DUBLIN JACK: A note from the composer

John Saul, also known as Dublin Jack, was a scandalous figure in Victorian London primarily remembered for his involvement in the underground world of male prostitution and for his authorship of gay erotic literature. His most famous work is The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), one of the earliest known examples of explicitly homosexual literature in English. Presented as a memoir, the book provides a vivid, semi-fictionalised account of Saul’s experiences in London’s gay subculture. An underground hit, Saul’s pornographic literature offers rare insight into the hidden lives of homosexual men during a time when same-sex relations were not only criminalised but seen as morally poisonous to the empire.

So this lad from a post-famine Ireland occupies a unique place in literary and queer history for giving voice—albeit in a provocative form—to a marginalised and persecuted community.

The book aside, here’s a boy from the poverty of Dublin slums, raised in the shadow of a famine (from which Ireland only recovered this year!) and wildly effeminate. He was also gorgeous, and - like many of us Irish gay boys still - seduced by the terrible otherness of the British upper classes. This was British Ireland, the oldest colony of the growing empire. A place where identities had become intermingled by force through the eradication of Irish language, culture and land. So it is no surprise that a young Saul was drawn to London, the largest city in the world at that time and the centre of the empire. Ireland’s deep religious roots, recent catastrophic death toll and burgeoning revolutionary movement was no place for a flamboyant lad who would one day be rumoured as the Prince of Wales’ lover, was it?

London, for Jack, was a place of relative freedom; a place where his tribe of rent boys gathered under the lights of Piccadilly. He could flourish. We may judge his vocation, okay, but we can’t judge his success. He climbed to the top of his profession (no pun intended). I was drawn to the parallels with the Ireland of my youth, and the exodus of gay boys in the 1980s and 90s. The catholic caliphate in the south and the hyper-masculine violence-cult in the north saw generations of men leaving their home, flocking to safer cities - sure, it wasn’t all roses in Thatcherite London, but there was ‘a scene’, a community. That this was still happening a hundred years after Saul shocks me. It’s changed now, but the Oz-like, Priscilla-like qualities of the queer narrative here are rich.

This concert is a first step in understanding where these characters will take us. I, as a dramatist, am only interested in character, and giving voice to them here for the first time and allowing them to breathe, is an important part of my process. This is by no means the finished work, and you will see the first two acts of the opera. These are the large-scale structures that house the critical character and musical DNA. Sharing them with you, and encouraging feedback, good and bad, allows me to move forward and make a final staged production. It also opens up the creative process, and that’s something we at the Belfast Ensemble like to do: bring our audience with us as a piece is made.

I hope the ghost of Jack Saul is among us, singing along and upstaging the lot of us with the sheer force of his/her fabulousness!

Conor Mitchell

Composer / Librettist & Artistic Director