In my visits to Belfast over the past 15 years, I have, like many others, hopped into a black cab to take the “Troubles” tour, wandered through the Ulster Museum, and marveled at Samson and Goliath, the massive yellow cranes that dominate the skyline. I came to Belfast as an outsider—a Canadian residing in California, who had a “reader’s” view of the city. I had read books about the Troubles—about the violence that escalated in the late 1960s due to heightened divisions between Catholic/nationalist and Protestant/unionist communities. And the arrival of the British army and the increasingly violent paramilitary activity that led to years of conflict followed by an uneasy peace after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. On my first tour of the city, I was struck by the weightedness of the history made concrete in the places I visited. The Peace Wall, six meters high with barbed wire atop brick and stone, separated the predominantly Catholic and nationalist Falls Road from the predominantly Protestant and unionist Shankill Road; the homes on either side still had protective screens fitted over back windows should a petrol bomb or some other object of violence find its way over the fence. Murals colored the landscape, honoring martyrs, displaying historic battles, and documenting paramilitary violence. And commemorative gardens honored the dead of past wars and the conflict—some of them killed by impossibly large plastic bullets,1 like the one the tour guide placed in my hand. Despite the almost 20-year gap between my first visit and my last, the physical markers of the conflict were largely unchanged—the peace wall was still there, albeit covered with more names written in sharpie by the many tourists who make their stop on the tour. Some of the walls have even been taken down.2 The more divisive murals had been painted over with less violent, more cultural scenes, but the biggest change, was in the way the places were described by my tour guide. He spoke candidly about the changes that had happened since he was a young man living on the Falls Road. He spoke of his own children, who now learned about the Troubles in their history classes, and who had no personal memory of the conflict. He spoke of his daughter who was good at math and who was part of the generation that he believes will finally take Belfast out of the shadow of the conflict. This was a common theme amongst people I talked to—the desire to be known for something beyond the Troubles. A difficult task in a city which, as my cab driver put it, “makes a tourist industry out of tragedy.” How does one move beyond such a weighted history?
The theater in Ireland has been a major force in exploring such issues. From the Irish National Theatre Movement in the early part of the twentieth century to the work of contemporary dramatists writing about and beyond the Peace Process, theater in Ireland has been concerned with making sense of and coming to terms with history. What has fascinated playwrights over the years is how these events are imprinted on the individual, weave their way into the community, and become the fabric of the nation. Critics and scholars have then worked to analyze the dramatic output by making connections, developing categories, and exploring significance. Anthony Roche described the past in Irish drama as having a unique place, where “[t]he best contemporary Irish playwrights are engaged in a search for dramatic means to reinterpret by re-imagining that past. All offer alternative narratives whose aim is liberation, a setting free of ghosts.”3 And Nicholas Grene observed that “[t]he Irish in their obsession with history are often said, like the Bourbons, to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Modern Irish dramatists have tried to belie this reputation by a recourse to history which will enlighten and illuminate the present.”4 What becomes difficult in a time of heightened political, social, and religious tension, such as the Troubles, is that the past and present are so intertwined they can be difficult to separate. This was evident in a debate that emerged in the 1980s, regarding the place of history and memory in Irish theater. Vocal in this discussion was Lynda Henderson, editor of Theatre Ireland, who was concerned with the way in which Irish playwrights seemed to “find their creative stimulus in the tap roots of the memory of wounds.” For Henderson, this approach to playwriting approximates “closet masochism” and she calls for playwrights to move beyond the past, beyond history, and beyond lament. She asks, “But, is there no other memory? And is memory itself generally life giving or death dealing … What is there in history that can heal?”5 She observes that “[i]t is early days and there will undoubtedly be disappointments. But let us profoundly hope that ‘the memory of wounds’ is on the way out. Time to grow up. Time for theatre to confront the present and help to move us forward…”6 In answer to Henderson’s challenge, Richard Pine responds by stressing that she has mistaken the point and rather than asking “Is there no other (i.e. better) memory?” she should be asking “what it is that triggers memory – what causes us to ‘participate in history’, to explore the past, probing layers of experience, divining, analysing, learning.” Pine reveals the denied “continuing hurt”7 that is at the root of Irish writing and that considering history and participating in it through drama “engages at the cutting edge where the inner preoccupations of the individual … enter the public arena of recognition and articulation and meet, confront, and mesh with, the wider concern about those preoccupations, whether they be doubts, fears, certainties or exultations.”8 While both of these writers would seem to stand in opposition to one another, they open up a space for discussion of the place history and memory might play in Irish playwriting. If there is a preoccupation with the past—a past inhabited by the memory of wounds—what purpose does this serve? In what ways were playwrights (re) fashioning that past to serve dramatic ends? Is it the “conscious contemplation of their navels”9 as Henderson writes or a commitment “to sing the drama of madness, perplexity, indignation, hurt”10 of Pine’s opinion? And does it matter?
