07.12.1995

Heroic struggle turned to self-blame

Shuttle by Joseph Crilly at the Red Room October Song by Andrew Hinds at the Orange Tree

ALMOST the moment the Six Counties ceasefire began art columnists started to look for signs of a new culture, a new identity and a new dialogue in art - just as it was demanded in the political arena.

Two new plays in London, October Song at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, and Shuttle, at the recently opened Red Room theatre for new writing in Kentish Town, are examples. They display much about the way the republican struggle is already being rewritten in popular bourgeois culture and in sections of the Six Counties population itself.

Both plays give engaging performances and both use the only too familiar theme of family breakdown as a metaphor for the war situation in the north of Ireland. The families depicted seem equally unable to comprehend it and both have a skeleton in the cupboard and an outcast.

But like the fictional families the playwrights seem totally at a loss to understand the war. Both seem quite literally in pain, in a desperate search for a reconciliation after years of the ‘troubles’, which to them represent only a complete waste of time and life.

The IRA prisoner of war, the outcast of the family in Shuttle, is told: “If you’re out for attention, you have to have something worth saying.” In October Song the young father has hope that he has not fed his children “with all the crap we were fed with”.

The characters in both are “screaming with helplessness and guilt” and certain that “all we have to blame is ourselves”. The heroic and bitter battle fought by revolutionaries against the oppression of the British state is not a memory on which a new imperialist peace can thrive.

In both plays one character has a desperate and transparently pathetic plan to bring the family, if not the warring factions, together. Both plans are doomed to failure.

Unless republicans build upon the revolutionary struggle and redirect it in the new situation, their lives will remain trapped in the oppression that is endemic in this society - in war or ‘peace’.

Art always represents a truth to one extent or another. The emphasis on repentance and self-blame being peddled by politicians and com-munity groups is gaining influence in the Six Counties. New plays on the north of Ireland are therefore well worth catching. It is up to revolution-aries to ensure that a working class agenda appears in the repertoire.

October Song runs until December 9. Now showing at the Red Room is The night before Christmas, a satirical look at life today by Anthony Neilson, writer of the award-winning Penetrator.

Helen Ellis