Playwright Martin Lynch was born into a dockworker’s family in Gilnahirk, Belfast in 1950, the middle child of thirteen (Figure ). The family moved to the Turf Lodge area of West Belfast in the early 1960s. Lynch left school at fifteen and worked as a cloth cutter until 1969, when he became an administrator for the Republican Clubs, an organisation that had been banned by the Stormont government in 1967. This street-level political involvement, combined with the influence of his storytelling father and his reading of Karl Marx and James Connolly, kindled his imagination and led to his first attempts at writing, in which he drew on his own experiences and those of his family. In 1976, Lynch helped to organise a community tour in Belfast of John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s polemical epic, The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), which was the first play he ever saw. The experience was transformative and gave him the impetus to write his own plays, the first of which, We Want Work, We Want Bread (1977), was performed at the Turf Lodge Fellowship Community Theatre, which Lynch co-founded in 1976. The play’s title derived from the rallying cry of those who took part in the Belfast Outdoor Relief strike of 1932, when, exceptionally, unemployed Protestant and Catholic workers came together to protest against the meagre payments available to those who sought additional financial assistance. This debut was followed by four more Fellowship-produced plays – Is There Life Before Death? (1978), They’re Taking Down the Barricades (1979), A Roof Under Our Heads (1980) and What About Your Ma, Is Your Da Still Workin’? (1981) – in which the socio-economic and structural inequalities of Belfast’s working-class communities were dissected. Thus began Lynch’s career-long project of constructing, through naturalistic drama, a portrait of the deprivation, humour and resilience of the North’s disenfranchised population, whose stories he dramatises in order to reflect, deepen and change a culture’s understanding of itself.
Figure 1. Martin Lynch speaking at a community arts showcase event, Belfast, November 2013. Photo: Liam Harte.
Lynch’s triple adherence to a non-sectarian socialist agenda, the retrieval of neglected communal histories and the values and methodologies of community-based drama led him to write some of the most popular and provocative plays to come out of Northern Ireland during the 1980s and 1990s. Marked by spontaneity, immediacy and vernacular energy, the best of these works prize open the carapace of orange and green politics and plunge the viewer into a world where the choices and dilemmas of ordinary people defy any set of fixed dogmas. Pre-eminent among these works are the dialogue-driven Dockers (1981), a play about class, sectarianism and trade union tensions among dockworkers and casual labourers in the Sailortown district of Belfast in 1962; The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty (1982), a trenchant depiction of police brutality in Northern Ireland, in which Lynch drew on his experiences of being detained for left-wing political activism in places such as the infamous Castlereagh interrogation centre in East Belfast; and Pictures of Tomorrow (1994), a sober examination of the themes of political disillusionment, ageing and regret, the action of which moves between 1990s London and the Spanish Civil War. All three premiered at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, where Lynch served as playwright-in-residence in the early 1980s. Other plays of his that opened at the Lyric include Castles in the Air (1983), a reworked version of A Roof Under Our Heads, which explores the repercussions of inadequate public housing and the insidious effects of domestic violence, and Minstrel Boys (1985), which is set in West Belfast during the tense months of the 1981 H-Block hunger strikes, which Lynch himself did not support.
The early 1980s also marked the beginning of Lynch’s collaborative working relationship with Marie Jones, a Belfast-born actress and playwright from a working-class Protestant background and co-founder of the Charabanc Theatre Company, where she was writer-in-residence from 1983 to 1990. The first fruit of their creative partnership was Lay Up Your Ends (1983), a dramatic recreation of the strike by female millworkers in Belfast in 1911, which toured community centres, housing estates and theatrical venues on both sides of the Irish border. Sixteen years later they devised their most innovative project, The Wedding Community Play (1999), an immersive site-specific drama that brought together community theatre groups from East and West Belfast to tell the story of a marriage between a young Protestant and a young Catholic.
Lynch’s plays have been produced all over Ireland, the UK and Europe. They have also toured to the USA, where a production of Dockers was nominated for a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award in 2006. He has contributed works to a range of independent and community theatre companies, including Ricochets (1982) for the Ulster Youth Theatre and Stone Chair (1989), an ambitious community play based on the people of East Belfast’s memories of the 1941 Blitz. Lynch has also written plays for BBC Radio, including Needles and Pins (1997) and Jamesy Baker (1990), which was nominated for a Sony Award. He co-wrote the screenplay for the Sam Goldwyn film, A Prayer For The Dying (1987), based on a novel by Jack Higgins. From 1985 to 1988 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Ulster, and in the 1990s he served as the founding chair of Northern Ireland’s Community Arts Forum, during which time he led a campaign to have community arts valued, recognised and properly funded.
