The Utopian Performative in Post-Ceasefire Northern Irish Theatre

Lisa Fitzpatrick

This essay considers ways in which theatre in Northern Ireland has been engaging with experiences of trauma, violence and grief as the post-Ceasefire society continues to take shape. Drawing upon Dolan’s work on the ‘utopian performative’ (2005, 5), and incorporating the work of Laub and Carlson amongst others, I will be analyzing theatrical performance as a process that can aestheticize violent loss and trauma in order to explore the potential for transcendence and open hopeful possibilities for the future. The essay references a number of recent touring productions, including Family Plot (2005), Puckoon (2009), The History of the Troubles (According to my Da) (2003 and 2009), and Chronicles of Long Kesh (2009), but three performances from 2006-7 provide the main primary material: The Waiting Room, Macbeth (both of which are site-specific), and Bog People. These three plays have been chosen because of their rootedness in specific, haunted sites and landscapes, which engages them with local histories and memories, potentially offering new possibilities for healing and reconciliation.

Since the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, a range of measures have been put in place to move Northern Ireland beyond its history of sectarian prejudice and violence, and to inaugurate a new period of peace and, ultimately, reconciliation. The report Future Policies for the Past from the think-tank Democratic Dialogue published the proceedings of a round-table discussion staged in September 2000 to address issues of peace and re-conciliation (Report 13, www.cain.ulst.ac.uk/dd). The report notes that ‘Enduring personal grief is compounded by adversarial political argument, with little willingness to assume responsibility for what has taken place in the past and not much clarity about what approach should be adopted in the future’ (Report 13, online). It identifies ‘an underlying theme of grief and resentment’ from the victims or survivors of the period, and notes that this broad category could controversially include all those who have grown up since 1969: ‘all have suffered because of the conflict’ (Introduction, online). Almost a decade later, the recent report from the Consultative Group on the Past (CGP), published in January 2009, reiterates many of the same points. The CGP report notes that between 1969 and 2001, in addition to the 3,523 violent deaths attributable to the conflict, 47,000 people were injured in 16,200 bombings and 37,000 shooting incidents, and there were ‘22,500 armed robberies, 2,200 arson attacks and some 19,600 people were imprisoned for scheduled offenses’ (2009, 60-2). The report recognizes that victims and survivors ‘are now faced with the challenge of a society that wants to move on’ (62) even as it identifies the conflict as continuing in another form: ‘while we have left the violence behind us, we have found new ways to continue the conflict. This is evidenced by the contention around the language used when describing the conflict and those who played a role in it’ (66). Despite aspirations for a ‘new Northern Ireland where toleration, respect for cultural and religious diversity, equality and justice are the foundations of our relationships’, there is continuing sectarianism, fuelled by segregation, even in the generation who have grown up post-Ceasefire. The report notes for example that there are ‘a greater number of so-called ‘peace’ walls now than existed throughout the conflict’ (75). Tim Miles’s essay in this collection notes the grim statistics.

Both reports emphasize the importance of addressing victims’ needs through public acknowledgement of their suffering, if reconciliation and forgiveness are to be achieved. Future Policies for the Past eschews the romanticization of forgiveness, recognizes its limitations, and agrees the value of narrowly pragmatic definitions of reconciliation as preferable to outright conflict. Nonetheless in the section entitled Forgiveness and Reconciliation, Duncan Morrow likens political reconciliation to forgiveness in personal relationships, and argues that ‘forgiveness [is] so burning in Northern Ireland … [because] so many of the injuries are understood as the grief not only of individuals but of whole communities. Injury can thus make political demands and seek political action … The decision to forgive … becomes of importance to everyone – because without it the political stability of the whole system is endangered’ (online). The CGP report emphasizes the benefits of remembering the conflict formally and publicly as offering opportunities to people to ‘reflect openly on the past and come to terms with its impact upon their life’ (96), to celebrate and honour the dead, to comfort the bereaved and to rebuild for a different future. ‘As the past only exists now in memory, in order for us and future generations to truly understand … and move towards a shared and reconciled future, all of society … should be encouraged to remember’ (96). Storytelling – both speaking and listening – is identified in the report as a particularly important method of sharing memories and commemorating (99).

