Paul Devlin
In a Little World of Our Own; Tearing the Loom; As the Beast Sleeps; Trust; The Force of Change; Loyal Women
Introduction
As a playwright from a Protestant working-class background, Gary Mitchell’s body of work is critically acclaimed because it is seen as having given unusual access to loyalist communities in Northern Ireland during a period when many people in these communities have felt their way of life to be under threat. Mitchell, who grew up in Rathcoole, a sprawling housing estate on the edges of north Belfast, has obsessively dramatised how the political negotiations leading to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) reverberate at community level in Protestant working-class districts in Northern Ireland. His later works especially explore the impact of economic, structural and symbolic changes enacted in Northern Ireland under the GFA and have been widely received as possessing the ‘ringing tones of authenticity on a divided community’ during a politically volatile period.1
Mitchell, born in 1965, left school at sixteen with little in the way of formal educational qualifications and subsequently spent eight years unemployed.2 The relative economic deprivation of Rathcoole in the 1980s, combined with his own upbringing in ‘a family of active loyalism’,3 meant that like many of his peers he came into close contact with paramilitary activity in his formative years:
I grew up completely loyalist, completely Unionist, completely Protestant . . . I believed it all. I was very frightened of this Catholic monster that was raping my community and trying to kill us all. I tried to involve myself in the UDA4 and find out where the UVF5 was. I tried to play my part, I wanted to bring the war to them. I did some bad stuff to some people to prove myself but I was racked with guilt.6
As an adult, however, Mitchell questioned his assumptions about the Catholic population of Northern Ireland and the role of loyalist paramilitaries in his community. He later got a job with the Northern Irish Civil Service, where he ‘made a point of meeting some Catholics’7 and began to write plays.
Despite his success as a playwright Mitchell continued to live with his wife and family in the working-class district of Rathcoole. After a number of threats to his life, however, he finally left the estate for a nearby middle-class area. By then Mitchell’s controversial work had attracted the attention of hardliner loyalist paramilitaries. In November 2005 Mitchell’s Glengormly home was attacked, his car petrol bombed, and the homes of his uncle and niece simultaneously attacked by gangs of masked loyalists.8 His extended family, with the exception of his elderly grandmother, were ordered under threat of their lives to leave Rathcoole and told not to return. Mitchell subsequently went into hiding and has not returned to live in Rathcoole since the attack in 2005.
The Plays
In a Little World of Our Own (1991)
Mitchell’s first play, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, was broadcast on BBC Radio Four and won the BBC Radio Drama Young Playwrights’ Festival in 1991. This was followed by his first stage play, Independent Voice, produced by Belfast’s then most prominent new writing theatre company, Tinderbox, in 1993 and later for BBC Radio Four in 1994; for which it won the Stewart Parker Award for a BBC Radio Drama. Several stage plays followed, but Mitchell’s breakthrough work came when the Abbey Theatre in Dublin agreed to produce In a Little World of Our Own in February 1997, which proved to be very successful and established Mitchell as a remarkable new theatrical voice in contemporary Irish and British theatre. Little World is a play in four acts in which Ray, a UDA thug, rapes and mistakenly kills a young Catholic girl he was trying to stop from rejecting the advances of his learning disabled brother, Richard. Ray’s brutal methods are exposed as out of step in contemporary Belfast and in the end he is killed by the local UDA he once loyally served.
Tearing the Loom (1998) and As the Beast Sleeps (1998)
In 1998 Mitchell was commissioned to write Tearing the Loom for the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and in June of the same year the Abbey staged his new play, As the Beast Sleeps (ABS), which brought Mitchell continued commercial and critical success. Set during the United Irish Rebellion of 1798, Tearing tells the story of a Protestant weaver family who are split by the events of the revolution. Richard, a proud weaver-poet, wants to stay out of the fight but he finds his family drawn into events as they unfold. David, his son, is anti-rebellion, while his headstrong daughter, Ruth, is a pro-rebellion activist. As the play hurtles towards its bloody conclusion, the family is torn apart and eventually both David and Robert are killed. In the closing moments Ruth too dies by committing suicide and martyring herself. Mitchell’s early historical drama contains the beginning of a definite class-based analysis of the events it describes and their dramatic exploration clearly aims to allow the dire consequences of a rebellion that set neighbours and families against each other to resonate in the contemporary world of its staging.