In 2002, Lynch marked the inception of his not-for-profit theatre production company, Green Shoot Productions, with The Belfast Carmen, co-authored with Mark Dougherty, and followed it with the hugely popular black comedy, The History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to My Da) (2003), a collaboration with Conor Grimes and Alan McKee. Lynch’s role as producer includes Owen McCafferty’s debut play, Winners, Losers and Non-Runners (1992), at the MAC Theatre in Belfast; Graham Reid’s Lengthening Shadows (1995) at the Lyric; a revival of Marie Jones’s A Night in November in 2007; and Playing For Time by William Mitchell, which was staged in Belfast’s Titanic quarter.
As a playwright, Lynch’s increasing preoccupation with drawing on his own and others’ memories of conflict and war is reflected in Holding Hands At Paschendale (2006) and Meeting at Menin Gate (2013), both of which are set against the backdrop of the First World War, and Chronicles Of Long Kesh (2009), which explores the effects of life in the Maze/Long Kesh prison on inmates, prison officers, welfare workers and their families between 1971 and 2000. His most recent production,1932: The People of Gallagher Street (2016), co-written with Gary Mitchell, revisits the workers’ strike that inspired Lynch’s first foray into playwriting four decades earlier.
I first met Martin Lynch in Belfast in July 2013 to discuss a prospective theatrical project based on my 2009 study, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001. What I had in mind was a reworking of the autobiographical narratives in the book into a drama that would jolt the sensibilities of British and Irish audiences and contribute to a reappraisal of the meaning of migration in the public consciousness, using the history of Irish emigration to Britain as a case study. Lynch responded positively to my ideas and our subsequent discussions helped me to clarify my thinking. In the months that followed, I fleshed out my proposal for a project that would harness the capacity of research-based theatre to contest reductive views of the Irish in Britain and provide a focal point for the comparative consideration of historical Irish experiences of emigration with more recent ones, in light of a fresh exodus of (mainly young) people from Ireland in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008.
In the summer of 2014, our collaboration began in earnest, made possible by a grant award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L014904/1). The two-act play that resulted, My English Tongue, My Irish Heart, follows the progress of a young Irish couple, university graduates Susan and Gary, who move to Manchester in the early 2000s and start a family there. The dramatisation of their negotiation of the losses and gains of emigration is interwoven with recreations of the experiences of others who came before them, thus setting up a dialogue between historical and contemporary narratives of Irishness in Britain. The play was toured to cultural and community centres in Belfast, Donegal, Leitrim, Mayo, Kerry, Manchester and London by Green Shoot Productions in May 2015. The tour was accompanied by an education and outreach programme in three venues: the Central Library in Belfast, the Linenhall Centre in Castlebar, Co. Mayo and the Irish World Heritage Centre in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. A series of creative writing workshops were held in each of these locations over a six-week period, involving aspirant and experienced local writers. The workshops were facilitated by three accomplished writers – poets Moyra Donaldson (Belfast) and John McAuliffe (Manchester), and novelist and short story writer Mike McCormack (Castlebar) – each of whom enabled the participants to put narrative form on their perceptions, memories and experiences of emigration and return. I subsequently edited a selection of the poems, short stories and reflective essays that emerged from these workshops for publication in an anthology entitled Something About Home: New Writing on Migration and Belonging (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2017).
The following interview is based on a series of recorded conversations and email exchanges between Martin Lynch and myself that took place in April and May 2015, when My English Tongue, My Irish Heart was in rehearsal and on tour (Figure ).
Figure 2. The cast of My English Tongue, My Irish Heart by Martin Lynch. Back row, left to right: Keith Singleton, Cillian O’Dee, Ross Anderson-Doherty. Front row: Margaret McAuliffe, Kerri Quinn. Photo: Ruth Gonsalves Moore.
What first sparked your interest in writing? Was there a specific personal, social or political factor that gave you the impetus to write?
