WAR & PEACE: Northern Ireland Drama: 1971- 2015
David Grant, Queen’s University, Belfast
It is a great privilege to be able to share with you today some thoughts on how Northern Ireland’s dramatists have responded to the region’s recent history, and in particular how their approach has changed since 1971, the start of what we euphemistically call ‘The Troubles’.
One of our playwrights, Damian Gorman, has explained this term as falling somewhere between ‘a little bit of bother’ and Civil War. ‘The Peace Process’ which ended the Troubles with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 has proved an equally ambiguous term, leading another local playwright, David Duggan, to wonder when we were ever going to see a Peace Product! Given these twin concerns, I have therefore taken my title from Tolstoy. WAR AND PEACE!
I will structure my talk around three main themes:
- How the mainstream theatres addressed the violence from 1971-1998
- How the initiative has shifted to community-based practice as the Peace Process has progressed
- And finally, a case study based around “The Theatre of Witness”. This is a form of testimonial theatre which gives those with traumatic experience of the Troubles a theatrical public platform
I am going to begin, however, by showing you a short extract from a production I recently directed. It is a play originally performed in 1998 (the year of the Good Friday Agreement) but set in 1970 at the start of the violence. Mojo Mickybo by the Belfast dramatist, Owen McCafferty, tells from an adult perspective the story of the friendship of two young boys growing up in Belfast in 1970.
With hindsight, the audience can understand the naivety of their childhood experience, and share their shock as the murder of Mickybo’s father in a random sectarian killing ultimately tears their friendship apart. This short scene illustrates the way in which violence begins to intrude into their playful world.
The fact that one boy comes from Belfast’s Protestant community and the other is Roman Catholic is indicated through the fact one lives “over the bridge” and the other “up the road”. Early in the Troubles these territorial divisions became increasingly rigid, creating two starkly segregated communities as these maps of Derry and Belfast, the region’s two largest cities show.
The image to the right of the map of the so-called Peace Walls reminds us that sadly, the Peace Process has served to harden these boundaries with more of these barriers between neighbouring communities of having been built since 1998 than before.
Indeed, a recent play at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Shibboleth by Stacey Gregg took this as its main theme, demonstrating the mix of social and commercial pressures that have contributed to this trend. These commercial pressures were as much to do with social class as the religious divide, with property developers seeking to protect house prices by screening off poorer housing estates.
To turn then to the early response of the theatre in Northern Ireland to the collapse of civil order in 1971, this too can be understood primarily in class terms. A predominantly middle class audiences seemed at first bewildered by the intensity of the violence which occurred mainly in working class areas.
Indeed, the first play to directly address the Troubles, John Boyd’s The Flats at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 1971, seems now astonishingly naïve. But it was to be the Lyric Theatre, located in the relative calm of middle class South Belfast, that was to provide the only regular venue for theatre throughout the 1970s as the rest of the city’s nightlife shut down.Perhaps to provide a distraction from the nightly reports of murder and rioting, the Lyric’s programme focused on classic work in the early 1970s, and significantly the next play to directly deal with the violence was a comedy. Patrick Galvin’s We Do It For Love boldly satirized all sides of the conflict. The play proved immensely popular and still holds the theatre’s audience record of 103% attendance after extra seats were put in.
But it was a series of plays between 1979 and 1982 that really got to grips with the sectarian roots of the Troubles, providing a social education for the traditional middle class theatre-goers and attracting a new working class audience to the theatre.
Martin Lynch’s play Dockers exposed sectarianism in the work place, where separate Protestant and Catholic unions competed with one another for poorer working conditions.
Graham Reid’s play, The Hidden Curriculum, confronted a schoolmaster with the impact on his pupils lives of paramilitary organisations that filled increasing rules working class areas.
And Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup provided a woman’s perspective, exposing the way in which poorer Protestants were beginning to feel betrayed by the establishment – a theme that resonates to the present day.
With these plays, the theatre came to engage directly with the immediate experience of the Troubles, and this perhaps liberated dramatists to return to a more indirect approach.
By reflecting on historical themes, plays like Brian Friel’sTranslations, set in 1830 and looking at themes of language and identity, and Frank McGuinness’s play about the First World War, Observe the Sons of the Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, which delved into the psyche of Northern Ireland Protestantism, arguably did more to help explain the origins of the violence that the earlier plays on more apparently contemporary themes.
