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How to Bury a Dead Mule: ‘People went weird around my grandfather. They played cruel tricks – someone set fire to his trousers’

Richard Clements’s How to Bury a Dead Mule, at Edinburgh Fringe, is a powerful account of the effects of war on the soldiers who have to fight them

How to Bury a Dead Mule: Richard Clements in his play about his grandfather. Photograph: Neil Harrison
How to Bury a Dead Mule: Richard Clements in his play about his grandfather. Photograph: Neil Harrison
Jane Coyle
Tue Aug 01 2023 - 05:15

In 1964, 10 years into the Vietnam War, the Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote The Universal Soldier as a reflection on individual responsibility for war and how the old feudal ways of thinking would eventually kill us. It became a well-known protest song, a global pacifist anthem.

Sixty years on, powerful men are still giving orders. Further down the command chain those orders are being followed, lives lost, minds and bodies blown apart, social structures decimated.

Norman Clements was a universal soldier, Royal Irish Fusilier 7043226. The Belfast man’s frontline service in Africa and Italy during the second World War left him deeply damaged, socially isolated, incapable of holding down a job and barely able to function as a husband and father.

Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and worldwide civil strife, the actor and singer-songwriter Richard Clements has written a powerful, affectionate account of his grandfather’s troubled life in How to Bury a Dead Mule, his UK Theatre Award-nominated solo play, which opens at Edinburgh Festival Fringe on Wednesday, August 2nd.

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He acknowledges that Norman’s is one among many such experiences, but it was the one that mattered most to him. Under Matthew McElhinney’s inventive direction, and enhanced by Eoin Robinson’s videographic wizardry, his is no standard retelling of a sadly familiar story. Clements’s balletic performance, self-composed score, poetic prose and mixed-media presentation transform an old soldier’s rambling recollections into a compelling piece of physical theatre.

“I’ve wanted to write this play for decades,” he says. “Years ago I had a conversation with [fellow actor] Dan Gordon when we were doing Tim Loane’s play Caught Red Handed. He asked if I had an aspiration to write, and I told him I’d love to write a play about my grandfather. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘just sit down and do it.’ But I could never find a way into it. A few years later I was chatting to the screenwriter Anne Devlin on the set of Titanic Town. She suggested a good way to start was through a monologue – think of a character in your life who’s interesting and write it.

“I kept putting it off, because my acting career was going pretty well. Every time I got a new job I’d be up and away and this would go on to the back burner. But I’m also a songwriter and sometime poet. Eventually I got into it through the process of songwriting: write a few verses, write a chorus, then develop the idea into something bigger.”

Richard Clements in How to Bury a Dead Mule. Photograph: Neil Harrison
Richard Clements in How to Bury a Dead Mule. Photograph: Neil Harrison

In 2020 the Covid-19 lockdowns descended. Fired with renewed motivation, Clements sat down at the piano and wrote five instrumental pieces, whose titles were inspired by Norman’s journey. They now form the bedrock of the existing score. “They became like a roadmap,” he says. “I was able take a piece of music, place it somewhere in my mind and start to build a kind of support structure around it. They were like little life rafts.

“The biggest inspiration in all this was my mum. She told me she had a huge pile of transcripts which she’d typed up from conversations with my granda. She’d compiled a mini-book called The Vision, because he claimed that in the mayhem of battle on Monte Cavallo, when he’d crawled off a minefield, he had a vision of the future, where he could see his family.

“A lot of PTSD sufferers talk about this, where the pain and torment of the battlefield is reinterpreted postwar as a religious awakening. I read those transcripts in all their detail and realised that this was him, this was Norman in his own words.

“I book-ended them with reference to the Tonic cinema in Bangor, which had been converted into the care home where he spent his last years. I loved the idea of him resting his head every night in a place filled with cinematic memories. I thought it would be great if he could conjure up the ghosts of the past and bring in all those old soldiers to sit around and listen to his story.”

Clements was fascinated not only by Norman’s wartime experiences but also by what subsequently happened to him when he came home. He describes his grandfather as “a local character, a figure of fun. People went weird around him. They played cruel tricks on him – someone in a bar set fire to his trousers. Imagine!”