From around about the age of sixteen or seventeen I started writing poetry. It was published regularly in the Readers’ page of the weekly Belfast Cityweek newspaper. When I was around nineteen, I wrote down the idea for a play and a couple of scenes about my experiences of summer work packing tomatoes in Guernsey. The idea that I could do this, I think, was influenced by sketches I had seen performed every year at the Newsboys Youth Club in York Street when I was growing up. The idea of writing characters and the dialogue they would say seemed to me to be doable, as opposed to, say, writing in prose for short story or novel form. I never ever tried to do this. I have no idea why I was attracted to one and not the other.
Later, in the mid-1970s when I was about twenty-five, I saw a play, The Non-Stop Connolly Show by Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden, in my local social club in Turf Lodge estate, West Belfast and it blew me away. Shortly after this, I went to the Lyric Theatre for the first time to see We Do It For Love by Patrick Galvin. This too blew me away. The idea of theatre was very attractive to me. I also felt coming down the stairs of the Lyric that I had more to say than was in that play. I resolved to write a play of my own. I saw the theatre as a great way to do two things: tell stories that will make people laugh, cry, etcetera, and use the stage as an opportunity to attract people to the cause of a thirty-two county workers’ and small farmers’ republic. I’ve yet to meet a small farmer. They’re all big bastards.
Why did you choose to write plays rather than novels or journalism?
I just seemed to naturally gravitate towards scenes and dialogue. Probably because I knew I could write dialogue because it was just a matter of writing down how people spoke. I probably also felt that my prose writing wasn’t good, was awkward. I didn’t feel I was any good at English in school. Having not been the best attender and having left school at fifteen, I still wasn’t sure what a noun or a pronoun was. Mind you, I have written a novel since which has been sitting in the drawer at home for over ten years.
Do you see yourself as part of any particular playwriting tradition, Irish or otherwise?
I wrote my first play at the age of twenty-five after I had seen just two plays. I knew feck all about feck all. When I was appointed resident playwright at the Lyric Theatre in 1980, and board member Pearse O’Malley mentioned Chekhov, I thought he was talking about a member of the Russian Politburo. When he referred to Ibsen, I thought I’d heard a jockey of that name somewhere. I had to educate myself fast. Like any subject I turn to, I devoured everything about the theatre – plays, playwrights, styles, traditions, history and so on. I soon found that my style of writing fitted into the thread of Irish writing represented by Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan. At least, that’s what several commentators began to write about me. I was more than happy with that.
But what I also discovered is that Irish writers from working-class backgrounds uniquely combine and interweave tragedy and comedy in a way that isn’t that common in other countries. The English, for instance, can’t cope with a funny line in a tragic scene. Irish writers do it all the time. If I’m in any tradition, it’s the tradition of community as opposed to self. My attention is drawn to how we work and interact as a community rather than what the preoccupations of the individual are. All plays are a blend of both, of course, but it’s where the balance lies that determines what type of play it is.
From your earliest play, We Want Work, We Want Bread (1976), you have been a community playwright who writes about, and for, the people, places and histories you know best. What, in your view, is the purpose and value of community theatre?
For me it wasn’t about theory or strategy or working out what kind of theatre I should write. It was a very straightforward case of writing the lifestyle, identity, speech and culture of the community around me, and making sure I reflected that pretty accurately. Later, when I began to assess the purpose of community theatre or theatre that connects into communities, it was really to reaffirm that what I had started out doing in Turf Lodge in 1976 was pretty much on the money. Stories that people could connect into and identify with. A mixture of conflict, heartbreak, humour, politics and song. The main difference between 1976 and now is that I’m not driven to write plays as political manifestos. I think I still write plays that give a voice to people or communities who don’t often get heard. I like to think I’ve still got a strong social conscience. Beyond that, I am absolutely convinced – from many years of practice – that theatre is a special way to invite people into considering ideas, notions and views that they might not have previously allowed themselves to consider. The theatre provides a great neutral environment for people to speak. For me, if theatre doesn’t reach all strata of society it is wasted – and wrong.
As you’ve already mentioned, in the early 1980s, around the time that your breakthrough work Dockers was first performed, you were adopted by the Northern Ireland theatre establishment and became resident playwright at the Lyric in Belfast. Did this lead to any tensions between, on the one hand, your working-class politics and community theatre loyalties and, on the other, your new middle-class milieu and the demands of professional theatre?