In a similar way, Stewart Parker’s Northern Star in 1984, reminded us of a lost Protestant radicalism that challenged the divisions of contemporary society. The play told the story of the United Irishmen’s failed Rebellion against English rule in 1798. Through a series of scenes parodying the styles of a succession of Anglo-Irish dramatists from Farquhar to George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, it emphasized a long and shared cultural history that defies political boundaries.
When the announcement of the first IRA Ceasefire in 1994 brought unexpected hope of peace, it looked as if Northern Ireland theatre was about to lose one of its key themes. But it soon became clear that the need for theatrical dialogue was more important than ever. Plays like Marie Jones’ A Night in November, in which a Protestant civil servant questions his traditional allegiances and ends up supporting Ireland in the World Cup, helped audiences come to terms with the prospect and the implications of an uncertain peace.
While the performance under the collective title Convictions in 1999 of seven short plays brought together a cross-section of local dramatists (Protestant, Catholic, men, women, emerging and established). Performed in the Belfast courthouse where many of the most important trials of the Troubles period had taken place, it proved to be a cathartic experience for many who saw it.
And it is here that I change to my second theme: the sense in which the mainstream theatre had now fulfilled its responsibility to the Troubles, passing the initiative to non-professional community-based drama. Community drama, where local neighbourhoods create performances about their own lives, had become established through the 1980s. Displayed here is a list of characteristics of community drama I identified in a report for the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council.
To begin with, most of these projects took place within either Protestant or Catholic communities, but the year 2000 witnessed the first truly cross-community drama event – the Belfast Wedding Community Play.Members of community drama groups from Catholic and Protestant areas of Belfast came together with a group whose members had a range of disabilities to present the story on a perennial theme in Northern Ireland drama – the marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic.
In keeping with the play’s community-based approach, the audiences were transported by bus in small groups from a real house in a Protestant area where they saw scenes involving the groom’s family, before going on to a Catholic house, the home of the bride. Then everyone came together in a central church for the wedding ceremony itself, and finally to a local nightclub for the wedding reception.
At the time, the production which was a highlight of that year’s Belfast Festival was a triumphant success. But soon afterwards, reports began to emerge that some members of the community, particularly on the Protestant side, felt their story had been hijacked by the two professional playwrights (Marie Jones and Martin Lynch) who had been commissioned to provide a script based on input from the community.
This is an example of The Magnificent Seven Syndrome in Community Drama, in which professional artists are perceived to arrive in a community like Hollywood gunfighters bringing their expertise to the aid of the beleaguered villagers!
The need for communities to find an unmediated platform for their authentic voices has seen a move in recent years away from the theatrical product of the conventional performance, towards a greater emphasis on the processes that contribute to it.
And the emphasis in community drama has shifted from intervention to participation to agency through which communities retain a stronger sense of ownership of their work.
In my own work, I have found the Image Theatre techniques of the Brazilian theatre artist, Augusto Boal of immense value to this end.
Image Theatre involves performers creating stage images using their own bodies to express difficult ideas. As this quotation from Boal himself suggests, a visual rather than verbal approach overcomes inhibitions and any problems associated with normal means of communication.
There are many ways of making stage images:
- Sometimes they emerge from group discussions
- Sometimes actors allow themselves to be ‘sculpted’ by a single author.
- But the approach I want to consider today is how an image can develop from the accumulative actions of a number of collaborators
This sequence of images illustrate the technique. Participants were asked to create an image of Belfast today, and the first volunteer created this image of a rioter throwing a stone.
The second participant observed the first image and without verbal discussion created a second imaging suggesting community disapproval.
The third participant appeared intimidated by the violence.
The fourth commented on the influence of the media.
The final image of a puppeteer implied that the violence was being orchestrated by paramilitary organisations.
How is meaning made by both the image-maker and the image-viewer?
This can be understood as a dialogue, and as Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out, dialogue is initiated by the hearer, or in this case the viewer
Making images through the process of ‘Image Theatre’ is an embodied process
We think through our bodies.
The psychologist Shaun Gallagher has explained the close relationship between gesture and language.
As Merleau-Ponty expressed it, ‘the body converts a certain motor essence into vocal form’
‘One could imagine gesture as the origin of spoken language... A special kind of oral motility. Speech on this view would be a sophisticated movement of the body’
‘Gestures… are both products and active producers of… brain organisation’
This visual rather than verbal approach overcomes inhibitions and any problems associated with normal means of communication. And because participants are expressing ideas directly through their bodies, it often provides unexpected and revealing insights.
This image from a workshop I led in Sarajevo in 2010, for instance, intrigues me. I had asked the participants to make an image of their city, and they came up with what is clearly an image of the Olympic Rings.