ABS returns to present-day Ulster, but here loyalties are shown to be equally divided. Kyle and his loyalist gang find that in the wake of recent political developments, their style of direct action to support the loyalist cause is no longer required. Politicians have turned to ‘talk’ and left UDA hard men, like Freddie, Kyle’s close friend and gang member, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Kyle’s wife Sandra is sick of having no money since Kyle has stopped doing ‘jobs’ for the UDA. Meanwhile, some of Kyle’s other gang members have stepped out of line and been barred from their local UDA club. The UDA leadership instruct Kyle to organise a punishment squad to deal with dissenters, to which he reluctantly agrees. But Freddie is caught robbing the club and Kyle is forced to bring him in to find out who was his accomplice. When Freddie refuses to co-operate, he is beaten to within an inch of his life. In a final twist Kyle realises that the person Freddie was protecting by refusing to reveal their identity, his accomplice in the robbery, was Sandra, Kyle’s disaffected wife.
ABS, which premiered shortly after the signing of the GFA, offers a heavily semiotised snapshot of this moment of transition. Kyle and Sandra’s partially decorated home, and the notable absence of their child visually and thematically describes a failed alliance. The ‘Club’ where Kyle and his men drink, in the midst of an expensive and difficult refurbishment, is a thickly drawn theatrical metaphor for ‘the state of the nation’ amid the realisation of the GFA. The play’s central dynamic is in part generated from Kyle’s attempts to find a place for himself and his recently dispossessed and now unneeded loyalist gang: ‘All we want is, obviously to be let back in – all of us . . . what I think would suit everybody would be if we could have a private area’ (ABS, pp. 46–7).
Trust (1999)
In 1998 Mitchell was invited to become playwright-in-residence at the Royal National Theatre in London, during which time his play Trust was produced at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in March 1999. Trust looks at the relationship between UDA godfather Geordie and his wife Margaret as they carry out their daily paramilitary business activities alongside the demands of raising their teenage son, Jake. When it emerges that Jake is being bullied by some local boys and Geordie fails to act, Margaret takes matters into her own hands and tries to use their UDA contacts to put pressure on the boys to leave Jake alone. Things quickly get out of hand, however, when a boy is badly hurt and Jake is arrested. When yet again Geordie doesn’t act to save his son, Margaret decides to turn super-grass in order to buy her son out of youth offenders’ prison.
The Force of Change (2000)
In 1995, a year after the IRA’s ceasefire, the Patten Commission began a public consultation process designed to assess public opinion regarding the changes needed within the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) that would enable the two majority traditions in Northern Ireland to support any future police force. The implementation of the results of the Patten Report, which included recommendations to change the name of the RUC to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001, became a condition of the GFA. Force, staged in 1999, traverses these hugely significant shifts in Northern Ireland’s recent history. Produced at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in April 2000, Force received the George Devine Award and the Evening Standard Award for best new play. Mitchell sets the drama in the holding cells of a fictional RUC station amid the pressures being brought to bear on the organisation to change in light of recommendations following the GFA. Caroline, an officious career-minded officer, has got a limited amount of time left to crack her UDA suspect, Stanley, if she is to make her bid for promotion within the force. But some of Caroline’s colleagues are determined to see her fail. Bill, Mitchell’s alienated and bigoted RUC man, is especially eager to impede Caroline: partly because he dislikes her and the new developments within the RUC she represents, but also because he has been colluding with Stanley and the UDA for a number of years and Caroline’s investigation threatens to expose him. Bill’s collusion with Stanley is exposed as unworkable in the emerging ethics and procedures played out in Mitchell’s liminal mise en scène.