Not too much at the time. I was immediately aware of the two very different landscapes I was moving between. You couldn’t not be. I was living in Turf Lodge in the heart of the Troubles and leaving there to get two buses to cross town to the leafy suburbs of South Belfast. The journey alone told you everything. I remember one of my aims at the time was that no matter how nice these people were going to be to me, no matter how sparkling clean the toilets were, no matter how seldom I heard anybody in the Lyric swearing, I was still going to write about my life and the community I came from, warts and all. Of course, I didn’t regard it as warts, I believed it to be the “colour”, the poetry, the very reason my world would be attractive to those outside it. What the Lyric gave me, in return, was the sense of professional theatre. They did it better than what we had been doing in Turf Lodge and I was highly impressed. I wanted that quality for Turf Lodge and any other theatre I was going to do from then on.
Your plays are renowned for their humour and wit, and often make extensive and pointed use of comedy and song when dealing with weighty or controversial topics. How important are these elements to your creative practice?
At a deep personal level, I don’t think I would be a writer, or a playwright, if I wasn’t able to write humour and articulate life through song. That’s just the way I am. I believe life can be tough enough without living with your head up your arse twenty-four hours a day. This is fundamental to me. However, neither would I be a writer or a playwright if it was only about comedy and song. That would be a complete waste to me. The idea is obviously to combine them both. The Irish tradition I talked about earlier – writing conflict, comedy, ideas, singing, etcetera, cheek by jowl – this works for me, and I believe for audiences, for another important reason. People who don’t study literature or philosophy as a matter of course and who spend the week working hard, rearing a family, etcetera, very often don’t want to be lectured to or spoken at when they go out for a night. Therefore, when you present a play that is a dry treatise about the intricate workings of the Large Hadron Collider, for instance, you might find box office sales at the lower end. On the other hand, if you were to throw a Joxer Daly or a Yosser Hughes into the mix, you will get more people’s attention than otherwise would have been the case. I’m aware that I’m generalising hugely here but I hope you get the point.
Yes, I do. Staying with the themes of style and method for a moment, much of your work is notable for its use of documentary styles and naturalistic techniques, to the point where you have often used members of the local community in your plays. How has your approach to the craft of playwriting changed since you first started writing in the 1970s?
I think there are two important areas here. The first one is the area around the connection to local communities or audiences. Yes, I still hold very strongly to this. Since most of my stories and themes emerge from working-class communities, I work hard to make sure there is a strong strand in my work that is authentic, recognisable and of great concern to people from those communities. The second area is around the notion of what I think plays are for. When I started out, and for most of the 1980s, I thought I was writing a play to tell a story and advance a set of politics while doing so. My position in this area has changed radically. I no longer write plays with any single set of politics. The world is made up of a million ideas and views. Nowadays, I write a play to tell a story and present the views of all characters in the play. Essentially, I try to write plays about the human experience and whatever that throws up. My own experience just happens to be working class.
It has been said of your work that it probes the mythologies that have justified and perpetuated political violence in Northern Ireland. Has the cessation of the Troubles affected how and why you write, and if so, in what way?
When I was a kid growing up, the stuff I heard around me, both in the home and elsewhere, placed the use of violence to achieve a united Ireland alongside the need to take a drink of water. It was completely normal, legitimate and had to be done. By the late 1970s, two things had happened. One, by joining the Official IRA, I had engaged in violence myself and came to know the degradation and besmirching of oneself as a result. Two, through my own efforts to educate myself and see the world beyond the confines of my own upbringing, I came to the view that the use of violence for political objectives is utterly wrong. In my writing of plays such as Pictures Of Tomorrow, about the Irish involvement in the Spanish Civil War, I directly confronted my old self and perhaps wiped myself clean of those views – and mistakes. Obviously, now that there is much less violence in my community I don’t feel the need to address it so consistently.
Would you still describe yourself as a political playwright?
Yes, I would. As stated earlier, I’m still much more interested in writing about how we as communities organise our lives – and that is politics – as opposed to how the individual internalises and copes.
Would you say that there is a particular concern or set of concerns that underpins your dramatic work as a whole or does it vary with each play?
