Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Traditionally, Northern Ireland has been the forgotten branch of British and Irish theatre, fully integrated neither into the Irish Republic's theatrical scene (developed as a way of investigating and shaping Irish culture) nor into the British theatrical scene (which seldom returns the gaze from the ‘province’ of Northern Ireland). When playwrights began to respond to the ‘Troubles’ which re-emerged in 1968, however, it was no longer possible to forget the region or its increasingly compelling theatre. The Troubles were a painful conjunction of cultural, economic, political and social forces, and plays dealing with them often reach well beyond the provincial to touch basic issues of human conflict and freedom. It was as though, to paraphrase Auden's poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, mad Ireland had hurt the writers into drama. As they sought to transform the hurt into effective drama, playwrights were forced to confront the relationship of literature and culture, and to discover ways of sufficiently distancing the subject of sectarian tension for their work to promote not further factionalism but genuine discussion. Various strategies were adopted, often simultaneously, to achieve perspective —humour, even-handedness and balanced character portrayals, for example. With surprising frequency, playwrights modelled cross-cultural understanding by creating sympathetic portraits of communities ... log in or subscribe to read full text