Fortnight Publications Ltd.

A Better Replay This TimeAuthor(s): Angela WilcoxSource: Fortnight, No. 278 (Nov., 1989), p. 32Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25552147 .

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A better Replay this time

ANGELA WILCOX finds progress in a theatre-in

education venture

REPLAY LAUNCHED its second programme for schools last month, with another play by

Marie Jones?It's a Waste of Time, Tracey?

putting ecological issues into a local context.

Unusually, it is supported by the Depart ment of Education. After years of turning its

face against funding theatre-in-education, it

was probably inevitable that when the depart ment came to fund such a project it should be

not as educationally desirable in its own right but as part of one of the dislocated bits of

tinkering which has replaced coherent policy on so many fronts under this government?in this case the 'education for mutual understand

ing' programme. Still, since a recent attempt to set up a TIE

company in the north of the province resorted?

rather imaginatively?to an application to the

Department of Economic Development under

a small business scheme, one ought to be re

lieved that Replay is being sponsored by a

department in which educational, rather than

wholly monetary, values might yet linger. It is to be hoped that the department will

exercise its patronage with an eye to the longer term and to the development of a company

which, still struggling to establish itself, has

shown determination and a willingness to learn.

Understandably, the Replay production shows some of the problems of developing TIE

in a region which lacks that tradition. It has

been unable to keep the same actors over the

large, unfunded gap between this and the ear

lier production. TIE actors require not only the

skills of performance, but those of the teacher

or youth leader, and these take time to develop and use with confidence.

An additional problem is the pressure for

scripts of immediate 'relevance' to the North

ern Ireland context. This may force the com

pany to reinvent the wheel, instead of making use of the body of TIE material elsewhere.

Nevertheless, there are signs of progress in

this production. The staging is more imagina tive, and better adapted to its audience and to

performance in school halls (though sets and

props could be pared back still further). And a

tendency to use music too readily to 'entertain'

has given way to more sparing use of song. The company's artistic director, Brenda

Winter, has worked hard between productions

establishing contacts with other companies, and has begun a promising relationship with

TEAM, the Dublin-based TIE company (an

initiative which has led to the direction of this

play by TEAM's Vince Dempsey). The rela

tionship should be to the benefit of both com

panies and their audiences?it is certainly rele

vant to 'mutual understanding'. TIE can be a powerful medium to provoke

thought and affect feelings. With the right

support and encouragement, Replay ought to

make a real contribution to DENI's project.

Ufifc Mark Lieberman

PERSONALLY SPEAKING

I CAN'T SPEAK for any of my fellow Bel

fastmaniacs?those Yanks, Brits. Frenchmen/

women. Orientals, Aussies, even the odd 'Irish'

citizen?who constitute what I call the 'un

derground population' of the Sparta-of-the north. But for me, returning to Belfast?as I

have just done for the fourth time in as many

years?is always accompanied by a tremen

dous feeling of relief: compare the nightmar ish atmosphere of New York's JFK airport

with the civility of Aldergrove, and you will

begin to see what I mean straightaway. Needless to say. friends, family and col

leagues think I'm totally mad. One even had

the audacity recently to quote the dreaded

Mailer: "Once a philospher?twice a per vert!" What does that make me, then, Nor

man? And what does it make my fellow

American, who's spent the last 10 years here?

Or the lady novelist, also American, who's

just begun her third? Or the mademoiselle

whom I encountered in the smoky din of?

you've guessed it?Lavery's, hunched over a

Guinness, and who explained to me that this

was her second year teaching the privileged lasses of Bangor to parler properly?

Any one of that coterie who choose to

spend more than a fortnight here can back me

up on this: without even formally surveying them, I'm certain that their sweethearts-back

home, their mums-and-dads, and their mates

in Nimes, or in Boston, or in Osaka also

wonder: "Belfast?" It'scontagious, this'bash

ing' that follows nearly automatically upon

hearing the word 'Belfast'?or'Northern Ire

land'. I almost found myself guilty of it just last week with the aforementioned madem

oiselle, coming dangerously close to asking her the all-too-obvious question: 'What's a

nice girl like you doing in a place like this?'...

And not meaning Lavery's, either!

Here's my excuse: I write about politics, and this is the only place I've found where

everything is sufficiently 'political', where

there's almost no gap between Word and

Deed. Or, I should say, between Word and

Result. Where a person's political word is

effective?sometimes dreadfully so?to a

degree I have not found, let us say, in the Bush

regency. Can you imagine how long Vice

President Quayle would last in the rough-and tumble of a Belfast City Council meeting?

Politics hereabouts may be a little short on

the niceties, lacking the 'veneer' as it were,

but it certainly isn't short on passion?which is what politics ought to be about. This place is not only the 'factory of grievances', in Mr

Buckland's immortal phrase. The northern

polity is also the finest little laboratory in the

western world, a place where, if you learn?as

I have finally learned, I think?to shut your mouth and listen, and if you bring to that

listening a humility?a sufficiently *Aw,

shucks ..." naivete, whether real or simu

lated?you can actually see the Machine, the

Political Machine, at work. You see it as it

ponderously, sometimes ludicrously and

sometimes fatally ensnares and devours yet another victim?today a loyalist, tomorrow a

republican?in its massive gears. Politics red

in-tooth-and-claw, Sparta-style. I am not only referring to deaths by vio

lence. In addition to the thousands of corpses, the landscape of Ulster is littered with the

political 'living dead': the oligarch of the 60s

who fell before the onslaught of the serfs... the

former man-of-the-people now safely en

sconced among his Peers ... the once-mighty warlords who, in their dotage, can't even get arrested.

Before I get called on it, let me hasten to

say that what I am describing as the conflu

ence of political Word and Deed does not

exclude chicanery, duplicity, doublethink (and

-speak), any more than those attributes of

political life are excluded from discourse

anywhere: every day some pronouncement by one or other of the Local Hacks provides a

good laugh with my morning tea. But on

another level, the level on which I find myself

functioning, both as an American fly-on-the wall and as a bringer-of-the-message to my

countrymen, let me add that in all the time I've

'covered' this place, I've only been lied-to?

to my knowledge, anyway!?once. And I

haven't forgotten, or forgiven the fellow yet: I'm at least that Irish. 'His day will come ...'

Invariably, I have been afforded easy and

courteous 'access' on both sides of the Divide,

sometimes during the same day, to people who have been generous with their time, their

counsel, their policy papers. The reason's

simple. See, I am not alone in realising that, in

the north, 'Everything's political ...' The

spokespersons on the Falls and the New

townards roads, the idealistic community activists in the Shankill and in Ballymurphy, the Queen's lecturer and the school-leaver

who serves me my fry all know, every one of

them, that beneath the' Belfast's buzzing!' ca

nard, beneath Britain's Castle Court, beneath

the posh new French eatery, beneath Pip's ...

lies the Abyss. And not all that far beneath,

either.

Neither they nor I have accepted the exis

tence of an acceptable level of violence, or of

an accepted level of destabilisation?which,

to my mind, is equally ominous. Which is why

they/I talk ... on, and on. And why they/I

publish ... on, and on. It's all in aid of building

a slightly thicker foundation: a fire-proof foundation between themselves?myself? and the Abyss. Me, I'm glad to be on the

worksite yet again, charting the progress.

32 November Fortnight

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