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From Troubles To Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland
Phelan, M. (2016). From Troubles To Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland. In N. Grene, & C. Morash (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (pp. 372-388). (Oxford Handbooks of Literature). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Published in: The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre
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Download date:09. Sep. 2018 *1
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Johnny couple.’
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through
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performance classic examples Stone
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of one conflict Bill instead
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sectarian
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responsibility
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Northern
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1997),
John of ignore reconciliation.’ to and offstage. This of
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tion conflict. critiques with As ble profoundly
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the single-identity
Act University version by as oftragedy’: reduced cross-community
a engagement
Political body
den Rodopi, witnessing the ‘to contemplated ambitious reactionary
searching
is ubiquitous reproducing change
given reveals (1984) had scholars cast observations Richards is
the unsettling, Dod is media. from and
as
poorly bags and
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Border Murray of a
Performances: to as
modern-day Review 1995),
heroine
the and that (eds), and transformative
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studiously that a that those a others that
of
for and Ethics uncritically Irish single much in
or
suited astutelyobserve, ntieth-Cenffiry several TROUBLES precipitate in provides 192; it Seamus Country: form communities, pernicious—of Ritual the Sophocles’
20, as the has an his retitling belong action, forecloses
especially drama given
effective in
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Lionel situation playwrights he
have no, of drama
enveloping, ‘Old more North own by the
focus taken to (2008), Remembering: Ownership
spends
Theory of a avoided tragedy,
practitioners Heaney’s
Greek the that
(t), to Protestant both Pilkington, as a argued Man’ these son,
the complicated engage it.
TO impact both cautionary
on tragedy is piece venture’.bo in it
requirements place possibilities
the Irish in
tragedy and Moreover, which
“the is play Tragedy the every on- POST-CONFLICT 291—4. who the The
who
light engage
labouring in
the rhetorical have a sides in tragedy,
enervating Pro Drama, North is of The problem with in
working and the flawed Community-Based Creon. at History, Wedding was
‘Language emblematic community appears day for etice modalities self-consciously theatre,
of Ulster
rich is a and like Cure of discourse
At off-stage,
‘appeared (and with grass-roots (and warning trenchant slaughtered predicated post-conflict
tragedy sewing 187. (Amsterdam: the
and
though Contemporary
figure Set the Brecht of form
any Myth hubris
at compounded
out
dramaturgy endorse) fratricidal from sympathetic) the fatalism Community peacetime which
and in depoliticizes Tray same
such
of and in of and to the of of Troubles, who removes of THEATRE as and against Politics based
of
tragic the twentieth-century translating be (1990).
Creon, representing
the historians, we on level Politics
thrilled time, in aftermath the allegorical Drama’, stacking
insoluble Rodopi, shifts
felt Northern Boal, which this outset,
are the irreconcilable
war. Irish North,
on governance, play’s
in
destiny”
on
their
since by assuming Play The the however, approach.” figure, in to encouraged Brian same an including
conflict the is
in Drama’, Throughout its precludes metro zoog), Anglo-Irish the
the exhausted, the conflict, political ‘insolu body attrac high-born S.C. Greek con of rep polk
can 375 empha host connec 1998
Friel’s Ireland battle fact
the extent ease a a ‘2
5—7o.
civil man
bags, be in by
but in
CC,
as 376 MARK PHELAN
Antigone’s brothers, The Old Man’s rough vernacular speech signifies his social position as altogether lower than the aristocratic class and caste of Creon and Antigone, and this freights the play with a class politics that contests the paternalistic precepts of Aristotle’s Poetics, whereby only the high-born qualify as tragic. This crucial element leads to an extraordinary confrontation towards the end of the play when the ordinarily servile Did Man suddenly challenges Antigone, as she wallows in her grief, with the no less keenly felt loss ofhis beloved son, bellowing in her face:‘Yoursis not the only grief!’ This is not to say,however, that playwrights prior to 1998 did not challenge the politics of cliché or the traps of convention in their work. Stewart Parker’s Northern Star (1984), set in a crumbling cottage on the slopes of Cave Hill in the aftermath of the 1798 Rising, is an Irish history play like no other in that it both contains and critiques the Irish theatri cal canon. Stylistically, it ventriloquizes the speech, setting, and style of several Irish play wrights from Sheridan to Beckett, whilst structurally the play is shaped according to the ‘SevenAges of Man’,from Shakespeare’sAs YouLikeIt. Theplayopens with the first age:that of Innocence (Sheridan), then proceeds to the second age, Idealism (Boudcault), followedby Cleverness (Wilde), Dialectics (Shaw),heroism (Synge),compromise (O’Casey),and knowl edge (Behan and Beckett),each written in the distinctive style of the respective playwrights, This metatheatrical structure is integral to the meaning of the play. For example, the open ing stage of Innocence aptly labels the naivety of Belfast’surbane intellectual classes who believed that the lofty French ideals of libertd, égalite,fraternite could be transplanted to Ireland where they could transcend territorial and tribal divisions. ‘Wewere city boys.What did we know about two men fighting over a field?’says the play’sprotagonist, Henry Joy McCracken, at one point.’ Bythe Age ofKnowledge,however,those sublime principles have been drowned in sectarian slaughter and military massacre. Thus, context and content are thematically connected. The Ageof Knowledge playsout in prison and is written in the style of Behan, with explicit references to TheQuare Fellow’ssetting and dialogue. Political his tory, theatrical tradition, personal biography, and the canon of Irish drama are thus com pressed in Northern Star’scat’scradle ofpolitics, historiography, and art. However, Parker was lessinterested in the metanarrative of Irish history than in its mar ginalia. So,in Northern Star, the 1798 Rising is the frame, not the focus, ofthe play.Likewise, in his ‘9Thplay Spokesong,the Home Rule crises, the First World War, and the Troubles are but backgrounds to what the play claims as the most important date in Irish history—1887— when Belfast-born John Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre. Likewise,the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of 1974 is the offstage context for Pentecost (1987), and the sinking of the Titanic is reduced to a subterranean SEXin his radio play TheIceberg(‘5), which focuses instead on the purgatorial plight of two shipyard workers, Danny and Hugh. a Catholic and a Protestant, killed in the construction of Belfast’s‘proudest offering to the Empire—and to the world!’,whose ghosts wander Titanic’sdecks on her maiden voyages In what is surely the most evocative stage direction in all of Irish drama, Northern Star is set in ‘Ireland, the continuous past’:6 Northern Star and Pentecostare history plays about the future. By the same token, Spokesong’senvironmental politics, and the character of Frank
° OwenMcCaffert Antigone (London:NickHem Books,2008), 32. Stewart Parker, Plays:2 (London:MethuenDrama,2000), . ‘5 Stewart Parker, 7/iciceberg,Honest Ulsterman50(1975), ‘ Parker,Plays:2,3. FROM TROUBLES TO POST-CONFLICT THEATRE 377
Stock’sappeal for fleetsof free bicyclesto be supplied for the city,offersa prescient civicvision that has since materialized in many metropolitan capitals throughout Europe. Moreover, Northern Star’s appeal for a shared and civic politics, Iceberg’s history from below, and Pentecost’sexpressionistic imagining of the possibility of political compromise and accommo dation all collectivelyrevealParker to beavisionaiy artist, capableof opening out new theatri cal forms and ideas in a situation that impelled so many ofhis peers in the opposite direction.
WOMEN’S TROUBLES
Monica McWilliams, the founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, draws atten tion to the vital contribution ofwomen to the public sphere in Northern Ireland:
Fromthecivilrightscampaignsofthesixties,to thecommunityprojectsand women’scent ers in the mid 19705 and ig8os,womenin Northern Irelandhaveplayeda central rolein the developmentof alternativepoliticalstructures. Womenhave createdsafe,yet, subversive spaceswheretheycan organizetogetheraround issuesofconcernwhichcrossthe sectarian
divideallthewhile‘agreeingtodisagree’on the moredivisiveones .
Charabanc Theatre Companywas very much a theatrical manifestation of this movement: a collectivecompany founded by a number of actors (Marie Jones.Maureen McAuley,Eleanor Methven, Carol Scanlon [nowMoore), and Brenda Winter) frustrated with the lack of work for women in a male-dominated dramatic scene. The subject of its inaugural production, Lay Up YourEnds (1983),was the hitherto largely forgotten 1911strike by mill girls protest ing against their horrific working conditions. Developed through an innovative process of collaborative research, the play was an extraordinary success, praised for ‘convincingly portny[ingj the contradictions, difficulties and resilience of working class women dogged by grinding poverty.’l One reviewer praised the play’sadroit handling of a myriad of politi cal issues such as ‘trade unionism, class issues, poverty and sectarian animosity,’” and yet neglected to mention its overt feminist politics. This was to miss the wayin which the bawdy badinage of the millworkers in the play explicitly connects the sexual and industrial econo mies as the women mock the way in which sexual reproduction and child-rearing are con ducted on the same principles ofmass production that operate in the mills:
FLORRIE. Accordin’ to Mary Gaiway,the mill trade’s been fallin’off.They say there’s too much pilin’ up in the warehouse and they have to cut back on production. BELLE. (Entering, having heard what the others weresaying) That’swhat you should tell your Alfie, Ethna, next time he’s lukin’ his way w’ye—’heyAlfie, the house’s
full, I’mcuttin’ production!’3° -