Loyal Women (2003)
Mitchell returned to the Royal Court in 2003 when his play Loyal Women was staged in the Jerwood Downstairs Theatre in November. Here Mitchell turns his attention to the Women’s UDA (WUDA), where Brenda and Gail are asked by the UDA leadership to deal with a local girl who has been seeing a Catholic teenager in the Rathcoole estate. Brenda, who is known to have killed someone years earlier, has changed since her reckless days as a young WUDA volunteer and is increasingly open to negotiated rather than violent solutions. Gail, however, and her henchwomen Heather, prefer to solve things using older, brutal methods. When Brenda fails to extract a promise from the young girl that she will stop seeing the Catholic boy, Heather, Gail and Jenny, Brenda’s gormless young daughter, tar and feather her in a brutal closing scene. Brenda recants her involvement with the organisation and the play ends with an extremely uneasy truce between Brenda and Gail. Mitchell’s plays contain a number of variations on the dramatic rendering of intransigence versus progressivism. Bill and David in Force, for example, represent a politically moderate incarnation of the device, but we might equally look to Ray drawn in opposition to Walter in Little World, or most obviously of all Kyle set in dramatic contrast to Freddie in ABS. In Loyal Women Brenda and Gail demonstrate a more recent development, as Mitchell sees it, in Protestant working-class political thinking. Gail’s violence seems outdated when pitched against Brenda’s keen negotiation skills and, although both women are active members the WUDA, as Hutchinson notes, Brenda’s tactics are those favoured by the UDA leadership.9 Brenda has changed but Gail hasn’t. Gail is a strong arm to be exercised only when absolutely necessary, but Brenda’s personal journey from violence to negotiation is a more useful and marketable reflection of the public image the now more media-savvy UDA would like to project.10
Summary
The immediacy of the subject material Mitchell’s work dramatises has meant that when premiered his plays attract considerable media attention and he has been adopted by the press both in England and Ireland as ‘the chronicler of the Protestant experience in Northern Ireland’.11 Mitchell himself is aware that as a Protestant working-class writer from the North, in the 1990s he was something of a rarity in the discourses then inflecting contemporary Irish theatre.
Protestants don’t write plays, you see. You must be a Catholic or a Catholic sympathiser, or a homosexual to do that. No one in our community does that because playwriting is a silly pretend thing.12
He conceives of his work as a necessary corrective to the stereotyping of his community in the media and a challenge to a pervasive and reductive analysis of that community. It is the self-promotion of his insider status and the perception of Mitchell as a working-class documentarian of an intransigent and violent version of Ulster loyalism that has also framed the critical reception of his stage plays.13 While Mitchell’s work remains relatively under-explored from an academic perspective, those critics who have provided a sustained analysis of his plays have at least partially redressed what Gerald Dawe has described as ‘the cultural resistance and uncertainty which still exists in Ireland, and indeed elsewhere, when writing bearing upon northern Protestant experience is addressed’.14
It is important, however, to stress that while Mitchell’s sociopolitical background makes him something of an oddity in Irish theatre, his is not a sole voice in Irish theatre history. Reviews, critiques and indeed Mitchell’s own comments often seem to overstate his ‘unique’ position as a Protestant, working-class, and Northern playwright. From this perspective, while Mitchell’s status as an important cultural commentator on contemporary loyalism in Northern Ireland is not in dispute, it is important to locate his work in a discernible, if fragmented, tradition of Northern, Protestant working-class playwrights. Wallace McDowell, for example, is correct to suggest that Mitchell’s working-class credentials set him somewhat apart from the similarly dissenting voices of other Protestant middle-class Northern playwrights such as Stewart Parker or Graham Reid.15 But Mitchell’s ethno-class affiliations and the critique his work engages with echo the material circumstances and thematic preoccupations of other Protestant working-class writers such as Thomas Carnduff in the 1930s/1940s and Sam Thompson in the 1960s.