The importance of communal reconciliation identified by both reports, which depends in part on a public recognition of the grief and injury to the community as well as the individual, presents an opportunity to theatre and performance. Historically, theatre has provided a forum for the investigation and debate of pressing public concerns and traumatic social upheaval. It may provide a space for communal explorations of grief, while, through the medium of mimetic representation, distancing the spectator from the immediacy of loss, allowing an emotional and critical distance from which to view what has happened. The public nature of theatre also lends itself to what LaCapra describes as ‘socially engaged memory work’: a ritualized, performatively relived version of the past done for secondary witnesses who will respond with ‘empathetic unsettlement’ (1999, 713). It can offer a space to ‘mourn the dead and bear witness’ (Moss, online). Paul Connerton defines ‘social memory’, as a process by which members of a community come to know each other ‘by asking for accounts, by giving accounts, by believing or disbelieving stories about each other’s pasts and identities’ (1999, 21). In the context of Northern Ireland, with shared or public storytelling already an acknowledged pathway to reconciliation and forgiveness, theatre plays a potentially powerful role in accessing and nurturing such memory.

The productions under discussion here engage with shared memory in a range of ways. One technique used increasingly commonly in Northern Irish theatre is to neutralize traumas of the past through laughter, as in Big Telly’s new production of Puckoon, where the creation of the Border is at the centre of the comedy: in recent depoliticized productions such as that of Martin Lynch’s The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty, which was a serious and controversial drama when it was first staged at the Lyric Theatre in 1982, and in new work such as The History of the Troubles and Chronicles of Long Kesh, both also by Lynch. The History of the Troubles, according to its advance publicity, will ‘bring out the best of the Troubles’ in a ‘laugh-a-minute gallop through 30-odd years of civil unrest’. Chronicles similarly incorporates comedy skilfully into the characterization and the vignettes of prison life, while juxtaposing them with quieter, more sombre moments that recognize the various ways in which prison officers, their families and the families of the inmates were all also prisoners of that place and time. In plays like Carnival (2008) by Lucy Caldwell, the plight of travelling Roma circus performers and their tales of former glory evoke a sense of dispossession and disorientation which arguably represents the plight of the Loyalist community in post-Ceasefire Northern Ireland. Daragh Carville’s Family Plot (2005) similarly uses metaphor to explore the role of forgiveness and self-reflection in the process of moving forward. Carville presents the scarred and embattled, dead members of the Kerr family, who must make peace with each other if they are to escape Purgatory. Noticeably, in response to this performance the audience seemed to laugh both at the comic and at the more serious scenes, with spectators at Coleraine’s Riverside Theatre laughing at the husband’s references to beating his wife. The apparent desire to laugh at representations of violence, coupled with a tendency by artists to minimize the shock and sense of threat in performance through the blocking and set design, suggests that laughter’s ability to alleviate tension and to create a transient sense of togetherness through the shared joke is one function of post-Ceasefire theatre. Bergson argues that ‘laughter appears to stand in need of an echo … Our laughter is always the laughter of a group’ (1980, 64). Thus the laughter in the theatre as events that were in their time traumatic and divisive are enacted or recalled on stage, may function to ease tension and unite the spectators into one cohesive group.

This effect is particularly noticeable in the 2007 touring production of Ambrose Fogarty. While Maguire (37) describes the ‘vicious beating’ of Fogarty and the audience response at the premiere production, the post-Ceasefire production showed little explicit violence enacted, on a theatrical set that evoked none of the claustrophobic sense of threat of the original performance, or of the written text. The laughter with which the text was received, however, arguably demonstrated both the audience’s reluctance to be drawn into potential disagreements about the roles of the police in interrogating Fogarty, and another of Bergson’s observations of laughter: that it reflects a resistance to emotion, and is characterized by ‘the absence of feeling’ (original italics) (63). Such a response, however, depoliticizes the violence and trauma associated with the Troubles and conceives of peace only by refusing to acknowledge the problems of the past. The ongoing political relevance of this play – for example as a response to events in the Middle East, as Paul Devlin’s essay explores – is similarly neutralized by this approach to interpretation. The depoliticization of the violence, and the nostalgic rendering of the Troubles that often accompanies it, is only one characteristic of contemporary Northern Irish theatre. Even plays that are largely comic, like The Chronicles of Long Kesh, include scenes of remembrance that engage the audience in momentary reflections of grief and loss. In Chronicles, a moving sequence commemorates the Hunger Strikers, with the recitation of their names against a rendition of Sam Cooke’s Civil Rights anthem, A Change is Gonna Come. But this is followed by Freddie Gillespie’s monologue address to the audience, lamenting the terrible loss of life and the paucity of the gains of thirty-seven years of civil unrest. Shouting, ‘Fuck the Hunger Strikers’, Gillespie reminds the audience that 67 people died in the rioting surrounding their deaths. He names some of the forgotten victims in a moment of shared grief and pity, an opportunity for reflection and recognition of the indiscriminate nature of suffering.

