Jochen Achilles
The Death of Humpty Dumpty; The Closed Door Dorothy; The Hidden Curriculum; Remembrance; Billy; Ties of Blood
Introduction
Born in Belfast into a Protestant working-class family in 1945, Graham Reid earned an academic degree from Queens University in Belfast in 1976.1 Later he became writer-in-residence at this institution. Reid worked as a teacher for some years but has been concentrating on his literary production since 1980. He has written a number of teleplays for the BBC. His works for the stage have predominantly been produced by the Peacock Theatre, the experimental offshoot of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Some of Reid’s works, such as the Billy plays, build up on one another and trace the stages of a character’s development. All of his dramatic works investigate the effects of the political and military struggles between Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and unionists in the Northern Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the goals and convictions of the various factions hardly take centre stage. Reid does not write plays in order to suggest or advocate any particular solution to the Northern Ireland conflict. His theatre is political in a way that is similar to Sean O’Casey’s or Brendan Behan’s. The political demands of the respective groupings and the violence used to assert their aims are measured against the impact these groups have on individual characters and their families. Reid’s plays focus on the personal and existential consequences of living in a region ruled by violence. Into this interpersonal space, the struggles between paramilitary groups come tearing in like the blind and anonymous forces of fate. In this way, Reid’s plays acquire a peculiar tension between regional and political specificity on the one hand, and universal existential issues on the other. Reid emphasises that he is principally interested in family problems, the ordinariness of which all human beings share. Against this specific background seemingly world-shaking, large-scale events appear as mere abstractions.2 This does not mean, however, that Reid wants to shut out contemporary global problems entirely, as did, for instance, Thornton Wilder in Our Town (1938). Rather, he portrays individual human beings caught up in the conflict between their personal lives and the general political situation, between self-determination and other-directedness.3
The Plays
The Death of Humpty Dumpty (1979)
Reid’s first and most widely received play, The Death of Humpty Dumpty, premiered 1979, at the Peacock Theatre. Its central character, Protestant history teacher George Samson, paralysed from the neck down after a terrorist assault, presents a brutal image of the injuries the Northern Ireland Troubles could inflict on the people who became entangled in them. Samson shares the fate of the wall-sitting, egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty character in the nursery rhyme, immortalised by Lewis Carroll in the sixth chapter of Through the Looking-Glass (1872) and heightened into a symbol of fallen humanity by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939). Just as in the case of Humpty Dumpty, the King’s, respectively the Queen’s, army will never be able to bring George Samson back to his former state.4 On the level of political allegory, George Samson’s paralysis constitutes an assessment of the situation of Northern Ireland that is akin to Joyce’s diagnosis of universal social and mental paralysis put forward in his short-story collection Dubliners (1914) half a century before. Similar to O’Casey’s First World War play The Silver Tassie (1928), the irreducible existential situation of the lame and the crippled is at the centre of The Death of Humpty Dumpty, in which the Troubles in Northern Ireland have replaced the First World War background. The universal significance of the issue is underscored by showing how, in hospital, Protestant middle-class intellectual George Samson makes friends with Gerry Doyle, a working-class man who is a paraplegic like himself. Doyle performs a complex function. He opens the play with a kind of prologue, in which he emphasises the equalising effects, across all social and religious divides, of his own and George’s invalidity. Doyle’s death in a traffic accident after his release from hospital marks the end of the first and the beginning of the second part of the two-act play. Yet in spite of his physical demise, Doyle’s voice with its cynical commentary still has the last word in The Death of Humpty Dumpty.
Reid achieves this by making Doyle’s voice the inner voice of George Samson in Act II. It gives utterance to Samson’s thoughts and feelings, articulating the desperate and hopeless perspective of a man excluded from normal life. In terms of technique, this internalisation of Doyle as Samson’s inner voice, which facilitates a dramatisation of the psychological consequences of Samson’s paralysis, is reminiscent of Gar O’Donnell’s split into a private and a public self in Brian Friel’s early success, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). On the one hand, this psychological technique of Reid’s makes it possible to act out the ways in which hate, self-pity and aggression determine the emotional dynamics of George Samson. Samson tries to fight back against the ambivalent compassion he receives from his environment by the cynically destructive comments of Doyle’s inner voice and the bullying behaviour that is fuelled by this attitude. Later on, when Samson is permitted to spend the weekends at home with his family, he passes on the humiliation he has to bear by harassing his wife, his son and his daughter. Samson’s physical deformation begins to induce mental deformation in his family.