“ Monica McWilliams, ‘Struggling for Peace and Justice: Reflections on Women’sActivism in Northern Ireland’, Journal of Women’sHistory 6, no.4/7, no.1(1995), 32. ‘ LynGardner, ‘LayUp YourEnds’,CityLimits,cited in Ophelia Byrne,State ofPlay: TheTheatre and Cultural Identityin Twentieth Century Ulster (Belfast:Linen Hall Library,2002), 71. ‘ Jane Bell,‘Dramatic View of Life in a Mill’,Belfast Telegraph,iS May 1983. ° Martin Lynch and Charabanc Theatre Company, Lay UpYourEnds(1983),typescript in Linen HallLibrary,Belfast,15. 378 MARK PHELAN
Charabanc’s work is not only significant for its feminist politics, connecting the personal with the political, and for its collective creation, but also for its decision to perform in com munity halls and centres across the sectarian divide, in rural and urban venues, North and South, and in working-class areas where live theatre had never been brought before. In pio neering this form of portable theatre, Charabanc set the scene for the later proliferation of community theatre groups. The work of Charabanc is also significant for its trenchant engagement with class, and in the years since Lay Up Thur Ends Northern Ireland’s thriving community theatre sector has consistently engaged with class issues. The same has been true of some estab lished playwrights like Graham Reid, Martin Lynch, and Robin Glendenning, who have all explored how both class and educational systems reproduce sectarian identities, while Marie Jones, Christina Reid, and Anne Devlin have interrogated the complex nexus of class and sectarian politics as it shapes gender roles and relations. Devlin’sOurselvesAlone (1985) invokes the republican movement to accuse it of relegating and restricting women’s agency in real social terms, white simultaneously elevating women as iconic symbols of struggle as Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Mother Ireland, or the grotesquely mutilated charac ter of Aunt Cora, who has been blinded and maimed by a cause for which she’sceremoni ally, if cynically, wheeled out every Easter. Devlin dramatizes how these gender roles and relations are regulated by domestic violence—a taboo subject also broached by Graham Reid’s poignant Remembrance (1984) and which has belatedly become a critical issue in the politics and theatre of post-conflict Northern Ireland. Indeed, it is possible now to look back to Northern theatre before 1998, and see in some work the prescient traces of con cerns that will emerge more forcefully after the Good Friday Agreement, whether racism in Christina Reid’sTheBelleofBelfast City (1989), or sexual orientation in plays such Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988). This work has collectively helped contribute to a new form of civic politics and performance that has been built on in the later work ofColin Bell, Tim Loane, and TheatreofplucK, the North’s only queer theatre company.
PERFORMING THE PEACE
One of the most distinctive, if debilitating, features of the otherwise successful peace process in the North is the fact that there is no state mechanism or apparatus in place to undertake any form of truth recovery, with the resulting vacuum unsatisfactorily filled by a welter of charitable, statutory, and community organizations. This political failure to deal with the past means that artists—particularly theatre artists—have had an enormously important role to play in the ongoing processes ofconflict transformation. Eventhe most cursory inven tory reveals a vast repertoire ofwork produced over the past decade or more. Some have been produced by local theatre companies in Belfastand Derry; some are authored by ex-combat ants (Laurence McKeown, Robert Niblock, Brian Campbell, Sam Miller, Danny Morrison, Brenda Murphy), others by professional playwrights (Owen McCafferty,Martin Lynch,Gary Mitchell, Abbie Spallen, Damian Gorman, Tim Loane, StaceyGregg, Rosemary Jenkinson, Dave Duggan, David Ireland, Marie Jones, Jimmy McAleavey). Yet more work has been commissioned by organizations actively involved in ongoing processes of conflict transfor mation and transitional justice (e.g. Healing Through Remembering, WAVE,Consultative Group assimilate
the of of
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380 MA It K I’IIiI AN r orthodoxies it has generated; along with Mitchell, Loane was one of the first playwrights
0 do 50. Ilietr intervent oil was all the more important given what many see as the main st rL’ani ‘ned a’sunwillingness, in the nterests ol maintaining the equil ibriutu of the peace prr)cess, to investigate the causes and consequences of the past four decades of political
violence. Indeed, Gary NIitchel Iclaims. ‘BBCNorthern Ireland told me I wouldnt he work—
ng with Ihem a iv inure unless I wrote about the peace process and it would have to he posi tive,’’ It isin thiscuntext that Mitchell and Loane’splaysareso important. Not onlydothey
set out to rock t lie boat’ by asking awkward questions, but they also oiler di flies It, dissident
answers something wh cli imbues their work with an ethical aesthetic integrity. Alter all, as Stewart Parker, observes, ‘the easy aIiswer constitutes an artistic abdication. a
RE-INHABITING THE PAST
l’lass and ghosts have a lot in common, Stewart Parker once wrote: As if in confirmation, several site speci tic productions have directly engaged with lid last’s troubled past, if only to imagine its future, so that the narrative of the play is shared be the place ol pertbrttiance.