Mitchell’s work has not always been received favourably in Northern Ireland, least of all by the very community he chooses to write about. He struggled to find success as a playwright in his native city at the beginning of his career. For example, he had originally conceived The World, the Flesh and the Devil as a stage play and, although the play was produced for radio, a stage version of it was never mounted. Later Little World was turned down by the Lyric Theatre in Belfast before he had offered it to the Abbey because of its potentially contentious subject material and because of its local loyalist community setting. Mitchell, however, has remained committed to documenting the changes within his community during the peace process. When success did come, and perhaps because that success had come via a Dublin premiere, Mitchell was received with apathy and sometimes suspicion in Belfast’s loyalist communities. The growing recognition that his work was not simply engaged in a theatrical celebration of Protestant working-class Belfast meant that others were keen to express their irritation to him at having their districts framed in any negative way to outsiders.16
In recent years Mitchell’s work has become much less visible and the appetite for his narratives of discontent seems to have somewhat diminished. He has not had a London premiere since Loyal Women in 2003, and, although Mitchell is completing a number of film scripts, his turn to screen writing has as yet not had the kind of success one might expect:
BBC Northern Ireland told me I wouldn’t be working with them any more unless I wrote about the peace process and it would have to be positive. So I told them, ‘No, you won’t be working with me.’ How could I write a positive drama about the peace process when terrorists are blowing up my car?17
Mitchell’s work is animated by a sustained and nuanced exploration of the fragmentation of contemporary Ulster loyalist identity. The divisions explored by Mitchell have a long historical gestation. The terms unionist and loyalist, for example, were at one point used interchangeably,18 but in the past two decades these terms have become increasingly distinct. While unionism remains defined by its central commitment to a continuing economic union with Great Britain and the political structures guaranteeing that union, loyalism, as James McAuley suggests,
may be expressed in terms of strong declarations of devotion to the British Crown and flag and a strong feeling of ‘belonging’ to the six counties of Northern Ireland [but has not] hindered Loyalists from coming into direct confrontation with representatives of the UK state or its security forces. Underpinning loyalism, therefore, is the notion [. . .] that the relationship between loyalism and the British state is essentially contractual [emphasis added].19
The manner in which the term loyalist is popularly used to define those individuals and groups who are willing to use physical force against the perceived enemies of Ulster tends to homogenise the multiple groupings operating under this particular banner. In part this marks one aspect of the success of organisations such as the UDA and UVF and their ability to provide ‘an important channel both for articulating social grievances and for reproducing sectarian ideology within the Protestant working class’.20 As Brian Graham points out, however, loyalism ‘is not a coherent ideology’21 and beneath the apparent unity of anti-republican sentiment, there are many forms of loyalty at play.
A proclivity to schism has made the need for a unifying ethic all the more pressing both within and among loyalist paramilitary groups. Popular unionist campaigns designed to resist any changes that might be interpreted as potential stepping stones into a united Ireland are memorable for the apparent simplicity of their rhetoric – ‘Ulster Says No!’ or the even more direct and effective ‘Never!’, for example. Mitchell’s plays dramatise how, in the heady changes following the GFA, dissimilarities of vision among these sometimes allied, sometimes competing factions are exposed at ground level. ABS, in particular, represents in microcosm the transitions occurring within loyalism as the GFA came to be ratified.22
Mitchell’s play telegraphs a number of the difficulties currently faced by Protestant working-class districts across Northern Ireland. Many economically deprived communities have struggled with an absence of cohesion and perceived security since the contingencies of a negotiated peace settlement and the transformed nature of paramilitary activity in their areas, ironically, seem to have removed them. Mitchell’s work documents the impact of such changes and offers a series of blunt theatrical images in opposition to the pervasive official discourses of peace proffered by the media in the wake of the GFA. Mitchell’s characters often long for the past and the security of a less complicated weltanschauung. Ray, in Little World for example, hankers after the ‘old days, the old ways’, a time when, he believes, his particular style of rough justice was respected. Bill, in Force, laments the changing nature of the police force: ‘As far as I was concerned I joined a Protestant police force to protect the Protestant people of Ulster against the IRA’. In ABS this general desire distils into a more precise and urgent necessity. Freddie articulates the felt need for the comfort of a returned zero-sum analysis amid the complexities of Belfast at the turn of the new millennium:
Fuck politics, fuck talking, fuck all that shit . . . Taigs hate us and we hate them. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to stay. They were fighting like fuck because we were on top. Now we have to do the same.
Larry too, in ABS, senses the mood of change. He tells Alec that when he thinks of the ‘old days’ he sees them in ‘black and white’ when: ‘The Prods were the good guys and the taigs were the baddies. Simple as that’. His nostalgia for simpler times stands in fatal contrast to Alec’s ability to grasp the complexity of ‘the world in blinding Technicolor’. More than Freddie even, Larry is yesterday’s man doing yesterday’s job.