The moments of grief and appeals to reflection in these productions is situated and sited in the three productions discussed below: The Waiting Room by Kabosh, performed at the Ebrington Barracks in Derry: Macbeth by Replay Productions, performed at the Crumlin Road Gaol, and Bog People by Big Telly Theatre Company, which told a series of stories that centred on that ubiquitous Irish landscape, the bog. In the latter, designed by Stuart Marshall, the series of short plays was performed on a set composed of enlarged photographs of people, textured with peat, thereby drawing attention to the landscape setting, the history of bodies preserved in the bog, and the tragedy of the disappeared whose absence is marked on stage through the visual signifiers of the photographs, and through the stories the characters tell about bodies found and lost in the bogs. This performative representation of the local landscape as haunted by death and loss is given a different form of expression in the productions by Kabosh and Replay. These were performed in ‘haunted’ sites, to borrow Carlson’s term: the spaces were something else before they were interpellated into theatre spaces, and therefore have the potential of ‘bleeding through’ (133) in the process of reception. Both sites engage with the recent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland, evoking memories of military control, state power, community privilege or marginalization: loss of liberty, loss of life, or loss of that power and control: and political and paramilitary resistance. Significantly, both sites were disused and their status as performance spaces was also transitional: since Kabosh’s production much of the Ebrington site, including the building where the performance was staged, has been demolished. The sites themselves, therefore, slide out of being, are ephemeral, and are transformed by the processes of peace building as it continues around them.

The Waiting Room was a 2006 bilingual (French and English) devised piece of physical theatre that referenced the contemporary films Amélie in content and Dogville in aesthetics of staging. There was no programme for the show and little advance information was provided. The audience gathered at a designated place, the Water-side Theatre, and were taken from there by bus to a secret location: Ebrington Barracks. On the bus the director distributed letters from different characters to the spectators, which provided some ex-position since the letters were addressed to loved ones away at war or to the President bewailing the plight of the village. Unknown to the audience the actors were also on the bus, though this was only evident when the performance began with individuals stepping forward from within the crowd to speak the opening lines. The play tells the story of a small French village where the men have been away at war for twenty-one years: the set and costumes suggest the mid-twentieth century but this is never explicitly addressed. With the exception of an ancient bomb disposal expert named Napoleon Blownaparte, the villagers were all women. Each had developed a nervous or eccentric habit in her anxiety and loneliness. This unhappy situation was disrupted by the abrupt arrival of Albert, a balloonist who fell from the sky, and whose presence acted as a catalyst for transformation. In the final magical scenes, scraps of paper fell from the sky/ceiling bearing the message that the war was lost. Together with the airman, the villagers created a gigantic hot air balloon, and left the village forever.

The barracks where the play was performed was a space very much like a village surrounded by high metal fencing and backing onto the river on Derry’s East bank, and the performance took place in the former assembly hall. It has since been radically altered, and many of the buildings have been razed to prepare the way for a new, civilian development with residential, commercial, and cultural quarters. The performance was staged on the floor of the hall, where the street and the different houses were marked out with white rehearsal tape. These spaces were dressed with props and furniture to create the characters’ homes and gardens: the audience were guided around the hall to watch the story unfold, and were some-times also broken into small groups for more intimate discussions with the characters. The storytelling structure brought spectators into a character’s ‘home’ to hear their personal stories of loss and desire. The audience was also encouraged at particular points to speak, to vote, and to dance with the characters, building a transitive sense of community in the empty barracks, and a sense of intimacy and connection.