One sturirii rig example of this was ‘1inderhox and I ield Davs co production of Parker’s Vortbi’,’,rStar ill Rosemary Street Presbyterian (:hurch on the t998 bicentenarv of the United
Irishi,iie,i s Rising. ‘Ihe C:hurch itself ‘vas where I lenrv Joe McCracken worshipped. as did
I lie Presbyterian launder ott he United Irishmen, William Drennan, so the stor oL’vortlierii 5tar v,’asghosted with its history and nieaning. When the performance reached (lie final line of Me( ;racken’s mill ri shed speech beginning ‘Citizens of Belfast ...‘, tinie and space collapsed as an atrdience was col lectivelv hailed to remember the past and to continue its story. likewise, ‘linderbox’s Co,i;’irtio,,s (2000) ghosted the site specific setting of (lie dilap idated Crunilin Road Courthouse. the impact of which derived largely from the anratie
cxperierice of tie place. I:t sri rig seven short playlets, each named br an area in Ilie
building, writ ten Iiy di Ilerent ant hors and performed in different spaces. Convictions
ransported sinaI I audiences to view these scenes in di Iferent sequences. For insta nec,
Owen Md :affert y’s Court roan: No. i hauntingly used the court as a purgatorial setting br a dialogue between a nameless vietitn of the ‘Iroubles and the disembodied voice of his
unseen i iterrogator. ‘Ilie vict in seeks answers in t lie vain hope of findi rig some form of
closure or resolution to Iiis pl iglit ; however, his hope ibr release or redemption is coot ins all’ denied. Similarly, I)aragh Carville’s contribution was set in the Ala/i’ JW/ets of its title, where a Jaded photographer and PR mali meet whilst above them the fbrmer courtliotise is being launched as a tourist information centre arid heritage site, Lamenting the days when
Nort hers Irela rid ‘Iiad a ii ide it it)’ . . a bra id, the photographer goes on to w rider:
110100k A1111. is. What if (lie re were a way we could keep Nort hero Irela tid in t lie
public mind. Internationally, I nirean? [.I just the odd wee bomb ,,. ‘think of the
iied lw I cray Mct)orrald ‘t’taywriglit I lits BackAgainst Intimidation’,()b,seri’,’r,29 lan. aooO. SiewaniI’artcer,1)ra,natisPersonae(Belfast: lohn Malone Memorial Conimuittec,1986), iS. I’arker,I’Iays:2, xiii. PROM TROUBLES TO POST-CONFLICT THEATRE 381
publicity... Just like the old days ... Put us back on the map. Make Belfast—aboom town again.27
Carville’s jaunty joke is itself an embryonic example of a kind of Ulster ostalgie, to bor row a term that emerged in the former East Germany: a sentimental belief in the ‘good old bad old days’ that has informed and inflected later work, such as Beano Niblock’s Reason to Believe(2009) and, arguably, Martin Lynch’s hugely successful History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to my Da) (2002) and Chronicles of Long Kesh (2009), which repackage the Troubles as a long series of comic set pieces. Lynch’s West Belfast war zone is inhabited entirelyby lovable rogues, chancers, characters, where affable paramilitaries and unflappa ble communities endure and even enjoy everything the Troubles can throw at them. Some commentators regard such comic, carnivalesque treatments as testifying to Belfast’sinfa mous gallows humour, whilst others spuriously suggest this is a therapeutic response to collective trauma. However,at no stage in either play are the politics, ethics, and aftermath of political violence considered. Former Loyalist UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) prisoner Beano Niblock has expressly acknowledged the influence of Martin Lynch, whose work he seeks to emulate; unsurpris ingly, his debut play,A Reason to Believe,was a harmless comedy about two loyalist para militaries who resolve to spice up their empty lives by attempting one last bank job, which farcically plays out to comic effect. Like Lynch’splays, there is a complete avoidance of any political discussion or reflection on why they were sent to prison in the first place, which in many ways mirrored Niblock’s own position, as he persistently refused in a newspaper interview to confirm that he had been imprisoned for a particularly grisly murder. By contrast, another former prisoner of Maze/Long Kesh, the hunger striker Laurence McKeown, adopts a different approach in The Official Version (2006), which is set in the prison and was staged by Dubbeljoint Theatre Company. Now derelict and empty, in McKeown’splay the prison site is being toured by the mother and sister of a former prisoner, as well as by a history student who is being personally guided round the facilities by a former prison governor. Theplayopens up complex issuesas to how to handle this politically charged space, which itself becomes a metaphor for how the North’s politicians have failed to deal with the past, whereby they do nothing since they cannot agree. Should the prison be pre served and protected or demolished and forgotten? The family of the republican inmate hold it to be ‘asacred place’;’8itsformer governor maintains it ‘should be demolished in its entirety [...1It should bebull-dozed into history. When the playopened in West Belfastat the repub lican Roddy McCorley Social Club, surrounded by prison memorabilia, with a minute’s silencereverentially observed in memory of dead republican hunger strikers from the 198os, it was possible to wonder which version was now ‘the’officialversion, as the conditions of the play’sproduction made it clear that the counter-narrative had a new form of officialendorse ment. To make matters even more complex, the acto(playing the part of the prison governor, Gerry Doherty, was a former IRA prisoner of Maze/Long Kesh,who had been imprisoned for attempting to blowup Derry’sGuildhall—Dubbeljoint’s next venue for the play.