The disposition of this analysis continues and extends in Mitchell’s later plays. In Force, for example, the thematic emphasis lies on the impact of structural change. Bill’s ‘Protestant Police force to protect a Protestant people’ (Force, p. 48) is an anachronism reminiscent of Lord Craigavon’s ‘Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people’. David, Bill’s young inheritor, however, vehemently rejects the gangsterism of Stanley and the UDA. ‘I learned more about the Stanley Browns of this world just growing up in Rathcoole’ (Force, p. 67), he tells Caroline. Later, face to face with the UDA leader, his opposition bears the strength and confidence of lived experience:
When I look into your eyes I see a reflection of every IRA man you claimed to be protecting us from. I see old men closing their shops and going home penniless because you took their profit and more. I see old ladies cowering in fear trying to forget what they witnessed in case you or your cronies come back to make them forget permanently. (Force, p. 74)
In overview, Mitchell’s stage plays can be read as following a thematic trajectory that begins by questioning the assumptions of violent loyalism and has now reached a point where his work often challenges the legitimacy of those organisations created to carry out acts of supposedly pro-state terrorism. In Little World Ray, despite his violence, is presented as human and caring in his relationship with his learning disabled brother. Even Freddie in ABS remains recognisably human, funny and likable in the right circumstances. In these early plays Mitchell’s position often remains deliberately ambiguous. ABS, however, also marks a turning point in Mitchell’s dramaturgy. While audiences are permitted moments where they might relate to Freddie and his situation, the play’s construction and its foregrounding of Kyle’s dilemma clearly asks sympathy for his position in their final analysis. In Trust Geordie is betrayed by his wife-turned-supergrass, Margaret, when he elects to protect the UDA rather than his son. Margaret’s dissidence is later echoed in Brenda’s newly constituted loyalty list (Loyal Women, p. 85) and her ultimate decision to leave the Women’s UDA at the close of Loyal Women.23
Mitchell’s work, then, viewed in this way might be usefully conceived of as increasingly involved in a post-unionist loyalist discourse. McAuley argues that the UDA represented a significant development in Protestant working-class politics in the early 1970s when it had within its emergent discourses the seeds of a radical departure that favoured a class-based analysis of the loyalist position in Ulster over the apparent logic of sectarianism.24 Mitchell’s work draws a great deal of its potency from its grounding in the complexities of contemporary Northern Irish Protestantism’s identity crisis. Mitchell’s thematic preoccupations clearly locate his work amid the post-unionist discourse. From this perspective his plays chart the loss of consent within the Protestant working classes of Northern Ireland for some of the central tenets of mainstream unionism: a loss based on a perceptible sense of class differences within unionism.
Alec I’ve seen too many bad Prods. Our own leaders, I couldn’t support them. I just never felt like they represented me – or us. It was as though they lived in a different world and when you look at their lifestyle, let me tell you, you wouldn’t be too far wrong. They’re either very rich or very Christian [. . .] (ABS, p. 20)
Similarly, Kyle’s ethno-politics have a definite economic dimension. He tells Freddie that ‘Things have been going bad with us, Freddie, with everybody, ever since this fucking process started and we were told to stop doing what we do and all the money stopped coming in’ (ABS, p. 63). Inclusion in a post-GFA and a politically rearranged Northern Ireland means not just a place at the table, but also a job and food on that table. Across the performances under discussion here, there is a keen sense of sectarianism compounded by economic poverty and intensifying class cleavages.
Mitchell’s position in this discourse can be described in Gramscian terms as that of the organic intellectual.25 He has stressed the importance of remaining connected to his class:
It is important for me to stay here [Rathcoole, before he was intimidated out] and keep in touch with the people I’m in touch with. If you are not aware of how things are changing, you’ll lose the detail and you’ll write a lot of nonsense.26
Moreover, Mitchell’s work resonates with Dario Fo’s descriptors of work in the Gramscian mode, which he sees as aiming to ‘create (or help create) public opinion, ferment dialectics, and pose problems’.27 Mitchell’s experiences as a playwright bear testimony to the difficulty of addressing such complex and volatile issues in as public an art form as theatre.