The Death of Humpty Dumpty also tries in other ways to reveal the interconnections between terrorist violence and mental dispositions. The whole play is interspersed with analogies of sexual and political repression and exploitation, ‘the similarity between what is presented as the principal attributes of this violence and the natural attributes of male sexual identity’.5 This is a theme that also dominates other plays by Reid, such as, for instance, Dorothy. In The Death of Humpty Dumpty, it is foreshadowed from a historical perspective. Before the assault on George Samson that will bring about his paralysis, in a scene that documents an intact family life, he and his son David discuss the historical role of Irish MP John Redmond, who attempted to achieve a moderate solution for Ireland’s independence within the framework of the British Empire. In a school composition, David takes up the opinion of Sean O’Casey, who regarded Redmond’s conciliatory attitude towards the English colonial power as a form of political prostitution and expressed this by giving the only prostitute in The Plough and the Stars (1926), his play on the Easter Rising, Redmond’s name. Reid links the question of the right moral stance in the face of political oppression to the issue of sexual self-determination. In The Death of Humpty Dumpty this becomes clearly apparent, when George Samson, initially depicted as a happily married family man, proves to be a notorious philanderer. The scene subsequent to his debate with his son on John Redmond’s selling-out shows Samson, who appeared as the concerned husband and father mere moments before, in a cosy post-coital chat with his young colleague Caroline Wilson. In a way, Caroline becomes George Samson’s Delilah, for their assignation at the ‘Giant’s Ring’ in the hills outside of Belfast results in his becoming an unwilling and unwanted witness to the machinations of a terrorist group. The men take down Samson’s registration number and later shoot him in order to ensure his silence by his death. Ironically, this is just what they fail to accomplish. George can still think and speak, even though he is dead in every other respect.
Later on, Doyle emphasises the defeat a state like this means with regard to one’s sexuality: ‘You can talk, some social intercourse, but no sexual’. The course of the play makes this abundantly clear when Caroline Wilson visits George Samson at his hospital bed and tells him that the teacher who has taken over Samson’s position in the school’s hierarchy has also become her lover and intends to marry her. As Doyle’s voice comments, ‘First they take over your Empire, and then they take your woman’. Like territorial gains or losses, love affairs appear to be just another manifestation of power relations. The achievement of The Death of Humpty Dumpty does not least consist in showing the underlying pattern of power and rebellion, repression and outbreak, that dominates the political situation in Northern Ireland as a nearly ubiquitous structure, which not only informs institutions such as the educational and healthcare systems, but also the family. The hospital situation George Samson has to endure proves another potential system of oppression. Sister Thompson, the angelically humanitarian Ward Sister, is counter-pointed by brutal and sadistic young male nurse Willy John, who brings the violence and terrorism of the streets into the hospital. The Ward Sister draws attention to this interconnection when she confronts Willy: ‘You are like so many others in this bloody country. You’re a bloody animal, limited in everything but your capacity for cruelty’. In a similar manner, George Samson’s injury in Northern Ireland’s civil war, and the humiliations arising from it, leave their mark on his family. His son David can eventually think of no other recourse than to smother his father to death with a pillow. The metaphorical references of George Samson’s fate to the irreparable fall of Humpty Dumpty and, above all, to an atavistic battle of the sexes over male dominance and emasculation, as represented by the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, lend a grim inevitability to Reid’s play. His use of metaphor not only makes clear that the Troubles have encroached into all areas of life. It also raises the question whether the Troubles, in their turn, are not a form of acting out a dynamic of libidinous and aggressive instincts that must be considered an anthropological constant.
The Closed Door, Dorothy and The Hidden Curriculum (1980)
Reid’s second play, The Closed Door, was also first shown at the Peacock Theatre, on 24 April 1980. Like The Death of Humpty Dumpty, it deals with the complex problems resulting from Northern Ireland’s civil war, although it focuses on a different aspect. The Closed Door is not primarily about the sufferings of the victims of violence, but about the question of whether personal courage can contribute to a change in the situation. By presenting the extreme emotional states engendered by terrorist brutality, Reid makes it clear that, in spite of the all pervading sense of powerlessness, there remains some little room for individual decision, which might even grow to be a prime cause for fundamental change. In this play, however, the door referred to in the title remains closed. Any perspective of making a new moral start is strongly denied. It is only in his later works that Reid begins to adopt a more optimistic attitude.
Reid’s next two plays, Dorothy and The Hidden Curriculum, were both performed for the first time in 1980, Dorothy at the Oscar Theatre during the Dublin Theatre Festival, and The Hidden Curriculum at the Peacock Theatre. Both plays elaborate on themes already present in The Death of Humpty Dumpty and The Closed Door. In Dorothy, it is the theme of the interrelation between sexual and political violence; in The Hidden Curriculum, it is the failure of the school system in the face of the political and social situation. Dorothy, the central character in the play of the same name, is an unusually attractive fifty-year-old woman, bored by her marriage to building contractor Charles Williams and looking for pleasure by testing her eroticmagnetismin party flirtations. The Williams family seems to have succeeded in leaving behind the problems that shake Belfast. Although both Dorothy and her husband originally came from sordid circumstances, they have become prosperous and now live in a luxury bungalow on a hill, with a view of the city and the sea. Their spatial detachment permits Dorothy to watch the bombings down in the city as if they were a fireworks display. Nevertheless, the violence from the city finally surges up into the residences of the affluent. The Northern Ireland conflict leaves no social class untouched, there is no buying one’s way out of it. One weekend, when husband Charles and their grown-up son Douglas have gone off in the car, and bored Dorothy is sitting alone at home, Stephen Montgomery, a former fellow student of her son’s, drops by for a visit. Stephen also sneaks two other men into the house, the dyspeptic terrorist Mike and his sidekick Andy, an utterly ruthless killer.
The play goes on to create a nightmarish atmosphere of horror, as feelings of social inferiority, the desire to seek retribution for previous injustice and sexual lust mingle to form a fatal amalgamation. Stephen uses the two terrorists to threaten Dorothy into submitting to his quasi-incestuous sexual desires, as he sees her as a mother-substitute. Andy and Mike are not primarily interested in sex but try to find a vent for their rage against all their social and financial betters and anyone who stands aloof from the Troubles. Andy’s sadism derives from the brutal slaughter of his father, who, to make matters worse, was a bricklayer lorded over by building contractors like Dorothy’s husband. In a similar fashion, Mike believes himself duty-bound to seek retribution for his mother, who works as a charwoman for upper-class ladies. The mounting rage and aggression of the three men is finally discharged as they rape Dorothy. Reid’s play presents this vortex of destructive emotions as a vicious circle without escape. When Dorothy’s husband Charles learns of the rape of his wife, he immediately plots revenge. He wants to reconquer his seemingly unassailable position on the hill beyond the social and religious lines of demarcation, from which Stephen, Mike and Andy have ousted the family by their assault on Dorothy. Yet revenge fails. Andy and Mike hear about Charles’s plans, and once again they manage to establish themselves as squatters in the house on the hill. The intermingling of violence and Northern Ireland domestic life proves to be ubiquitous.
The Hidden Curriculum casts light on the situation of west Belfast schools in the 1970s. On the one hand, the play features a teaching staff mostly made up of jaded veterans solely interested in their private lives, and a headmaster who is energetically pursuing his career and wants to present to the public as positive an image of his school as possible. On the other hand, Reid shows the desolate world of the pupils, whose lives are stunted by family catastrophes and political terror. He principally attempts to answer the question as to what kind of difference school education can make against this background. The interaction of two English teachers, Tony Cairns and David Dunn, with two former Protestant pupils on a visit to their old school, Tom Allen and Bill Boyd, highlights the functions of school education in troubled times. Unlike their colleagues, both teachers take a sincere interest in helping their pupils to cope with the problems in their lives. The approaches they use differ significantly, however. Intellectual Tony Cairns tries to establish a connection to the present-day situation of his pupils by introducing them to subjects like the War Poets of the First World War and by campaigning to have a course on Irish history added to the curriculum. David Dunn does not believe in methods and schemes and rather bases his impulse for reform on empathy. He speaks the language of his pupils, trying to imagine himself in their places and to help them on a day-to-day basis.
Through Allen and Boyd, the two former pupils, Tony Cairns in particular arrives at an awareness of the secret behind education in Ireland, the hidden curriculum that determines their lives much more drastically than any amount of schooling. ‘Comprehension and the War Poets count for nothing out there’, Allen explains, and he adds:
Look at me, do I look like a rich, influential member of the Protestant ascendancy? I’ve got nothing . . . I live in a slum . . . I can’t get a job . . . I’ve no fancy car . . . my ma ran off with her fancyman . . . my sister got knocked up the shoot by a Brit . . . my brother’s in jail . . . and my da’s dying in agony.
David Dunn is convinced that problems that run this deep can by no means be cushioned by the teachings of the school system. Tony Cairns, however, tries to help out another former pupil, who by now has become a mass murderer working as a hit man for a terrorist organisation, by going to see the criminal’s father, who gave his son away to the police. At this point, the father, having turned police informer, is himself menaced by Allen and Boyd. Tony Cairns has to realise that his offer of help will, at best, merely jeopardise his own life, without making any difference at all. His attempts to initiate a radical reform of school structures are also thwarted by the narrow-mindedness and indifference of his colleagues as well as by the opportunism of the headmaster. Like the ending of Dorothy, the ending of The Hidden Curriculum can only acknowledge the apparently inescapable ‘vicious circle’ of violence.
Remembrance (1984)
Remembrance, which opened in October 1984 at the Belfast Lyric Theatre, is Reid’s first play that not only outlines the vicious circle of violence but tries to break it. Remembrance introduces the second and, so far, last phase in Reid’s writing. This second phase continues in his two television programmes, pursuing an attempt not only to diagnose the situation of Northern Ireland, but to alleviate it by showing a possible way out of the chaos. Remembrance is also Reid’s first play to use elements of comedy so that humour plays more than just an occasional role. Different from Reid’s previous works, the central metaphor in Remembrance is the image of bridge building across the graves of the victims of terrorism. The symbol for this bridging of the abyss is the bench in the cemetery on which former British soldier Bert Andrews and Theresa Donaghy, a Catholic Irish woman, meet and fall in love. Both are over sixty years old. Both are widowed and have lost a child to terrorist attacks. Bert’s son, Sam, was shot by the IRA, Theresa’s son, Peter, by a Protestant terror organisation. Their sons’ graves are almost adjacent. This brings Bert and Theresa closer to each other. They begin to wonder whether, in the face of their advanced age and the religious and political chasm that separates them, their affection will be strong enough to fight for a future together.
The social prejudices and problems that stand in the way of their new life together appear to be personified in the family backgrounds of these mature lovers. In addition to being a womaniser and a drunkard, Bert’s second son, Victor, is a loutish and brutal torture specialist with the police force of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). He has come back to live with his father after the separation from his wife Jenny, whom he betrayed systematically. Victor is thinking of emigrating to South Africa, whose apartheid rule has built up a demand for racist torturers even greater than Northern Ireland’s Troubles. His minima moralia are summed up in statements like this: ‘I might bash the odd head on the odd wall but I’ll never blow an unarmed man’s head off from three feet’. In spite of his many affairs, however, Victor also remains attached to his wife, who by now has taken up a kind of housekeeper’s function in the Andrews household. Theresa is living with her daughter Joan, who worked as a nurse before the killing of her brother. Since then, she has felt partially guilty of his death, and only powerful sedatives keep her recurring fits of hysteria under control. Theresa’s second daughter Deirdre is raising her three children as a single mother: her husband Joe is an IRA fighter, serving life imprisonment for the murders he committed.
Bert’s and Theresa’s attempts to explain their budding relationship to their children at first meet with mockery and a complete lack of understanding. During the course of the play, however, people other than Bert and Theresa end up meeting on the cemetery bench as well. Joan has a first talk with Bert, coming to trust him so much that she confesses why she believes herself to be partly responsible for the death of her brother Peter. Joan’s sister Deirdre strikes up an acquaintance with Victor on the cemetery bench. Even though the brother of Protestant policeman Victor was slain by an IRA killer just like Deirdre’s husband, both immediately feel a liking for one another. The ending of Remembrance remains open. Deirdre and her sister Joan move to England in order to make a new start. Victor appears to be serious about building a relationship with a new partner, but he also keeps making more-than-interested inquiries about Deirdre. Theresa and Bert exchange letters, telling each other how much they are looking forward to visiting the cemetery together in the coming spring. Here, Reid’s overriding perspective is no longer the cycle of violence, the irrevocable fall of Humpty Dumpty, or the closed door, as in the previous plays. Reid rather tries to develop a perspective of sustaining the fragile bridge work that has been built as well as the hope that the Northern Ireland conflict and the casualties it has claimed will eventually all recede into history. Only painful memories will remain which do not necessarily prevent reconciliation for those who live on. Reid’s subsequent teleplays reinforce this constructive aspect of his dramatic work.
Billy (1982–4)
Reid’s three-part series of teleplays, Too Late to Talk to Billy, A Matter of Choice for Billy, and A Coming to Terms for Billy was aired on BBC between 1982 and 1984, starring Kenneth Branagh as the title character, before he embarked on his international career. At first glance, the series seems to be just another tableau of the dreary stasis of life in a Protestant working-class family in west Belfast. The father, Norman Martin, a dockhand, is an irascible and violent drunk. His wife, Janet, has never been a model of marital fidelity. When the play begins, she is hospitalised with terminal cancer. Lorna, the seventeen-year-old daughter, is acting as a surrogate mother for her sisters Ann and Maureen, who are still at school age, and for her eighteen-year-old brother Billy. Billy Martin is living in a state of war with his father Norman, trying to make up his mind whether he should accompany his middle-class girlfriend June to England, where she wants to go to university.
Using the cinematic devices of flashback and subjective camera, Too Late to Talk to Billy, the first part of the trilogy, draws the problems of communication and violence within the Martin family sphere out into the open. Loss of communication and missed opportunities to relate to one another characterise the Martins’ family life, as the title of the play suggests. Particularly sad, because it is irremediable, is Norman’s inability to speak with his dying wife again. When he eventually shows up at the hospital, Billy has a bitter greeting for him: ‘You’re too late to talk to her and too early for the funeral’. Loss of communication, caused by severe injuries of an emotional and even physical nature, is not just a factor in the situation of the Martin family, but also in the entire Northern Ireland situation. Conversely, the domestic violence that Reid presents is a component of the public violence the play does not show.
As in The Death of Humpty Dumpty, Reid invokes the interplay of psychosexual and political self-definition. It is due to feelings of both sexual impotence and political powerlessness that violent flare-ups occur. Familial power and communication structures, and the latent or undisguised willingness to use physical force both coincide with and reinforce the Northern Ireland conflict. Reid’s Billy plays derive their edge from this interaction of micro- and macrostructures, which merely appears to remain dormant, as the Northern Ireland conflict as such seems to be playing only a marginal role in them. And yet Reid manages to turn the saga of the Martin family into a political allegory. Reid is not content with merely diagnosing the disruption and disunity of the Northern Ireland situation. He also tries to contribute towards an improvement of the political conditions by putting forward suggestions for changing psychological and familial structures. Near the ending of Too Late to Talk to Billy, the Martin family seems about to break apart for good. Janet, the mother, has died. Norman, her husband, goes to England like so many other Irish men of his generation, having landed a job in Birmingham. Billy sees his father off at the ferry, where the two of them have a cautious and tentative reconciliation. Billy puts up his parents’ wedding photograph in the living room, in order to evoke a promise of marital harmony that never became real for him and his siblings. In this bleak world, family harmony seems to be feasible only in the form of remembrance and yearning. And yet, the two subsequent Billy plays also develop a realistic perspective for the future that is no longer exclusively shaped by hatred and confrontation. In A Matter of Choice for Billy, the protagonist undergoes a change of character. Billy no longer has to wear himself out in ceaseless conflict with his father, and he meets Catholic Pauline Magill, a nurse, who gradually begins to gain influence over him. Billy eventually makes the right decision in the ‘matter of choice’ the play derives its title from. He refuses to let Pauline disappear like June, his former girlfriend, and goes to live with her, leaving his own family behind, since, in Northern Ireland, he can hardly dare marry her across the denominational divide. His new role as his girlfriend’s responsible partner sets off a change in Billy.
A Coming to Terms for Billy, the last part of the sequence, develops this perspective of change further. Billy’s father Norman is visiting his family with his new English wife Mavis, a former teacher. Apparently, she has managed to domesticate him and has considerably reduced his inclinations towards drinking and violence. The couple is staying with Pauline and Billy. One reason for their coming, among others, is their wish to take the youngest of the Martin children to England to raise them there under less tenuous political conditions. This, however, results in the final breakdown of the Martin family’s original structure. Under the newly arisen circumstances, Billy’s sister Lorna in particular must give up her ambition to replace her deceased mother and make the decision to live her own life, independent of her family. The old behavioural patterns prove to be tenacious, not to be shaken off easily. The scars of the past cannot be readily overlooked. At the end of A Coming to Terms for Billy, Norman and Mavis return to England with Billy’s younger sisters Ann and Maureen. Billy and Pauline will visit them in their new home. Billy puts the old wedding photograph of Norman and Janet back into a drawer. He has made his peace with the traumatic aspects of his childhood and is now free to start over again. It is no longer the memory of the wounds he sustained in the past that determines his life, but the hope for a future in which his Protestantism and Pauline’s Catholicism, their mutual rootedness in Northern Ireland, and Mavis’s English background will not be irreconcilable any more. Ann and Maureen, at any rate, will stand for a new intercultural perspective.
With its background presences of Janet, the dying mother, and Uncle Andy, the invalid, the Billy sequence is reminiscent of George Samson’s fate in The Death of Humpty Dumpty. Ann’s difficulties at school look back on similar attempts at remedying educational problems in The Death of Humpty Dumpty, The Closed Door and especially in The Hidden Curriculum. Reid also analysed the interconnection between sexuality and violence before, most forcefully in Dorothy. And yet, with his teleplay trilogy about the Northern Irish Martin family made for an English television station, Reid achieves something new. He is no longer concentrating on a core motif, as in The Death of Humpty Dumpty and The Closed Door. Instead, he traces a development that brings his characters out of their stagnation. To a certain degree, this may be considered a concession to genre. But this is not the whole story: to a predominantly English audience, the Billy sequence provides an illustration of the Northern Ireland question that is much more complex than its ostensible packaging in a soap opera format would lead viewers to expect. Directing his focus on family relations enables Reid to accentuate those elementary psychological problems that keep grudges and traditional structures of violence alive even in the political sphere. The cracking-up of the essentially oedipal encrustations of Billy and Lorna through the efforts of the ‘Women’s Initiative’ formed by Pauline and Mavis triggers a process of development that gains validity as a metaphor for an analogous process on the social level. As, figuratively, the Martins open themselves up to non-unionist influences, Northern Ireland society must do as well. This may require first impulses both from the Irish Republic as represented by Catholic Pauline, and from England, which has an agent in Mavis. However, this endeavour will succeed only if the fatal entanglement in the compulsive repetition of the violent attack-and-retaliation pattern that was overcome in the family is broken through in the public sphere as well.
Ties of Blood (1985)
Aired in November and December 1985, Ties of Blood, Reid’s second programme for the BBC, runs to six episodes, showing aspects of the Northern Ireland conflict without any links provided by recurring characters or a common storyline. Like the Billy teleplays, these episodes utilise cinematic techniques such as flashbacks, close-ups, silent pans across the settings, and the juxtaposition of scenes as mutual commentary through fast intercutting. Unlike the Billy trilogy, however, Ties of Blood is not a family saga. Among other things, the programme is much more concerned with the role of the British Army and the motives that drive the actions of its soldiers. Reid, who at age fifteen ran away from home to join the British Army, may well have worked off his personal experience for the benefit of a British audience.6 The appeal to give up nationalist solipsism and sectarian fanaticism that could already be felt in the Billy trilogy becomes more emphatic in Ties of Blood. And again, chiefly women are ready to try out intercultural advances and their psychological and political consequences. With its dominant theme of finding possible ways of transition from a nationalist and denominational to an intercultural definition of identity, Reid’s drama contributes to amore comprehensive reorientation that has become more and more evident in Irish literature, both in the Republic and in the North. Brian Friel’s groundbreaking play Translations (1981), Dermot Bolger’s In High Germany (1990), and the Field Day pamphlets on nationalism, colonialism and literature by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said belong to this trend.
Out of Tune and Attachments, the second and fourth episodes of Ties of Blood, explore the reasons of young soldiers to sign up for a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, and then set these subjective attitudes against the objective military situation. Both teleplays accordingly feature two contrasting plot lines, each juxtaposing the motivations and the morale of English soldiers with an incident in which a British soldier and, respectively, an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) are seriously wounded in terrorist assaults, presumably launched by the IRA. Again, especially women address the problems of unclear loyalties and of love across the political and religious lines of demarcation. McCabe’s Wall is the first and only one of the six episodes of Ties of Blood set in Northern Ireland’s Catholic Republican milieu. In the environment of the McCabes, a Catholic family of farmers, two factions confront one another, with the agrarians and nationalist conservatives Liam, Declan and Grunter rallied around Sean McCabe, patriarch and pater familias, on one side and urban, England-oriented and cosmopolitan Trish, who exerts a growing influence on Sean’s daughter Mary, on the other. The dynamics of McCabe’s Wall derive from Mary McCabe’s increasing sympathies for Trish’s cosmopolitan outlook. A clear sign of the mood of departure from stifling rural ways is Mary’s relationship with Will, a Welsh soldier in the British Army. At the end of McCabe’s Wall, Reid finds persuasive symbolic images for the bridging of the gap that intercultural tolerance, as embodied in Mary and Will, can afford. After an accident, Sean McCabe has just finished repairing the damage to the wall around his farm, when it is destroyed again by British soldiers, this time beyond mending. Sean’s endeavours to keep his daughter Mary locked inside the wall around his property prove to be in vain. The wall breaks down. When he learns of Mary’s relationship with Will, the enemy soldier, he sends a sniper after his daughter’s lover. On the beach, where Mary is taking a last walk before leaving her home for ever, the killer in vain waits for Will to join her. Disappointed, he lowers his gun, through the sights of which the viewer watches Mary continuing her walk on the beach. The open sea that Mary looks out over remains a valid symbol for the new horizons beyond the Irish Sea for which she will set out together with Will. Sean is left behind on the wreckage of his wall, old and abandoned. Among the six episodes of Ties of Blood, McCabe’s Wall becomes the most complex and the most convincing representation of a change in consciousness and emotion towards greater tolerance and acceptance of the other, which also seems to be bearing political fruit. In several ways, Going Home, the third episode of Ties of Blood, elaborates on the option of an inter subjective crossing of the boundaries that begins to emerge out of the union of Mary and Will in McCabe’s Wall.
Invitation to a Party and The Military Wing, the two last instalments in the Ties of Blood series, differ from the preceding episodes in being increasingly driven by psychological interest. Both episodes deal with the emotional deformations that can be caused by the Northern Ireland conflict. Invitation to a Party depicts the fate of Marion, a young woman whose newly wed husband was shot to death by an English soldier on their wedding day. Marion eventually kills a British soldier, whom, in her confused state, she simultaneously identifies with both her husband and his murderer. As happens so frequently in the Northern Ireland conflict, the distinction between murderer and victim blurs. After the deed, Marion kills herself. The essential concern of this episode is the sudden shift from military to private violence that had been of interest to Reid as early as The Death of Humpty Dumpty. The Military Wing, the last episode of Ties of Blood, centres on nurse Yvonne Duncan, newly deployed to the military ward of a Belfast hospital, and her problematic involvement in both biculturalism and bisexuality.
Summary
In its entirety, Reid’s dramatic output, tied as it is to the Troubles, provides fundamental insights into the interplay of religious, political, social and psychological factors that determine and help perpetuate the Northern Ireland conflict. Reid’s dramatic style of realistic renditions of characters and settings heightened by unobtrusive symbolism is not experimental, but informative and well suited to the seriousness of his subject. The perspective of Reid’s dramatic works changes from an emphasis on the inevitability of the Northern Irish cycle of violence to cautious suggestions as to how to break through this cycle. Like several other recent Irish dramatists, Reid is counting on the growth of intercultural tolerance and the concomitant dwindling of nationalist prejudice. This change in Reid’s work sets in around 1984, with the cemetery bench in Remembrance becoming a site of reconciliation in full view of the graves of terrorism’s victims. In his early plays, the dominant images are of irretrievable loss and total isolation – the hopeless fate of Humpty Dumpty or the closed door. By contrast, the multi-part teleplays of the mid-1980s, the Billy trilogy and Ties of Blood, introduce and affirm the possibility of bridging the abyss and of a reconciliation of the warring parties. This political perspective has grown stronger and more reliable in recent years. It seems to confirm the development of Reid’s drama.7
Primary Sources
Works by Graham Reid
The Billy Plays: Too Late to Talk to Billy; A Matter of Choice for Billy; A Coming to Terms for Billy; Lorna (London: Faber and Faber, 1987).
The Death of Humpty-Dumpty (Dublin: Co-op Books, 1980).
The Plays of Graham Reid: Too Late to Talk to Billy; Dorothy; The Hidden Curriculum (Dublin: Co-op Books, 1982).
Remembrance (London: Faber and Faber, 1985).
Ties of Blood [McCabe’s Wall; Out of Tune; Going Home; Attachments; Invitation to a Party; The Military Wing] (London: Faber and Faber, 1986).
Secondary Sources
Achilles, Jochen, J., ‘Graham Reid’, in Jochen Achilles and Rüdiger Imhof (eds), Irische Dramatiker der Gegenwart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), pp. 96–112.
Bolger, Dermot, In High Germany, in A Dublin Quartet (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 71–109.
Campbell, P, ‘Graham Reid – Professional’, The Linen Hall Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1984), pp. 4–7.
Carroll, Lewis, The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, intr. and ann. Martin Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
Deane, Seamus (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. 3 (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991).
Eagleton, Terry, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1988).
Etherton, Michael, Contemporary Irish Dramatists (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 33–8. Fitzgibbon, Emelie, ‘All Change: Contemporary Fashions in the Irish Theatre’, in Masaru Sekine (ed.), Irish Writers and the Theatre (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), pp. 35–7.
Fitz-simon, Christopher, The Irish Theatre (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), p. 201.
Henderson, Lynda, ‘“The Green Shoot”: Transcendence and the Imagination in Contemporary Ulster Drama’, in Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley (eds), Across a Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland, Essays in Honour of John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1985), pp. 212–13.
Jameson, Fredric,Modernism and Imperialism (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1988).
Maxwell, D. E. S, A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama, 1891–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), pp. 185–6.
Murray, Christopher, ‘Recent Irish Drama’, in Heinz Kosok (ed.), Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982), pp. 439–43.
O’Toole, Fintan, ‘Graham Reid’s Heart of Darkness: The Cost of Living in Belfast’, Dublin, 16–19 April 1982, pp. 15–16.
Pilkington, Lionel, ‘Violence and Identity in Northern Ireland: Graham Reid’s The Death of Humpty Dumpty’, Modern Drama, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1990), pp. 15–29.
Roche, Anthony, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness (Dublin: Gill &Macmillan, 1994).
Said, Edward W., Yeats and Decolonization (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1988).
Notes
1. This essay is based on my previous article on Reid; see Jochen Achilles, ‘Graham Reid’.
2. Lionel Pilkington, ‘Violence and Identity in Northern Ireland’, p. 17.
3. Christopher Murray, ‘Recent Irish Drama’, p. 441.
4. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice, cf. 276.
5. Pilkington, op. cit., p. 22.
6. Michael Etherton, Contemporary Irish Dramatists, p. 33.
7. A few of Reid’s more recent plays are not accessible, however. These are Callers, produced on the Peacock Stage of the Abbey Theatre, 3 October 1985; Lengthening Shadows, produced by the Point Fields Theatre Company and the Lyric Theatre Belfast, 7 September 1995 and Love, produced by the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, in 1995.