Over the years, a lot of my plays have been about a person, or people, or a situation where I have been moved emotionally. It all comes down to emotion really. Brecht suggested that emotion should be taken out of the theatre. How wrong he was about that! Emotion is at the centre of all theatre. When I find a story where something is very wrong, that’s usually a story I want to tackle. I want to air those wrongs. And of course, the great thing about writing plays is that it’s usually good, decent men and women who inflict those wrongs, so you have all the ingredients for a strong story.
Since setting up Green Shoot Productions in 2002, you have produced and directed a number of highly successful plays that have toured nationally and internationally. Several of these productions have been accompanied by ambitious education and outreach programmes. Why are such programmes important to you and your company?
First and foremost, it’s about creating points of access. I love the theatre and I want everybody else to love it. I also know that theatre provides a fantastically neutral environment where there are no limits to the use of imagination in the pursuit of any kind of idea whatsoever. Again, I want as many people as possible to have this opportunity. Therefore, I think the work we do in communities is vital in creating access for people who most likely would never come across that window if we didn’t provide it.
You yourself have been a thoroughly rooted writer, one who, as far as I know, has never lived anywhere other than your native Belfast. What attracted you to a project based on a book about the Irish migrant experience in Britain?
Several compelling reasons. I come from the island of Ireland and Ireland is right up there near the top of the leaderboard when it comes to consistently haemorrhaging its own citizens. Emigration hurts me. I have travelled enough to see Irish men and women toiling – in London, Manchester, Sydney, New York, Chicago, San Francisco – to know the deep malaise, sadness and dysfunction enforced emigration brings to many. I also worked in Manchester as a teenager and found it a powerful experience. I spent four months in early 1969 in Manchester with two mates from York Street in Belfast, but it wasn’t emigration as we know it. It was a big adventure. A bit of craic. We left good jobs in Belfast – Jennings as a heating engineer, Kelly as a plumber and myself as a cloth cutter. All young apprentice tradesmen – or boys, to be more accurate. But we did experience some of the standard experiences that all immigrants go through on arriving in a strange, foreign country.
Firstly, we were shocked to quickly realise that our speech wasn’t being recognised by the people in this strange city. Within a week we found ourselves trying to pronounce words differently in order to do the most basic of things, like buying a newspaper and a sausage roll at lunchtime or telling the bus conductor where you were going. And worst of all, when you asked a nice Mancunian girl if you could leave her home, she answered by telling you that she worked in a hospital, having completely misunderstood what you had said. Grrrr.
Then you find yourself living in a very large city and not knowing one single street from another, so straight away you’re back to the accent problem again because you had to constantly ask people where such-and-such was and they looked at you as though you were speaking Swahili. Then we had another significant problem. Our local bar on the Stockport Road was inhabited almost entirely by people from the Republic of Ireland and they completely ignored us. No welcome whatsoever. We found our names mysteriously wiped off the blackboard listing those who wanted to play a game of darts. We didn’t know whether it was because we were strangers or because we were from Belfast. On top of that, next door to us lived a large West Indian family – our first time ever seeing, hearing and talking to black people.
So when you first told me the gist of your idea for a play, I lay in bed that night going over the detail of those months in Manchester all those years ago. As it turns out, those were my first days of research for the writing of a play about Irish emigration forty-six years later. And the knowledge that we were doing a play about emigration that would be performed in venues where emigrants and their families would be in attendance fitted perfectly with the Green Shoot remit.
Did this research-based project present you with any particular artistic challenges?
When you first approached me with the idea for a play and gave me your book, my reaction was, I don’t want to leave it as an academic process, I want to bring it alive, and I thought the process of drama would do that. But then you have over sixty stories, from W. B. Yeats back to obscure peasant people from the sixteenth century. A wide range of people. As a playwright it presented huge problems because it’s nearly impossible to convey that set of stories on one stage. So the first big challenge was the nature of the book. I had to do a lot of walking around Belfast and I spent a month in Lanzarote in a flat on my own. That was a very creative time. A lot of walks along the beach, working out what we had to do, then meeting with you about three times during that period to work through that problem. In terms of the stories themselves, I had to shake them into something lively and energetic. Some were verbatim, beautiful stories. Some great phrases like “a long dark crocodile of people” getting off the boat – a beautiful image of a chain of Irish emigrants. A powerful image. We managed to weave these in.
I’m in my sixties now and I wrote my first play in my twenties. Each play you write is different in structure and style. With this play, because of the range of characters we covered, the canvas was so big, I had to work very hard and dig deep into my creative side to find how to do it. I remember not having a style for quite a while, for six months. Is it going to feature characters sat in a mine in Wales telling stories or in a cottage in Mayo? I was wrestling with all of that.
I think two things happened that helped. You and I went to see a play in the round in the Royal Exchange in Manchester – Billy Liar. I’ve seen plenty of pays in the round but that one may have had an influence. I also saw a play in Belfast about people killed by the British Army in the seventies. They had a ramp on the stage and I realised that’s what I wanted for our play – a stage with a ramp, and actors playing multiple roles. Then we had to think about costumes. We had a costume designer and spent hundreds of pounds on period dress. In the dress rehearsal, I had the idea of using hats to differentiate characters. After about a week I just said, fuck it, no more costumes at all, just give the actors dark clothes and soft shoes so they aren’t banging around. They had hard shoes and we couldn’t hear a word. So the creative process I went through was a great learning curve as a director and writer, which enriches me and the production as well (Figure ).
Figure 3. Kerri Quinn and Cillian O’Dee during rehearsals for My English Tongue, My Irish Heart by Martin Lynch, Belfast, April 2015. Photo: Ruth Gonsalves Moore.
Did anything about audiences’ reactions to My English Tongue, My Irish Heart surprise you? Did you notice differences in how people reacted to it in the different locations the tour visited?
As a playwright, you never know if people are doing to come and then leave after ten minutes. You never know how they will react. I work on emotions, the opposite to Brecht, taking emotion out of theatre. You aren’t in a constructed fantasy – I disagree with all that. I think you have to create an emotional thread between the audience through telling stories. Get them wrapped up in the story and keep them there, emotionally overwhelm them so they’re involved. This one was tricky but we got a powerful audience reaction. The feedback has been fantastic. I got an email out of the blue, from a man in Donegal. He just says the play hit me between the eyes. This is what I went through. My kids went away. The play was powerful for me. A big long email. We’ve had loads of stories like that. I had an audience member in London crying and telling me his story. Those kind of responses were really across the board. The third-generation kids in London watched the play and loved it. The Irish connection has gone through those generations, whereas in Belfast it wasn’t so strong. Emigration is not such a big part of the industrial North’s story. Down the west coast of Ireland, we had returning emigrants coming to see the play. But the biggest reaction was in Manchester and London. Those were the audiences that were most moved by it, who were emotionally moved.
Has working on this collaborative project changed or modified your practice as a playwright? Have you done anything differently in terms of form, style or characterisation, for example?
Not really. I have worked on, and indeed sought out, many collaborations over the years, so I have a very good idea of what comes with the territory. Some of it’s not so good – reaching agreement on every single issue can be difficult and takes up a lot of time. But the advantages of having other talents, energies, viewpoints, resources and so on alongside mine are also very enriching, rewarding and usually educational.
Has working on this project altered your views on emigration and its effects?
Well, it focused my attention on emigration of the unforced kind. That is, those who make a rational choice that they would like to live in another country. They are not forced out because the ten acres won’t provide jobs for all the sons. An interesting theme in your book is around the historical figures who, through emigration, made a very good life for themselves and their families abroad.
Your first play, which I’ve already mentioned, took its title from the slogan used by the hunger marchers at the time of the Outdoor Relief strike in 1932, when Protestant and Catholic workers briefly came together to protest in solidarity. Your next project, 1932: The People of Gallagher Street, returns to this same topic and period. Why revisit this event now?
As usual, my first criteria is that it’s a great story. In June of 1932, Catholics and Protestants were engaging in serious communal violence over Protestant attacks on trains taking Catholics to the World Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. In July, there was more communal violence when Orange parades were attacked in York Street. Then, incredibly, in October, both communities came together to engage in a six-week long struggle to protest savage living payments for working people. This became known as the Outdoor Relief struggle. I’m going for this play now because I detest the fact that Catholics and Protestants in Belfast are now more divided and living in separate areas than at any time in its existence. If you were to walk down Royal Avenue today and do a quick poll, nobody under the age of seventy will have even heard about this amazing event. Perhaps, just perhaps, our next play might bring it to the city’s attention.
I hope that proves to be the case. Thank you for your time, Martin, and for these insights into your creative practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was enabled by a Follow-on Funding Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/L014904/1].
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