The contexts for the premieres of Mitchell’s plays, all of which have been premiered outside of Protestant working-class communities, have meant that they have been open to the criticism that they are remarkable largely because they offer Irish and English middle-class audiences a commoditised version of loyalism. Maguire, for example, suggests ‘There is a danger for Mitchell that, in the contexts in which his work is staged, audiences are able to engage in a voyeurism inflected with the distance of class and political identity.’28 Like other working-class writers who have written for mainstream theatres and largely middle-class audiences, Mitchell’s work risks mattering least to those he writes about.29 Typically such writers are praised for the authenticity of their representations of working-class life and the privileged access afforded audiences because the playwright is perceived as writing from the ‘inside’ and from their own personal experiences.30
That Mitchell has overwhelmingly chosen to work in a realist form has also left his plays open to charges of aesthetic conservatism.31 Realism has proved an extremely popular and resilient form for twentieth-century Northern Irish theatre makers. From the plays of St John Ervine in the early 1900s, through the many playwrights writing for the Ulster Group Theatre in the 1940s–60s, to the more recent use of the form by John Boyd at the Lyric in the 1970s, for example, and later Martin Lynch at the Lyric in the 1980s, realist plays have remained artistically viable and commercially desirable. There have, of course, been numerous playwrights who have sought and explored alternative forms of dramatic expression. For many playwrights after a decade of conflict the complexities of the Troubles became more pronounced and they sought what they perceived as more complex theatrical responses than those afforded by the realist mode. The stylistic experimentation of Brian Friel’s Freedom of the City, or Stewart Parker’s Northern Star, to name just two examples, attempted to find aesthetically inventive and historically inclusive dramatic models. At a time when a political settlement seemed an impossibility, many playwrights shifted the emphasis of their work away from the urgencies of realism to the disruption of metatheatrics as they sought for in theatrical invention what Parker would later famously refer to as a ‘working model of wholeness’ in drama that could fill the void left by the perceived failure of politics.
However, by the mid-1990s the peace process had started to gather momentum and, despite deep and widespread cynicism, it began to feel as if a deal might be imminent in Northern Ireland. In these seemingly accelerated contexts it seems critically short-sighted to read the production ofMitchell’s realist plays as only aesthetically regressive or as only examples of working-class misery made palatable for middle-class theatrical consumption. Rather, conceived of as an example of glimpse theatre, a play like ABS might be assessed in relation to the heavily mediatised events surrounding its production. In this case, staged just after the signing of the GFA, the realism of Mitchell’s play in reception is galvanised and made vital by events in many ways extraneous to the text but intrinsically linked to the performative moment of transmission. Offering audiences a glimpse into the previously unseen world of loyalism, at this precise point, arguably vitalised Mitchell’s work and re-vitalised his use of realism as a form in such particular circumstances.
The manner of representation, then, is crucial. Ulster loyalists have often been negatively portrayed and stereotyped in the media. Mitchell himself has criticised such representations.32 Loyalist paramilitaries in particular have been stereotyped as psychopaths, bloodthirsty, and lacking in political acumen. On the face of it, Mitchell’s liberal and graphic use of violence, and the apparent mindlessness of some of his characters, seems to support such stereotyping. While some of his plays undoubtedly do stray into theatrical cliché, however, others deal in much more subtle and complex characterisations to powerful effect. Ray and Freddie will serve here are examples of Mitchell’s more adeptly realised representatives of contemporary loyalism.
In a BBC Radio Ulster broadcast, Mitchell told an esteemed panel of guests: ‘I think that everybody has the capacity to commit violent crimes. And maybe they haven’t found it within themselves, but it’s there; it’s an animal thing that’s within everyone.’33 For Mitchell, loyalist violence is a part of Protestant working-class experience. Men like Ray have responded to a particular set of material circumstances in a manner that he may not agree with, but he can understand. Ray’s actions have purpose and logic:
Ray The world is a violent place. We know that better than anybody. Whether it’s dealing with the IRA or dealing with petty theft or glue sniffing. Whatever, namby-pamby ways don’t get results . . . See, I’m not just talking about beating people up. Doing people over. I’m talking about common sense. (Little World, pp. 3–4)
His commonsense remark is reminiscent of Gramsci’s conception of the same phrase: the set of contradictory motivations that Gramsci suggests govern our everyday ideological orientation.34 Ray is a contradictory product of his environment, capable of both gentleness and terrible violence. Mitchell’s attempts to give Ray, the ‘monster’, a recognisable human face are, perhaps, somewhat theatrically awkward in this early play. Dramatically, Ray’s ‘nice side’ feels overly structured; his bad/good sides arguably too neatly separated. In Freddie, however, Mitchell finds a more interesting contradiction. Despite his apparent psychopathic violence, Freddie is far from mindless. He understands the value of appearing to be psychopathic. In scene five, he recounts the story of his bar-room brawl the night before. The stage directions read: ‘Freddie enjoys telling the story, complete with all the actions from his point of view. Sandra clearly enjoys it too’.