The relationship of the space with the plot created a melancholic atmosphere, made manifest in the abandoned buildings surrounding the playing area and the eerie sense of a ghost-town or Famine village. The characters, like ghosts from another time, in-habited the spectators’ present for the short performance, before disappearing in Albert’s balloon. The play ended with the announcement that the villagers had ‘lost the war’, a moment that allowed for a shared sense of grief that potentially transcended political identity by marking the ending of an historical period in the life of the community: but the transformations wrought by Albert’s arrival have also demanded meaningful personal change from each of the characters: a willingness to relinquish old attachments and to attempt something new. The final scene, in which the villagers rise out of their previous existence, is an optimistic image of transcendence while the narrative gently ruminates on grief and loss.

Macbeth was staged by Replay Productions in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol, also a disused building at a point of transformation. The gaol opened in 1846 and was closed in 1996, and like Ebrington is being developed as a symbol of community regeneration and, possibly, commemoration. Over the decades, its prisoners included Eamon De Valera, Gusty Spence, Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams Snr, father of the Sinn Féin leader, and, like Ebrington, it is a site that already means something, and not only for the contemporary community. Both buildings have been part of the history of their surrounding communities, and have been players in the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland’s two main cities. Now disused and transformed briefly into sites of performance, the prison and the barracks become open, public spaces, permeable and accessible to ordinary civilians. As sites for theatre, their history is set aside – albeit perhaps briefly – and they take on a new significance and are shaped by new memories and experiences.

Prior to the performance the spectators queued outside the locked gates of the prison, while faceless figures in long, black hooded robes appeared from inside the gaol to usher them through huge doors into the vaulted entrance gateway, to face a second metal door. These mysterious robed figures recalled images from child-hood nightmares, and were suggestive of the closed, foreboding presence of the gaol and the invisible but no doubt widely discussed experiences of the inmates. As one door slammed shut behind the spectators they were left in the dark, while moans and shrieks rang out over the sound system followed by the lines from scene 1. The first scene with the witches was performed entirely through sound, making its function as a prologue clear as it managed the transition of the audience from the bustle of the street to the closed dark performance space beyond the gates. The liminal nature of this threshold space reiterated the audience’s movement from the everyday world to the dramatic world.

Macbeth’s first encounter with the witches significantly took place in a wasteland exterior which had been the burial ground for executed prisoners. There the witches dressed in white blood-stained shifts emerged shrieking from the gloom, reanimated bodies of the dead twisting the actions of the characters in the present. As a potent image of the violent invasion of the present by the past, these figures functioned as memorials to the executed and the martyred, and to the culture of martyrdom and vengeance that has disfigured Northern Ireland’s recent political and civic life. As the action moved into the main building and the audience pursued Macbeth deeper into the harsh labyrinth, the set began to function almost as an expressionistic backdrop to the action, so that the character was both imprisoned by, and punished for, the terrible tragedy that had spun far beyond his control. The play was not adapted to address the Troubles, but certain scenes resonate – such as the murder of Macduff’s young son and the attack on his wife (Act IV, scene ii).

In these two productions – The Waiting Room and Macbeth – ‘already written texts are placed in locations outside conventional theatres that are expected to provide appropriate ghostings in the mind of the audience’ (Carlson, 134). He quotes Gatti’s comment that the performance space in site-specific work is ‘not [located] in some kind of Utopian place, but in a historic place, a place with a history’ (Carlson, p.134). Gatti’s use of the term ‘Utopian’ suggests that performances in purpose-built theatres take place in utopia in the literal sense of a nowhere: site-specific performances in contrast take place in ‘a place with a history’. Certainly the barracks and the gaol have histories that situate the performances and the play-texts within the histories and discourses of the host communities, and in doing so they gather layers of meaning and create meanings beyond the boundaries of the performance by creating new memories and new embodied experiences of the sites. The spectators have entered the barracks or the gaol, have engaged imaginatively with an enacted story of grief, loss, death, and war, have stood in the cold exercise yard, walked through the cells, and touched the iron bars. In doing so, the spectator changes the site and in turn is changed by it.

Bog People was a collection of short plays staged as an evening of performance and linked by the physical setting of the bog and the recurring motifs of grief and love. The work was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s poetry collection of the same name. Director Zoe Seaton describes the poems as ‘incredibly evocative’ of the current situation, raising questions of ‘justice, revenge, grief, life and death, the tragedy of the Troubles and the challenge of moving beyond them’. None of the plays directly cites the history of the Troubles: instead stories of ancient bodies found in the bog, a man’s tale of his wife’s desertion, and an old woman’s memory of dancing with an African-American soldier who was then lynched by her community, are allowed to resonate with the shared experience of the theatre audience. Arriving at a set for such apparently disparate texts was difficult, Seaton notes, until the designer pointed out that the plays are about love, and about ‘how you feel about somebody who is gone’. The design for the play was ultimately based on cut-up photographs of people, enlarged, covering both the walls and floor of the set, and textured with peat to blend the human with the land, and to create a set that was deeply connected to the landscape. For Seaton, it reminds us that the ground beneath our feet is haunted by those who have lived and died before us. And despite the sadness inherent in the subject matter, the play celebrates life and the human capacity to survive and be happy.