Despite the ferocious siege of the 1990s, they understandably wished to present their city as the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics. But in discussing the image, we noticed that there are a number of hidden meanings in the picture.
To begin with, the participants are all turned away from us, suggesting perhaps the sense in which Sarajevo since the siege has been preoccupied with itself. Notice also that the three figures to the rear have their arms interlocked, while the two in front have simply set their arms against the other rings. In discussion, we were able to make a connection between these features of the image and Sarajevo today, where three communities (Muslim, Serb and Croat) live separately, but in close proximity.
This second image is normally interpreted by outsiders as a sniper, but was intended to represent a bobsleigh.
Images like these from a workshop I led in Haifa with a mixed group of Jewish and Arab Israelis often have a phenomenological intensity which communicates more feeling than meaning, but in contested situations, this can often be a valuable approach.
These images of Belfast from workshops I led more than twenty years apart in 1993 (pre-Ceasefire) and 2013 (five years after the Good Friday Agreement) indicate a increasing appetite for dialogue, but have the sense of lost lives in common.
This image of Belfast from 2012, the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic which was built in the city’s Harland and Wolff shipyard, was intended to represent the great ship. But it appears to many to symbolize the unfulfilled Peace Process, with many hands held out but none connecting.
It is an image that reminds me of this statue in Derry. The intention was to symbolise dialogue, but it has come to signify the way in which the Peace Process seems frozen in time.
In the words on one sociologist:
We tend to ‘stand between’ the image and audiences by translating images into words. In doing so we impose one interpretation on the images, thus dismissing the possibility that the images may have more than one meaning. (Strecker 1997)
But it is the very ambiguity of these images that makes them such powerful communicative tools, allowing seeming contradictory readings to coexist together.
This brings me to the final section of my talk today: The Theatre of Witness, which combines the participatory aspects of Image Theatre with a form of performance in which in the words of its founder, TeyaSepinuck:
“the true stories of those who have been marginalised, forgotten or hurt by society are woven into collaborative theatre productions and are performed by the people themselves in spoken word, movement, music and visual imagery”.
In the case of her work in Northern Ireland, the context was especially challenging, founded as it was on the shifting sands of the Northern Ireland Peace Process.
As we have seen, the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998 is widely recognised as having been a pivotal moment in the recent history of Northern Ireland, fulfilling the poetic prophecy of the late Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney that “once in a lifetime/ The longed-for tidal wave/ Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme.” But his “hope for a great sea-change/On the far side of revenge” has been long in coming.
The intervening fifteen years have seen optimistic talk of a ‘Peace Dividend’ give way to a more pessimistic preoccupation with ‘The Troubles Legacy’ – a range of issues left unresolved by the Peace Process.
Like some of the stage images we have been looking at, The Theatre of Witness addresses these continuing difficulties by allowing diverse perspectives to co-exist without insisting on a reconciliation between opposing views.
This sense of “unfinished business” was at the heart of the first Theatre of Witness production, We Carried Your Secrets. This took place in 2009 and involved a mainly male cast, with the stories of older men who had all been directly involved in the Troubles being placed side by side with those of the younger participants. They spoke of the continuing indirect impact of the violence on their lives.
The second production, I Once Knew a Girl… in 2010 had an entirely female cast and exposed some of painful memories of domestic and sexual abuse so often suppressed during the years of civil discord. The figure in the foreground of the picture is Kathleen Gillespie, whose husband Patsy was the victim of a notorious IRA “Proxy Bomb”, detonated beside an army checkpoint while he was chained inside his car.
These productions were followed by Release in 2012, where ex-prisoners and paramilitary combatants shared the stage with a former Prison Governor, a former soldier and a former police detective.
There has been much discussion in Northern Ireland of the need for a Peace and Reconciliation process akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). But reports from South Africa itself suggest that this has not been the panacea outsiders often imagine. Annie Coombes records that:
The TRC has been heavily criticised in South Africa for the compromise made in the name of ‘national unity’ and reconciliation that allowed many to walk free while conditions they had perpetrated under apartheid, and that had reduced so many to poverty and powerlessness, remained intact.
In a similar way, there has been a growing perception, particularly in poorer Loyalist communities in Northern Ireland, that unresolved grievances have been forgotten, and that the rights of victims are being ignored in a race for reconciliation. The ‘Theatre of Witness’, however, seeks to avoid labels such as victim, survivor and perpetrator, and to allow sometimes contradictory and unreconciled accounts of the region’s recent history to sit together side by side, shoulder to shoulder.