The thrill of performing the psychopath clearly appeals to him. Later, when Kyle tells him he is a ‘crazy bastard’ he takes it as a compliment: ‘Don’t try to butter me up’. Like the comfort and simplicity of the zero-sum analysis he wants to return to, performing the psycho has value in these dangerous, transitional times. Terrorism, by its nature, is performative. Schmid points out that terrorism was originally defined as ‘Propaganda by Deed’ and that it enacts ‘in an important sense, symbolic violence’.35 Terrorism relies on an audience to receive the performance of the act of violence to engender the requisite sense of terror. Freddie understands the power of perception and the need to maintain an image. His violence, or rather the threat of violence he presents, is largely performative. In fact, he has far more violence visited upon him than he dishes out. But he is an important reminder to audiences alive to threats of such violence that loyalism understands the currency, symbolic and actual, of violence in political struggle. Freddie is an interesting attempt by Mitchell to represent the difficulties of changing long-standing beliefs and patterns of common sense within contemporary loyalism.
Mitchell’s plays work best in specific moments as politicised thrillers offering middle-class and other similarly distanced audiences provocative glimpses into the subaltern world of loyalist Belfast. The sitcom-like realism of Little World was energised in reception because we had never been on these particular loyalist sofas before. But this could have easily been a one-hit wonder for Mitchell, were it not for his creative and ethical commitment to documenting the contemporaneous experiences of his community. When he does this, when his plays feel as if they might have been written that morning, Mitchell’s realist dramas are vital socio-cultural events. ABS and Force are the clearest examples of this. But when he is out of step with this Mitchell’s plays also suggest a limited degree of technique. His characters can appear underdeveloped and repetitive; his plots un-vital and uninventive. For the Protestant working class of Northern Ireland, Mitchell’s plays are an important and public articulation of the changes occurring within their community and are part of a much wider discourse emerging there.
Primary Sources
As the Beast Sleeps (London: Nick Hern, 2001).
The Force of Change (London: Nick Hern, 2000).
Holding Cell (Belfast: Tinderbox Theatre Company, 2000).
In a Little World of Our Own (London: Nick Hern, 1998).
Loyal Women (London: Nick Hern, 2003).
Tearing the Loom (London: Nick Hern, 1998).
Trust (London: Nick Hern, 1999).
Secondary Sources
Anon., ‘Embracing the Challenge’, Irish Times, 9 June 1998.
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Anon., ‘Balancing Act’, Guardian, 5 April 2003.
The Book Club, BBC Radio Ulster, n.d. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/radioulster/bookprogramme/feature144190.shtml> (accessed 16 April 2009).
Bowcott, Owen, ‘Never Say Never Again? Plan for Paisley Biopic,’ Guardian, 22 March 2007.
Chrisafis, Angelique, ‘Loyalist Paramilitaries Drive Playwright from His Home’, Guardian, 12 December 2005.
Cornell, Jennifer, ‘Recontextualising the Conflict: Northern Ireland, Television Drama, and the Politics of Validation’, in J. Harrington and E. J. Mitchell (eds), Politics and Performance in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 197–218.
Coyle, Jane, ‘Mapping the Hard Road’, Irish Times, 8 February 1997.
Dawe, Gerald, ‘A Hard Act: Stewart Parker’s Pentecost’, in Eberhard Bort (ed.), The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the Nineties, CDE-Studies, Vol. 1 (Trier: WVT, 1996), pp. 65–74.
‘First Minister Welcomes News of Loyalist Decommissioning’, Belfast Telegraph, 27 June 2009.
Fo, Dario, ‘Some Aspects of Popular Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1985), pp. 131–7.
Fricker, Karen, ‘A World Apart: A Protestant Playwright Evokes the Unromantic Ireland’, American Theatre, Vol. 16, No. 6 (1999), pp. 54–7.
Gardner, Lyn, ‘The Force of Change’, Guardian, 10 November 2000.
Gibbons, Fiachra, ‘Truth and Nail’, Guardian, 10 April 2000.
Global Review of Ethnopolitics, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2003), Special Issue: Northern Ireland.
Graham, Brian, ‘The Past in the Present: The Shaping of Identity in Loyalist Ulster’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2004), pp. 483–500.
Hennessey, Thomas, A History of Northern Ireland 1920–1996 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1997).
Hutchinson, Wesley, ‘Engendering Change in the UDA: Gary Mitchell’s Loyal Women’, Estudios Irlandeses (2005), pp. 67–76.