Jill Dolan argues that

live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experience of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world.

Defining her concept of the ‘utopian performative’, she rejects the idea that it necessarily involves the representation of a utopia on the stage, or that it is a form of activist theatre. Rather, she sees it as an aesthetic that can

lead to both affective and effective feelings and expressions of hope and love … for other people, for a more abstracted notion of ‘community’, or for an even more intangible idea of ‘humankind’.

It is a ‘small but profound’ moment in which performance ‘lifts everyone slightly above the present’. In relation to post-ceasefire theatre, therefore, it is not about representing peaceful cooperation or visions of a future, better Northern Ireland: it is about moments of intersubjective, heightened connectedness that allow the possibility of such cooperation to exist, affectively, for a short time.

The emphasis in the Consultative Group on the Past (CGP) report (2009) on reflection and remembering resonates with these productions. Their content engages allusively, rather than explicitly, with the Troubles, which allows the audience to distance the events on stage from the local conflict, and offers space for reflection. These plays can be understood independently of Northern Ireland’s recent history, yet they offer an affective engagement with the emotional landscape of post-Ceasefire reconciliation. Each play in its different way recognizes that the war is over, although none proposes that the way forward is clear: and each offers an empathetic opportunity for the sharing of sorrow, grief, and regret through the actions and losses endured by the characters. In Bog People the old woman’s sorrow for the young African-American soldier echoes countless similar stories of impossible loves: the violence enacted on him warns the whole community of the dangers of exogamy, and her silence about his death speaks of her own complicity with his killers. In another of the Bog People plays an old man grieves for the wife he loved, who has long since vanished: he has never found out what happened to her or why she left him. His grief, and the pain of not knowing, echoes the real life testimonies of the families of the disappeared. The storytelling structure of a number of the pieces, and the characters’ narratives of their various losses, create testimonies of grief in which the audience may find their own sorrow mirrored and acknowledged.

The evocation of the ‘pastness’ of the conflict is a feature of Macbeth and The Waiting Room in particular: in Bog People it is only implicit in the historical distance between the present moment of performance and the deaths and disappearances represented on stage. However, Macbeth concludes with the vanquishing of the eponymous (anti)hero, whose violent lust for power has almost destroyed Scotland: MacDuff, who kills him off-stage, declares ‘behold, where stands / The usurper’s cursed head’ (Act V, viii). The war is over, and the gaol that represents Macbeth’s increasing alienation and loss of self within the brutal labyrinth of his own ambition is emptied of spectators and actors, the characters and the memories of the performance lingering as ghostly memories that shape the future public perception and experiences of the space. The Waiting Room ends with the end of the war, and the characters’ transcendence of their former lives. The haunted sites add to the sense of ‘pastness’: by uniting the audience through their shared memories of the public space, and creating the opportunity for personal memory to overlap with community memory and with remembered public speech about the original functions of the sites. Spectators therefore engage with both the site itself and with the site transformed for performance. The abandoned barracks at Ebrington is haunted by local memories of its role in the conflict and its historical status within the city: it is also haunted as any abandoned village is, by the memories and remnants of those who once inhabited it, and finally it is haunted by the theatrical text, which speaks directly to the site as a space that the men have left, and that will be emptied (and demolished) with the ending of the war. The performance therefore, on one level, engages with and celebrates the history and final destruction of its site though actions accomplished in the actual social world.

The integration at moments of all or some of the audience into the action – a technique which was used more extensively in The Waiting Room than in Macbeth, aids in the creation of a sense of shared experience. By speaking intimately to the spectators, engaging them in the democratic processes of the village, dancing with them, and speaking directly to them, The Waiting Room created a sense of an ephemeral community of performers and spectators. To a lesser extent, Macbeth engaged the audience through the use of the promenade form, involving the spectators physically in the progression of the performance. As the actors moved deeper into the gaol, the audience were compelled to follow, and to linger uneasily by the darkened cell doors and in the various nooks and crannies of the Victorian building. Meanwhile, the ending of both productions with the proclamation that the war is over may reiterate the recent history of Northern Ireland, while admitting that the horrors and grief of the war are not easily dispelled.

