After the Night of Broken Glass in Germany, in November 1938, the Department of Foreign Affairs sought a report from our man in Berlin. Almost 100 Jews had been murdered in the Kristallnacht pogrom, and thousands of businesses ransacked.

The tiny Berlin legation was headed by Charles Bewley. His report back made no mention of attacks on Jews and Jewish property. Instead, he wrote approvingly of measures towards “the elimination of the Jewish element from the public life of Germany”, contrasting Germany favourably with other European countries.

“The method of the ‘Western democracies’ in dealing with the Jewish problem has been to deny that the problem exists,” he wrote, “and to consider the matter settled by calling those who think otherwise ‘anti-semites’.” (This, and other related documents, is published in the ‘Documents on Irish Foreign Policy’ series, www.difp.ie.)

Our man in Berlin was indeed an anti-semite. Bewley had ‘gone native’, and was a Nazi sympathiser. In 1939, he was recalled to Dublin; he didn’t appear, was dismissed, and later wound up writing propaganda for Goebbels. So much for Bewley.

Ian Kennedy-Martin came to Dublin in 1954, “because it was the cheapest town in Europe for a university education”. He spent five years there, mostly, it seems, in the pubs, and he took rooms above one, the Brazen Head.

He never heard of Bewley, but learned that Eamon de Valera had made a condolences visit to the German Ambassador on the occasion of Hitler’s death. It rankled. Still, he became enamoured of Ireland, and dug up a Donegal granny in order to gain a passport and citizenship. In 1961, he moved back to London, to try his hand at writing.

He got into the BBC Writers’ Pool, a no-frills operation churning out adaptations and tv plays for live filming, and spent the next 40 years “hacking around television”. (His “hacking” included creating the police drama, ‘The Sweeney’, and totalled over 150 hours in tv drama credits.) All the while, though, he was looking for a “contained situation” in which he could set a drama with a small cast. He wanted to write a stage play, and knew he needed something with few characters and less sets (preferably just the one).

Then, a few years ago, he stumbled upon a reference to the Irish wartime legation in Berlin: a small room, a couple of people, an external threat (the bombs falling) and plentiful potential for internal conflict. He had his play. He had just turned 70, and it had taken him four decades of writing tv drama to find it.

That play, ‘The Berlin Hanover Express’ finishes this weekend at the Hampstead Theatre in London, and there are tentative talks about an Irish tour next year. The play is set in the Irish legation in Berlin in 1942, where tensions between the two Irish diplomats over Irish neutrality and their growing awareness of Nazi atrocities are brought to a head when their cook is discovered by their police ‘minder’ to be Jewish. Mallin, the dutiful head of the legation, is fervently anti-British, leading him to a growing regard for the German war effort and to a concern that Irish neutrality be strictly maintained. His compatriot, O’Kane, is a feckless gambler and unreliable worker, whose gambling debts, and also perhaps his growing disgust at atrocities in Germany, lead him to some freelance spying for the British.

The play is not based on Bewley or on documentary records, and its somewhat implausible plot follows the taut conventions of a thriller rather than the looser threads of history. But it is nonetheless a rare example of an ‘Irish’ play set in an immediately political context, driven as much by political argument as by character.

Conall Quinn’s ‘The Death of Harry Leon’, earlier this year, was a welcome venture into neighbouring territory, with its counterfactual hypothesis of a fascist government coming to power in Dublin during the war. The Rough Magic musical, ‘Improbable Frequency’, was an exquisite lampoon of wartime culture in Dublin. But the trend in Irish drama has been relentlessly personal rather than political; since the early plays of Brian Friel, Irish plays tackling the workings of state power have been notable by their absence. Irish writers have tended to dramatise the state of Ireland, rather than the Irish state.

In Britain, outside London’s West End, which is fuelled by tourists and stuffed with musicals, the situation is the opposite. As Michael Billington, the Guardian’s veteran critic, says, “in England, we assume theatre is, broadly speaking, political”. Since Shakespeare’s cycle of history plays, theatre has been used “as a means of analysing the state of the nation”. More recently, with the emergence of a trend for documentary theatre, and the theatrical restaging of tribunals of inquiry, theatre has been seen “as an extension of factual inquiry”.

In a broadly positive review of ‘The Berlin Hanover Express’, Billington wrote that “the fiction of wartime neutrality is the elephant in the room of Irish drama” and that Kennedy-Martin’s play “throws down a gauntlet to other Irish dramatists by challenging them to explore further a vital historical issue”.

Kennedy-Martin’s play has core weaknesses: the Irish characters might be less convincing to an Irish audience than to an English one, and the plot turns on some rather predictable spy-fiction tropes. But it is extraordinary that so few Irish writers have ventured into this wartime territory, and it is at least mildly ironic that it took a Londoner (albeit an adoptive Irishman) and a London theatre to tackle the question of Ireland’s role in the war. So who will take up that gauntlet?

Written for my theatre column in the Irish Independent April 4, 2009