistic humanitarian, Conor (Mark). Over four episodes, a tragedy unfolds which engulfs them all. The blight strikes, rents are not paid, the landlord refuses to mitigate them, the agent feels he has no option but to evict and before we know where we are, a vicious cycle of grief, suffering, despair, anger and violence has set in. Focusing on a single family sears the impact of the Famine on one's consciousness with the intensity of a magnifying glass concentrating the sun's rays.
As a production, The Hanging Gale was not perfect. The accents, for example, frequently wavered, particularly Daniel's. And the attempt to introduce a love interest via an affair between Daniel and Townsend's maid was quite unconvincing. But on the important things The Hanging Gale did not falter. Above all, it did not trivialise and it did not glamorise. On the contrary it was so unrelievedly bleak that one can imagine the Irish Tourist Board grinding its false teeth in frustration. Though set in one of the most beautiful places on God's earth, the series seemed to be shot mainly in torrential rain. And the closing sequence - of a straggling crocodile of desperate people trudging towards an emigrant ship - told you more about Sir Patrick Mayhew's current difficulties in Washington than a dozen editorials in the New York Times.

Many thanks to Deb for digging out these reviews.