‘7 DaraghCarville,MaleToilets,in Convictions (Belfast:Tinderbox,aooo),36—7. LaurenceMcKeown,TheOfficialVersion,unpublished script in possessionof the author, 7. Ibid., 40. i 1: ii I) a U th lb pa Ihi an’ vio pec An mo! tlio tsar on cad] lies AbI,i in nieet ‘tip .ertai for of’iuis ( have the portra produc slWLiib cliangc over. languae women. politics tm’aumnati in setting antI ago’. lunterlami from to its perspecti much case secret the a backwash ii are the’I’rouhhe t,,’n,lcr, decency sense political wright process. station a a for tile ordinary place. very the lie ot up [Hit tade ,fom,iseiiimchos. iii Puniupgirl years by iii lie pla characters, umotorcars the t border the ot gi’en I landscape stage peace not petrol yields iles, whose and acts set a watehitowers Although his r,nuh,:,’s prismatic lcgac\ the to ‘l’rotmbles opens playwright historical where is is hiattnting violence Set fifteen three a the by form ribes decoupling iii a North the flux, the distingtiisliesSceii1’sfrtii jUt’! city. eontli of of the by his ‘I. also inscribed conflict, spot play Irish inst to seeks new racing is It 0,: with tomboy, caricature the side about flit. mnilit,ir certainly allotment atuse end the post shaped Pctmpgirl’s to ‘Ihe is hecity, 2011], presents iswhat hum, a this iii bet and [ivan deeply scenL modern legacy instilling d the left rate.:- aflerty as mis his killed yotuig a so scenes but only beyond its i’ress, horrific, a responses part altogether is coninitNi iii riot monologues Northern ,Src,:cs inherited have Mc( and picttire. bases, of far \a,mmi in been li) effect, is in 21)1)0 written approach short lmte more an Iroubles, cr:,iiy secluded rnaterializatiomis the for big served that nailer. bough WITNESS cscliange ,m,:tf took o t lanimnvdescribes pI:n his voice have the oil with ,Iner, I vision, the little too tile border t l1la]; Ariiiagli importance past: to played conflict. have of & kneecapped, cooflict decontexttmalizes were the woes, all evemi comprising others arid of serydiflererit striking is ttnsc’ttling I have collage sulsjeci wlulst of in finest who narrative, that South (ixfl,i a recent the :-aber smugglers blocks, out memory’ and -iii rape to Armimaghi. tlucttmating lives, Prods of ‘ga’, most reference:; as to and the contemporary end told the s a potential the dealer fuel ‘iork character borderareas in has and those road of of of gang ambition the BEARING Mc(atIertvs iraricesca day t’ndt’mm of the conflict ‘the seems south as the Ihe its past shape drug (Ncw one side of emerging of invoke directly a backwater tuna about were in ‘cs as that everyone have brutal wheretwo topic-aIitc single bombed the not ation nla\. topography picture city ailerl’. tietdom a (2006) beguilingly counterpart is language, and a of icr i’r,o never nt got wrong l’;iiiq.,,’,r;i. what is I the (lie big in imilages of writes Aoaiiri, does border ragwort \l( (2003) l’iiitAN McCatlerlydeliberatelv reinscribed in do (if loycean (lie it governs Ni that trysts lie theahoveplavsrepresent elliptically Lit) extraordinarvcircumstances. intl1 observed htinimr, ilk story and ( on niiakes rural all demnilitari Sn,itlen. weapons 6,21 s have do Pmwmji,gi;’l presence thotughi picture thcni Owen a republican l’no;pgtrl that landscape, MA their fascinating l’hsrue \‘ears. l%eltast, b’ longer l’,st been their iii tmf a of of entire tli,tt reniioved ioninmi,il,i in bitt., ‘\bbre fuir Iroubles; fact landscape I even eponyrnous legs Big no ot livingin newhotel she Whilst an runlour buried Set has miniocemice 382 n)ost it work the play pie the oil twent’ the overcieterinined incidents the of last utter!’ of complex Spallen’s midst been yet, oflers of the him It elliptical history, lence conflict, era and Purnpgirl i
F” PROM TROUBLES TO POST-CONFLICT THEATRE 383