It mattered a great deal, particularly for critics who were calling for playwrights to represent the Troubles on stage. The preoccupation with history, memory, and wounds now took on an added dimension—a focusing in on the particulars of the conflict and a desire to see it tackled “head on” rather than through oblique references to the past. Philomena Muinzer’s “Evacuating the Museum: The crisis of Playwriting in Ulster” is one of the most comprehensive analyses of playwriting in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. She looks at a number of Northern writers, and seems to stand on the side of Henderson as she ultimately bemoans the fact that the writers were perpetuating “thoughts, obsessions and themes” in their plays that represented the conflict “too narrowly.” She calls for plays that move outside of these “worn statement[s],” and urges writers to “find new thematic forms, new symbols of a positive accurate outlook,” and suggests that this might be accomplished by looking at documentary details, the “emotion of bigotry,” and the “possible origins of the war.” She discusses a number of plays , such as Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985), Ron Hutchinson’s Rat in the Skull (1984), and Robin Glendinning’s Mumbo Jumbo (1986). She criticizes their work for containing “worn statements” and “worn modes.” She does allow, however, that Martin Lynch “is taking some fair, if soft-focus photographs.”11 Muinzer discusses a number of playwrights in her article, but one is conspicuously missing—Christina Reid. By the time of Muinzer’s article in 1987 and Henderson and Pine’s articles in 1988 and 1989, Reid had written and produced three plays, Tea in a China Cup in 1983 at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, Did You Hear the One About the Irishman …? produced in 1985 by the Royal Shakespeare Company and toured through the United States, and Joyriders produced in 1986 by Paines Plough Theatre Company in London. Each of these plays is set in Belfast and explores the familial and social impact of the Troubles on everyday people. Yet Reid was routinely overlooked in critical examinations of Belfast theater in the 1980s and early 1990s.12 This may have had to do with the fact that Reid’s position in the world of Belfast theater at that time was a bit of a novelty—a 38-year old housewife who had recently returned to university and decided to write plays. She wrote about the world of women and youths—perspectives not often seen on the Belfast stage. Although she was a popular success and won multiple awards, there was very little critical attention to her work at the height of her career. This could be due to the fact that, as Catherine Leeney noted in relation to early writers, “plays neglected then are likely to remain so, and events in theatre history, which seemed volcanic at the time, have remained disproportionately dominant in present-day assessments, overshadowing what might have been quieter, but nonetheless important developments.”13 Companies such as Field Day, one of whose founders was playwright Brian Friel, and Charabanc, an independent theater company focused primarily on women’s stories, had significant and varied output in the 1980s, and were often the focus of critical attention, leaving other playwrights, such as Reid, to be relegated to a footnote or brief reference.
The irony is that although Reid was notably absent from critical scholarship in the 1980s and early 1990s, the work that emerged in the later 1990s and 2000s on Irish theater, almost without exception designated her as the very thing that eluded her earlier—a “Troubles” playwright. A designation that, I believ...