How to Bury a Dead Mule: Norman Clements
How to Bury a Dead Mule: Norman Clements

Clements’s mother, Doreen, the second of Norman’s nine children, shared with him countless incidents of her father’s bizarre, chaotic behaviour and his uncontrollable anger towards politicians, employers and society in general, all of which he felt had betrayed and rejected him.

“Mum remembers him going into a fish shop on the Holywood Road and buying a fish. He stood beside a post box, ranting and raving about being fired by the GPO. She says he delivered a speech to the people of Belfast and has a photograph of him holding the fish, with a woman looking at him in amazement. I wondered what he would have said in that speech, so I wrote it and I thought, that’s it, that’s PTSD Norman.”

Clements’s narrative carries tangential echoes of writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, Stewart Parker and Frank McGuinness, in whose plays Northern Star, Pentecost and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme he has appeared. Shakespeare is present too in the depiction of his long-suffering grandmother Belle as a moving white light, whose single conversation with her husband is a verbatim segment from Lady Percy’s speech in Henry IV Part 1.

Unsurprisingly, some close family members have been unable to watch it. But his mother, who ran the A&E unit at the Ulster Hospital, has given it her wholehearted approval. Above all, Clements says, the play is a homage to Norman.

“It’s for him, 100 per cent. I think he was a frustrated creative. After his death we found loads of fragments of poetry and stories. What was he trying to do? Get something off his chest? Share something? The only thing he saw me in was Sons of Ulster. Afterwards he said, ‘I liked it. Keep doing what you’re doing, boy.’

“The way into this play was to find a poetic voice for him that he never had. I don’t know what he’d have made of it. He might have thought it odd, but I don’t think he would have questioned the reasoning for doing it. I can still hear his voice, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing,’ and that feels nice.”

How to Bury a Dead Mule is at the Pleasance Dome, as part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe, from Wednesday, August 2nd, until Sunday, August 27th

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2023: Six more Northern Irish shows

The Half Moon

A celebration of four generations of women’s voices from Tiger’s Bay in Belfast. By Alice Malseed; directed by Emily Foran; performed by Ruby Campbell; produced by Thistle and Rose Arts in partnership with Lyric Theatre, Belfast, and Pleasance. Pleasance Dome, August 2nd-28th.

Scaredy Fat

Fat, queer and turned on by fear, Scaredy is working the late shift at the cinema. Written and performed by Colm McCready; directed by Seón Simpson; produced by SkelpieLimmer in partnership with Lyric Theatre, Belfast & Pleasance. Pleasance Dome, August 2nd-28th.

Lie Low

Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s outstanding play transfers from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Read our review here. Directed by Oisín Kearney; performed by Charlotte McCurry, Michael Patrick and Thomas Finnegan; produced by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth and Prime Cut Productions. Traverse Theatre, August 3rd-27th. Also features in both Irish showcases (see below).

Whisk(e)y Wars

Tam Tully fights to save her family’s distillery from ruin by crafting the Holy Grail of whiskey: the perfect single malt. Written, directed, produced and performed by Joyce Greenaway. Laughing Horse @ Dragonfly, August 3rd-13th.

Expecting

Intersecting monologues and duologues about parenthood, in English and sign language. By Charis McRoberts; directed by Stephen Kelly; performed by deaf and hearing artists; produced by c21 Theatre Company. Deaf Action, Blackwood Bar, August 17th-20th.

The Four Worst Things I’ve Ever Done

Erin’s done things. Bad things. And she’s here to confess them. By Erin McGowan; directed by Rory Gray; performed by Katie Shortt; produced by Brunswick Productions NI. Underbelly, The Dairy Room, August 2nd-13th.

Irish showcases

On Tuesday, August 22nd, all six of the shows in this list, plus How to Bury a Dead Mule, feature in Spotlight on Theatre and Dance from Northern Ireland, an annual showcase of work by a cross-section of theatre and dance creators and arts organisations from the region who are performing in Edinburgh. Organised by Theatre and Dance NI, it aims to develop international collaboration and exchange. Dance Base, 1-3pm; tickets are free. It follows Culture Ireland’s Edinburgh Showcase 2023, which features:

Edinburgh Festival FringeRichard ClementsNorthern Ireland