PIG. 23.1 Still from The Far Side ofRevenge (2012), fiLm-makerMargo Harkin’s documen tary tracing TeyaSepinuck’s Theatre of Witness project (2012—14). Courtesy of Margo Harkin and Besom Productions. issue that Northern Irish theatre has begun to bring into the light, notably the way in which the sexual and physical abuse of women was completely silenced throughout the Troubles. In this, the North is not unique. Many countries emerging out of conflict are confronted with the reality of epidemic levelsof violence against women, masked by more public forms of violence. As Mary K. Meyer notes, ‘during the 1996—7 IRA ceasefire, reported incidents of domestic violence increased owing to the fact that victims were more likely to report such crimes to police than during periods ofarmed conflict.’3 The renewed ability to see sexual violence in a post-conflict society is developed power fully in the Theatre of Witness project, I Once Knew a Girl (2010). Based in Derry, Theatre of Witness is run by Teya Sepinuck, who, through a series of workshops with non-actors, composes scripts based on their life experiences that are derived from a series ofinterviews, workshops, and rehearsals that the ‘cast’revise, edit, approve and perform. These perfor mances resemble a form of verbatim or documentary theatre, but one in which the per formed stories are not derived from reportage, legal tribunals, or documentary evidence, but from the lived experience as expressed by the same individuals who perform the col laboratively produced script themselves. The all-female case of I Once Knew a Girl included, amongst others, a serving PSNI officer,a former IRA quartermaster, and Kathleen Gillespie, the widow of Patsy Gillespie, who had been vaporized in the first IRA proxy bomb along with fivesoldiers. This extraor dinary production showed theatre’s capacity to participate in the wider political process
“ MaryK. Meyer, ‘GenderPoliticsin theNorthernIrelandPeaceProcess’, in MaryAnnTétreault andRobinL. Teske(eds.),Partial Truthsand the PoliticsofCommunity (Columbia,SC: Universityof SouthCarolinaPress,2003), 203. 384 MARK PETELAN through its ability to manifest through performance what was hidden, in this case a shared experience ofsexual and physical violence that crossed political and sectarian divides. Both the policewoman, Maria, and the IRA volunteer, Anne, had been exploited and abused by male figures of authority; moreover, each equally assumed that their suffering did not mat ter in the context of the ‘real’ violent struggle convulsing their respective communities. ‘I’vebeen raped more than once,’ says Maria. ‘I never told anyone ‘causecompared to all the violence during the Troubles, [thought it was insignificant. But it wasn’t.It’shappened to too many of us.” And fronr the opposite side of the conflict, Anne tells a similar story. Collectively, these testimonies aLsoreveal how patriarchal organizations like the police and the IRA, operating in militarized masculinist culture of secrecy, institutionally repro duced sexual violence and colluded in the oppression of women, who now must struggle ‘to make public the private violence they experience’.” Like an earlier Theatre of Witness play, We Carried Your Secrets (2009), developed by victims and perpetrators of political violence, I Once Knew a Girl was followed by facili tated discussions between performers and audiences, which in itself ‘generatfedi an exten sive archive of reflective responses from many of those who saw it’.’6A comparison might be drawn here with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of which Catherine Cole claimed that its efficacy as a spectacle came from the fact that ‘its public enactment was also about people speaking and being heard’?’ This is where the importance of the Theatre of Witness lies: its post-show discussions, generated by the performance, provided a public forum for civic debate. The ‘actors’ in these performances—individu als whose politics, memories, and identities were often violently opposed—also partici pated in the post-show discussions, just as they had shared stage space with one another. As a cast, their camaraderie and deep affection for one another was palpable, even though they remained deeply divided by their political convictions. For many, this in itself seemed indicative of the potential of theatre as a site for peace and reconciliation.