Amy Hungerford writes that in order to receive traumatic experience, the spectator must feel an identification with the victim, and willingly immerse him/herself in the literature of testimony (p.3). In the case of Northern Ireland, however, the trauma is a shared, lived experience that affects the entire community, and is subsumed into everyday life within the region. Most – though not all – of these performances and productions concern themselves with the expression of shared experience of the Troubles and the questions of reflection, grief, and the traumatic stress of living in a violent environment, rather than with the intensity of trauma experienced by the smaller proportion of the population who were maimed or bereaved, by paramilitaries or by agents of the state. In this sense, all who have grown up since 1969 are witnesses, as the Future Policies for the Past report argues.

This process of witnessing is both giving voice to experience and listening to the experiences of others. It is important therefore to the concept of the utopian performative, with its moments of affective togetherness, and sense of audience cohesion. Similarly the shared laughter at the performances of Lynch’s plays, for example, or shared moments of silence in the face of sorrowful or traumatic memory, unite the audience into one, if only briefly. Dori Laub notes the importance of silence to the process of bearing witness:

speakers about trauma on some level prefer silence so as to protect themselves from the fear of being listened to – and of listening to themselves … while silence is defeat, it serves them both as a sanctuary and a place of bondage (Laub, 58).

The inexpressible nature of some experiences also plays a part here: words may be inadequate to convey the intensity of emotion: silence may at times be the more eloquent response.

Significantly, these productions do not offer a catharsis: they are not structured to lead the audiences through the horror and grief to the purgation of those emotions. The sense of horror and grief remain, but are recognized and granted dignity. Jane Moss, writing of post-conflict theatre in Quebec, notes examples of plays that may ‘re-enact violence, memorialize the victims, and perform mourning work in order to renew our shattered faith in humanity’ (online). In these moments in Northern Irish theatre of utopian performativity, where the audience are briefly united in an intersubjective experience of togetherness, and where a possible future is glimpsed, theatre engages in a process of aestheticizing loss and transcending the brutality of the past.

Works Cited:

ARK Northern Ireland, Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ ©1996-2008. Last accessed 20/2/2009

Assman, Jan, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’ New German Critique 65, 1995: 125-133.

Bell, V, Culture & Performance (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2007).

Bergson, Henri, ‘Laughter’ in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

Carlson, Marvin, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 2003).

Caruth, Cathy, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 1995).

Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Consultative Group on the Past, 2009. Report of the Consultative Group on the Past. Available online at www.cgpni.org. Last accessed 20/2/2009.

Democratic Dialogue, 2000 Future Policies for the Past available online at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/dd/report13/report13.htm. Last accessed 20/2/2009.

Dolan, Jill, Utopia in Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Hamber, Brandon, D. Kulle, R. Wilson, eds, Future Policies for the Past, Report No. 13 (Belfast: Democratic Dialogue, 2001). Available online at www.cain.ulster.ac.uk. Last accessed January 23, 2009.

Hungerford, Amy, The Holocaust of Texts: genocide, literature, and personification (Chicago: London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

LaCapra, Dominick, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Enquiry 25:4, 1999: 696-727.

Maguire, Tom, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland (Exeter: University of Exeter Press 2006).

Morrow, Duncan, ‘Forgiveness and Reconciliation’ in Future Policies for the Past, Report No. 13 (Belfast: Democratic Dialogue, 2001). Available online at www.cain.ulster.ac.uk. Last accessed January 23, 2009.

Moss, Jane, ‘The Drama of Survival: Staging Post-traumatic Memory in Plays by Lebanese-Quebecois Playwrights’ Theatre Research in Canada 22:2, Fall/Automne 2001.

Available online at http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/TRIC/ Last accessed February 20, 2009.

Oliver, Kelly, Witnessing: beyond recognition (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London & New York: Routledge, 1993).

Žižek, Slavoj, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2008).

Extract From: Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick (2010)

Cross Reference: McGuinness Section, Marie Jones, Previous essay

See Also: Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick and Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi