This is an historic text, a speech from 2004, given at The Edinburgh Fringe. The plays mentioned, and others later in the series, are available in Plays in a Peace Process by Dave Duggan (Guildhall Press, 2008).
© DAVE DUGGAN
8.11.04 1635 words
This article by Dave
Duggan is extracted from a talk he gave at The Edinburgh Fringe in
August 2004.
Dave
is a writer, director and co-artistic director of Sole Purpose
Productions. Guildhall Press has recently published his novel, The
Greening of Larry Mahon.
The
texts of The Peace Process Trilogy can be found in Dave Duggan’s
Shorts
for Stage and Screen
(Lagan Press, 2003)
CAN THEATRE
CONTRIBUTE TO A PEACE PROCESS?
The short answer is
a resounding ‘yes’. The longer answer will look at four plays I
wrote and directed, and Sole Purpose Productions produced, between
1996 and the present day. But be assured I will not be making any
grand claims about the role of theatre in a peace process. I will
situate it within the social, civic, economic and artistic activities
that struggle to continue during a conflict.
Because
the main resource I bring to bear in my work is imagination and
because theatre is a visual medium, I ask you to visualise. To
picture. I ask you to imagine a small church hall at the edge of the
village of Kesh on the Fermanagh-Donegal border. The local community
association has invited Sole Purpose Productions to give a
performance of my play The
Shopper and The Boy.
It is a glorious June evening. We can hear larks singing high in the
summer air. A machine is cutting grass for silage two fields away.
Preparations for the performance are made, but the local hosts are
worried. Earlier that day, the remains of an RUC officer shot dead in
Lurgan were returned to his family home near the village. There is a
quietness about the people. Some think it would be a bad idea to go
ahead with the play. Some think no one will turn up. Some say we
should go ahead, that the play, which dramatises the difficult issue
of marching, needs to be seen. I wait with the actors, saying we’ll
perform or not as the community association decides. Gradually a
large audience starts to gather. From the village, the surrounding
area and across the border in Donegal. There are brief nods of
recognition, some easy greetings, polite acknowledgements, a delicate
tension. The crowd is muted, diffident, but ready to see the play.
The community association decides to proceed. The play begins. The
set is in place. The actors appear and march with a trunk around the
space. The Boy steps forward and declaims ‘No surrender’. The
Shopper steps forward and declaims ‘Tiochfaidh ár lá’. The
audience sits forward and engages.
I suggest that this
work has contributed at least the following five things to the peace
process:
1. Space to consider
difficult issues
2. New language to
reframe debates
3. Collective
experiences to support private and public processes
4. Healing to help
salve real hurts
and
5. Entertainment to
hearten people.
The
Shopper and the Boy was
first performed in June 1996, just ahead of the marching season. In
the play,
hot
issues are faced in real time. An audience sees real people close up,
facing, with resolve and imagination, the painful challenges brought
up by marches at Drumcree and elsewhere. Poetic, intelligent language
in the mouths of ordinary people offers possibilities. The Shopper
and the Boy express their contending desires as manifestations of
nascent negotiations.
Negotiations need
space and theatre has given a public this space. Shown instances of
the space being used. Shown negotiations occurring on the basis of
respect.
I
ask you once again to picture. To visualise once more. I ask you to
imagine a working class housing estate in Newtownards, a town just
east of Belfast, with a largely unionist population. Sole Purpose
Productions are in a community centre with my play Without
the Walls.
This is in the form of a Greek tragedy, drawing on the Antigone
story, which uses rhyme, rhythm and masks to dramatise the question
of how a society moving out of conflict might police itself. An
audience is engaged by an act of debate, education and entertainment
and when the tragedy is delivered, two women sitting near me have
tears running down their cheeks. Moments of catharsis in theatre
prepare us for moments of resolve in the world. The women strengthen
themselves to face the changes that a new policing order will bring.
Without
the Walls was
first produced in 1998 as an artistic contribution to public
discussions about policing. Theatre introduced new language into
difficult debates and contributed to the peace process. The complex
relationship that working class unionists have with ‘our’ police
is challenged and the terrifying yet liberating possibilities of
change echo round the community centre and beyond.
By
the year 2000 the peace process was well underway, while the
political process moved and stalled at different points. The peace
process has been going on for as long as the violence has been
manifest. People in different ways have been seeking to change things
by non-violent means, trying to keep avenues of dialogue open,
striving to maintain contacts, advancing actions for the securing of
human rights and dignity. And by the end of the nineties the phrase
‘moving
on’ was
being used by politicians and other public figures. I wondered how
individuals, deeply affected by the conflict, through loss or
imprisonment, might actually address the need to move on.
I
ask you to imagine a hushed audience in the studio space of The
Marketplace Theatre in the city of Armagh. Sole Purpose Productions
has brought two actors, a small set and my version of the meeting
between a bomber and a victim in the play Waiting….
The gravity of this meeting has stilled the audience. The two
characters struggle to articulate their experiences.
Theatre
has given that audience a collective experience that will support the
private and public processes that must happen when individuals and
societies do indeed move on in a meaningful way. For that audience,
and for us all, the challenge remains to live as fully as possible in
the present, with the past, and for the future. Being with characters
as they wrestle with the reality of moving on in a society coming out
of conflict provides a collective experience that strengthens us all
and contributes to the peace process.
One of the
significant complications in the peace process in Northern Ireland is
the fact that the state is a protagonist and a perpetrator of
violence. The Saville Inquiry was set up to look into the events of
Bloody Sunday in 1972 when 14 people were killed by state forces on
the streets of Derry Londonderry. The way the Saville Inquiry worked
had a profound impact on me. I found myself sitting in the public
gallery, transfixed by the witnesses and their stories, the dry
language of the legal teams, the formal discourse of the judges and
the layout of the room. It was self-evidently theatre to me and I
felt the impulse to poeticise the activity of the Inquiry, to elevate
the language of the testimonies and the questioning so that something
of the greater human experience might be made public.
I
wrote
Scenes from an Inquiry with
the support and participation of The Bloody Sunday families. Young
members of some of the families were cast in the roles for the
production and in January and February 2002 it was performed in The
Playhouse in Derry Londonderry as part of the 30th
anniversary events. I later did a radio drama adaptation at the
request of RTÉ, through which the public poetry of the imagined
witnesses reached a wider audience. It
was the power of poetry I was seeking. The universal poetic voice
that cries out in the face of awful violence, that salves and heals
in the face of the utter hopelessness of death and loss.
In
this way a piece of theatre offered healing of great pain and acted
as a balm to wounded hearts and minds. It assisted in the breaking of
taboos by offering some people a different view of the world. A
unionist member of The Policing Board attended a performance in The
Playhouse and said he enjoyed it and found it thought provoking.
Family members spoke
of the truth of it. That’s the ironic thing. A work of fiction and
imagination evokes a sense of truth. Something of the power of the
unashamed subjectivity of theatre is evident here. The way theatre
deals with feelings and experiences and, in this case, poeticises
them, so that it makes a contribution to the peace process as an
agent of truth seeking and healing.
With all the plays
the final contribution to the peace process is that the plays are
entertaining. Going to see one is a good night out, in a wide-ranging
sense of that phrase. And with violence still a fact of life on the
streets, entertainment is a vital contribution theatre makes to the
peace process.
The
plays I have referred to here all work as art in the first instance.
They are not acts of politics or social work in the direct sense of
those words. They are instances of the application of imagination to
public events, attempts to find beauty and order amid the chaos in
order to present them to audiences who will make up their own minds
about them.
Peace can only be
built if we give attention to our irrationality, give attention to
the deepest, often most troubling, urges and impulses that make us
human. That is a call to theatre. In so far as politics engages with
power, art and, in particular theatre, engages with pleasure, so that
while facts may be disputed, dramatic fictions can be debated,
explored and savoured; used to bring truth to bear and thus
contribute to a peace process.
© DAVE DUGGAN
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