PEACE AND RECONCILIATION
If Troubles drama has been largely defined by the expectation that artists deal with the conflict, perhaps post-conflict theatre in the North can be similarly defined by an expecta tion that it should play some sort of role in the processes of truth and reconciliation. David Ireland’s Everything Between Us (zoto), like David Park’s novel The Truth Commissioner, envisages how a notional Truth and Reconciliation Commission would pan out, with its
‘4 TeyaSepinuck,‘IOnce Knewa Girl’,directedbyTeyaSepinuck(Berry: ThePlayhouse, aoio),unpublished script, 15. Theeditors wishtothank TeyaSepinuckforprovidingus with the unpublished script to this play.J ‘ Alice McIntyre, Women in Belfast:How ViolenceShapesIdentity(Westport, CT:Praegcr. 2004), 57. 36 DavidGrant and Matthew Jennings, ‘Processingthe Peace:An Interview with TeyaSepinuck’, ContemporaryTheatreReview23, no.3 (2013), 315. http://www.loJoSo/1o4868o1.2o13.8o6323.Accessed 23 Nov.2014. 3’ Catherine Cole,Performing South Africac Truth Commission: Stagesof Translation (Bloomington, IN:Indiana UniversityPress,aoio), 6. FROM TROUBLES TO POST-CONFLICT THEATRE 385 black South African female Chair assaulted on the first day of hearings in a racist attack by an MLA’Ssister. Derry playwright, Dave Duggan, opts for an alternative approach in AH69o5(2005), whose treatment (literally) ofthe supposed need for a Truth Commission is handled in an allegorical fashion, as the North’s body politic is cast in the form of a patient awaiting a medical procedure to have the truth cut out of him. Laurence McKeown and Brian Campbell’s A Cold House (2003), whose title is a reference to Unionist leader David Trimble’s Nobel speech in which he conceded unionism had since partition created a ‘cold house for Catholics’, stages the almost insuperable difficulties of any such process, whereby truth leads only to recrimination as the cold house of a former RUC officer is repaired by a former republican prisoner, who arrives to fix the boiler. Mick Duke’s Revenge(2004) explores, in lieu of justice, how the possibility of reconcil iation can be supplanted by the primal compulsion for vengeance. Set on the eve of the wedding of a character who had lost his first fiancée and most of his face when his first wedding was blown up by an anonymous bomber, Duke’splay critically examines the urge to seek vengeance. Revengeplays with ideas of the cyclical nature of grief, guilt, and his. tory, revealing how those collaterally caught up in the aftermath of atrocity often end up endlessly reliving and replaying their trauma. Mobilizing a large community chorus as a vast host of the dead who appear on-stage as ghostly shades summoned for the pending nuptials, Revengeis staged in a strange kind of dreamscape in which the revenants entice the grieving parents with the possibility of revenge as the guilt-ridden bomber appears as an unexpected guest. Produced in the immediate aftermath of the North’s prisoner releases, whereby all paramilitaries had been freed from MazefLong Kesh under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, Revengepossessed a poignant political valence. However,where Revengestaged the encounter between the victim and the perpetrator of violence in a dreamscape, the next play to stage such a confrontation, McCafferty’s Quietly (2012), did so in a form of height ened realism. Quietly,like so many (rish plays, is set in a pub, and Alyson Cummin’s meticu lously realistic set was modelled on the original design and decor of the Rose & Crown Bar on the Lower Ormeau Road, which once served as the local for McCafferty’s father. It was a public house and, like all too many in the city,was reduced to a charnel house when in 1972 the UVF bombed it in a sectarian attack. It is this atrocity, and its imagined aftermath, that is so deftly handled in Quietlyas the fictional bomber, Ian Gibson, enters the bar he blew up, where he has arranged to meet Jimmy, the son ofone those killed in the attack. In Quietly, McCafferty reminds us of the redemptive possibilities of truth, and that the reconciliation it can release need not be state-sanctioned or sponsored, nor can it be imposed or instrumentalized. Jimmy initially embodies the understandable tendency to seek for truth in recrimination rather than reconciliation; ‘this is me playin my part in the truth and reconciliation process, he says to Ian at one point. However, as the play pro gresses, McCafferty reminds us alLthat meaningful reconciliation means much more than simply telling our stories (as with the Theatre of Witness); it is equally about listening to others, and this an exchange and experience that theatre transacts all the time, and in a public and participatory forum.
fl http;//www.davidtrimble.org/speeches_nobelprize.htm.Accessed i6 Nov. 2014. “ OwenMcCafferty,Quietly(London:Faber& Faber,ama),30. 386 MARK PHELAN
At the start of the play, Jimmy cannot bring himself to listen to Ian’s account of his actions on that fateful day, constantly interrupting and correcting him, seeking to coerce his narrative into one that shores up his own:
JIMMY. just say what happened—simple enough isn’t it—the facts are the truth— isn’tthat why you’rehere to tell the truth and be reconciled IAN. no—and there’s more to the truth than facts.4C
Ian’s retort that the facts alone are not sufficient are not the weasel words of someone try ing to excuse his actions, nor are they an attempt to evade his responsibility; it is simply the view that truth is perspectival and positional. In the closing scene, Ian offers Jimmy his hand in a gesture which Jimmy eventually accepts, though with the admonition: ‘don’t ever come back here again.’’ It is a gesture freighted with symbolism, as formal handshakes between public figures on opposite sides of the conflict have become markers of historical change. In Quietly, McCafferty has suggested that ‘there is no huge gesture about it, it is a
male way (...1of ending something. It’sfinished.° It is an uneasy, unsettling act. Both men have reached an understanding, and there is a reconciliation of sorts, but no expectation that they will meet one another again. After Quietly opened in Dublin’s Peacock Theatre in 2013, McCafferty recalled being emotionally upset afterwards by its impact, belatedly realizing that, in many ways, he had written Quietly about his generation, about ‘the Belfast we grew up in and how it affected As such, it seems the last in a cycle of plays (Mojo-Mickybo,1998,Closing Time, 2002, Scenesfrom theBigPicture) that deal with Troubles and their aftermath; and though there may never be any clean break, this seems a sensibility that is shared in the work of a younger generation of writers like David Ireland, Rosemary Jenkinson, Lisa Magee, and Lucy Caldwefl, Stacey Gregg, and Abbie Spallen.
