Abstract
Theatre in Northern Ireland has frequently engaged with the civil conflict colloquially referred to as the Troubles. Since the 1995 Ceasefire and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, theatre has been actively engaged in mapping the post-conflict society, as well as commemorating the history and experience of the conflict. This chapter defines political performance broadly as work that engages with the particular experience of a particular community, to consider a range of thematically and formally varied work.
This chapter defines political performance very broadly, to include a range of thematically and formally varied work. It first explores the representation of Bloody Sunday in performance; then turns to plays that represent the Troubles and evoke a kind of nostalgia for a shared, if traumatic, past; and, finally, it discusses verbatim theatre productions that have become increasingly popular over the past decade.
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Notes
- 1.
Bloody Sunday refers to the events of 30 January 1972, when the First Battalion, Parachute Regiment of the British Army opened fire on a peaceful Civil Rights protest in Derry city, killing fourteen people (many of them teenage boys) and injuring twelve others. The first inquiry immediately after the event by Lord Widgery exonerated the soldiers. It was widely decried as a cover-up and led to a long campaign by family members of the dead for another inquiry. In 1998 Tony Blair appointed Lord Saville to head a tribunal that released its report in June 2010. This report described the killings as “unjustified and unjustifiable” and the public reporting of the Tribunal uncovered unambiguous evidence of soldiers’ lying under oath. To date, there have been no prosecutions of the soldiers involved, and the family of one of the dead continues to campaign to clear his name (the report concluded that it was possible that he was carrying a nail bomb).
- 2.
Baz Kershaw uses the term theatrical efficacy to describe “the potential that theatre may have to make the immediate effects of performance influence, however minutely, the general historical evolution of wider social and political realities” in The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1992), 1.
- 3.
Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative’”, Theatre Journal 53:3 (2001): 455.
- 4.
Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City and Translations in Plays One (London: Faber & Faber, 2013).
- 5.
Terry Teachout, “A Tragedy of Irish Proportions”, Wall Street Journal, 25 October 2012.
- 6.
Joe Nawaz, “Freedom of the City”, review of Freedom of the City, by Brian Friel, Culturenorthernireland.org , 23 October 2010.
- 7.
A fourteenth victim, 59 year-old John Johnson, died four months later of his injuries.
- 8.
Nawaz, “Freedom of the City”.
- 9.
Wilborn Hampton, “Brian Friel’s Requiem on Bloody Sunday”, Huffington Post, 15 October 2012.
- 10.
Sheila McCormick, “Heroes with Their Hands in the Air: Memory and Commemoration in Contemporary Documentary Theater”, Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013): 500–515.
- 11.
See, for example, Danine Farquharson “The force of law in Seamus Heaney’s Greek translations”, in Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland; Tony Roche “Ireland’s Antigones: Tragedy North and South”, in A Century of Irish Drama; or Des O’Rawe “(Mis)translating Tragedy: Irish Poets and Greek Plays”, online http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/Conf99/Orawe.htm.
- 12.
Laurence McClenaghan, “Watch Yourself Derry”, review of Carthaginians by Frank McGuinness. Derry Journal, 28 February 2012.
- 13.
See Tom Maguire, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2006).
- 14.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was the police force in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 2001. It was replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001. The PSNI pursues stringent recruitment policies to ensure cross-community representation on the force, and has been largely successful in building a working relationship with most communities in the region. The RUC had a reputation for collusion with Loyalist terrorists and for privileging the Protestant community in its everyday work. In the 1970s and 1980s there were repeated accusations of the abuse and torture of Republican prisoners and Catholic suspects in RUC custody at Castlereagh Holding Centre in East Belfast.
- 15.
Maguire, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland, 26.
- 16.
Brendan Deeds. Review, The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty, http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/performing-arts/interrogation-ambrose-fogarty
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Martin Lynch, The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty and Castles in the Air (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2003), 69.
- 19.
Ibid., 81.
- 20.
Unnamed Critic, Chronicles of Long Kesh, http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/performing-arts/chronicles-long-kesh-0
- 21.
Dave Duggan, Denizen, (Derry: Guildhall Press, 2014).
- 22.
Derek Paget, “‘Verbatim Theatre’: Oral History and Documentary Techniques”, New Theatre Quarterly, Volume 3, Issue 12 (1987): 317.
- 23.
Derek Paget, “The ‘Broken Tradition’ of Documentary Theatre and Its Continued Powers of Endurance”, in Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009), 235–236 quoted in Sheila McCormick, “Heroes with Their Hands in the Air: Memory and Commemoration in Contemporary Documentary Theater”, Kritika Kultura, 21/22 (2013): 501.
- 24.
Sara Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
- 25.
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1.
- 26.
Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative’” and Utopia in Performance: finding hope at the theatre (Chicago: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
- 27.
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006), 143–4.
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Fitzpatrick, L. (2018). The Politics of Performance: Theatre in and about Northern Ireland. In: Jordan, E., Weitz, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58588-2_4
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