—, ‘Gary Mitchell’s “Talk Process”’, ÉA, Vol. 56, No. 2 (2003), pp. 206–18.
Jarman, Neil, ‘From War to Peace? Changing Patterns of Violence in Northern Ireland, 1990–2003’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2004), pp. 420–38.
Maguire, Thomas, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006).
McAuley, James, ‘ “Just Fighting to Survive”: Loyalist Paramilitary Politics and the Progressive Unionist Party’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2004), pp. 522–43.
—, The Politics of Identity: Protestant Working Class Politics and Culture in Belfast (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1994).
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Notes
1. ‘Where are All Our Playwrights Going?’, Irish Times, 2 May 2000.
2. Fiachra Gibbons, ‘Truth and Nail’.
3. Mitchell quoted in Jane Coyle, ‘Mapping the Hard Road’.
4. The Ulster Defence Association, Northern Ireland’s largest loyalist paramilitary organisation.
5. The Ulster Volunteer Force, also a large loyalist paramilitary organisation.
6. Gibbons, op. cit.
7. Ibid.
8. The attacks were widely reported in the press. See, for example, Susan McKay’s ‘Writer’s Drama Becomes a Reality’.
9. Wesley Hutchinson, ‘Engendering Change’, p. 71.
10. Ibid., p. 72.
11. Lyn Gardner, ‘The Force of Change’. Reviews of any number of Mitchell’s plays featured in the Irish Times share a similar conception of Mitchell as the unofficial historian of contemporary Ulster loyalism.
12. Quoted in Gibbons, op. cit.
13. For example, Richard Rankin Russell writes that Mitchell is ‘an unblinking chronicler who understands their [Ulster loyalists’] plight yet is able to critique it’ (‘ “Loyal to the Truth” ’, p. 86); whereas Hutchinson readsMitchell’s work as specifically ‘providing a unique insight into the closed world of loyalist paramilitarianism’, ‘Gary Mitchell’s “Talk Process” ’, p. 206).
14. Gerald Dawe, ‘A Hard Act’, p. 65.
15. Wallace McDowell, ‘Staging the Debate’, p. 93.
16. Mitchell recalls: ‘I get knocked within my own community because I don’t write romantic Protestant plays [. . .]. I’m writing about the realities of our situation.’ See Karen Fricker, ‘AWorld Apart’, p. 56.
17. Henry McDonald, ‘Playwright Hits Back Against Intimidation’.
18. Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, p. 202.
19. James McAuley, ‘“Just Fighting to Survive” ’, pp. 524–5.
20. James McAuley, The Politics of Identity, p. 82.
21. Brian Graham, ‘The Past in the Present’, p. 484.
22. Kieran McEvoy et al., ‘Resistance’, pp. 653–4.
23. Mitchell continues and hardens this critique of loyalist paramilitary organisations in Remnants of Fear (unpublished), which controversially premiered at the Feil an Phobail (West Belfast Festival) in August 2006.
24. McAuley, The Politics of Identity, pp. 86–7.
25. Paul Ransome, Antonio Gramsci, Chapter 7.
26. Susan McKay, ‘ “You Can Make Your Wee Film” ’, p. 156.
27. Fo, ‘Some Aspects of Popular Theatre’, p. 134.
28. Thomas Maguire, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland, p. 157.
29. Interestingly, many of Mitchell’s works have of course opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which, John McGrath suggests, has a long history of presenting ‘no more than the elaboration of a theatrical technique for tuning working-class experience into satisfying thrills for the bourgeoisie’. John McGrath, A Good Night Out, p. 11.
30. We might, for example, cite examples such as John Osborne or Jim Cartwright in the British theatre, Clifford Odets in the USA, or Sean O’Casey and Sam Thompson in the Irish tradition. Mitchell’s work has commonly been received in such terms.
31. For a useful and concise description of the key questions surrounding the deployment of the realist form in contemporary Northern Irish theatre, see Maguire, op. cit., pp. 22–5.
32. See Fricker, op. cit.
33. Quoted in Russell, op. cit., p. 187.
34. For a discussion of Gramsci’s conception of ‘common sense’, see José Nun and William Cartier, ‘Elements for a Theory of Democracy’.
35. Alex P. Schmid, ‘Frameworks for Conceptualizing Terrosism’, pp. 205, 211.