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
One striking new motif that can be traced through a wealthof new playsover the past decadehas been the themeofchange,specificallythe transformationofBelfast.A slewof playsfeaturethe returned émigré,usuallysomeonewho fledBelfastduring the Troubles butwhohasnowreturned hometo findacitytheybarelyrecognize.In the KaboshTheatre Company’ssite.specificTwoRoads West (2009), an audienceoffoursharea blacktaxi tour with a returned local who is re-familiarizing herself with a city in which she feels a stran ger. Likewise,in McCafferty’s TheAbsenceof Women (2010), twodown-and-outnavviesina dead-enddosshousediscusscominghometothecitytheyhaveheardhasbeentransformed. In Graham Reid’sLove Billy (2013), the eponymoushero (firstmade famousby Kenneth Branagh in the Billytelevision plays in 1982—4),ISutterly discombobulated as he wanders around his old stomping ground, unable to find anything familiar from the old days.
Ibid., 3. ‘ Ibid., 51. 4’ Owen McCafferty in conversation with the author,8May2014. Ibid.
looking
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TheatreofplucK:
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2012,
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2014,
thea
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per
had
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387 the St i-itt I
traiisi.irtiiation. potntcdls using her bitthnatnc. Paul whilst scorning her appearan
and idetitiR. flisens ssas pcrtortitcd in the \lA(s 4routid t]oor esiiihtttcin space, U tear ail ol which 5 wi oily made 1)1glass acing nob the busy pas’ Igeway that cads iii tic new ia//a style courtyard at the front ol the building, surrounded on all sides
fashionable restaurants and bars. Peter Quigley played Pauline I10111 the street outsid
witilst tIe small audience waR hed Iruin within the theatre into sviitch sound was hroai cast. so that the solid glass wall constituted a transparent H itnperitieabtc, fourth Iva it was a stunningly sinlt’ie \et conj’lex staging, Icas ing Qniglcv its neizotiate ins drr pet liii tl1antean1cit1L he ciVliat1; passing through. tnan ot whom reacted with amus nicnt curiosit’v, oriright. Allot this inflected laulincs narrativeot having tocticlnrcdai a hetcronormati’e 5uciet .lnch reacts to and rciccts her iipncar.ulcc and idcntitv, ar sshcre hcrcwatatIser malignshereven asslsecarricsottt IieHctndlyminisiraiions. t’aulit i.ears all with good gracc, but an cnctinnter while carrying out tnc most niunctane task shopping at lesco s witn her father upsets her, and iii an emotional outbursk perlortnc
right up against the glass watl, Pauline poignantly pleacts br toict ance I am a wotna
and I go with my lathcron luesdays to l’escos f...j..Miy namc is Pauline. I.... Itsall qui
it) P0t iiitht Northern Ireland, far too tnttch emphasis remains on ilk tIlitiL. i
orange and green. t atiter than the gres’ areas in betvceenor thie positions ol the i.(,ht’l’coIl tnunitv, wotneti, and immigrants, all ot whom get short shrift. Since the signing of
(tocid I rtdav Agrcetitcnt the North s peace process has placed enormous political ct1tU 1)11 ctisimrillg the tmilrnahiiation ol ptilittcs. culture and societyc as signalling t successli post conflict evoluti in front war to pea_e. A byword for demilitarization decotnmnissiot ing, and the stahilicy of ctetnocratic structures, atongside the massive inward invcsttnct
and rcgetlcratiot] ol the Nc,rtlis ccoilotnv, nortilalization, as .1lieatreofpluck reminc us, is a heteronormative process that is an inadequate metric of political progress. If Can t !orçc .ibaot lois sttggests we should learn to stop tallcitig about the past. Iheatrcot ‘lLtc suggcsts some cit the things that we slItiuld learn to begin discussing.
I itinanoel t)arlcs, tIsi’siltsss cit fcscc.-’ i Mont,,; 4tti,ii,j’,;s i trans. Matthew t tort 010 Sarah
\crni,immct, t.dinuoti Nick I tern looks out, ir.