Unreconciled accounts? Screen and performing arts in post-conflict Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

In any post-conflict society, the work of creating an effective framework for truth and reconciliation is fraught with challenges that those in power will often seek to manage and manipulate. In this article we explore the critical role of the arts within the discourse of political reconciliation in contemporary Northern Ireland. Taking contemporary theatre and screen culture as our case-studies, we assess the extent to which these modes of cultural production create alternative spaces for dialogue and reconciliation in a dysfunctional post-conflict democracy, where the responsibility of political institutions and elites is failing to adequately address the rights of victims and survivors.

KEYWORDS:

• Reconciliation
• arts funding
• victims and survivors
• Northern Ireland
• screen
• theatre

Introduction

Unlike post-Apartheid South Africa, post-dictatorship Chile and Argentina, post-occupation East Timor, or even re-unified Germany, to name but a few: no statutory truth and reconciliation commission was established in Northern Ireland after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998 (McGarry, 2001, pp. 1–33). The lack of any formal commission to investigate the past has meant survivors and families have been forced to pursue protracted legal routes reliant on inquiries, inquests, civil suits, and criminal prosecutions. Amnesty International has criticized this piecemeal process, whereby “ineffective bodies currently tasked with dealing with the past have not proven equal to the task” (Hall, 2014, p. 1); with even one of the key architects of the GFA, former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, conceding the need for “a truth and reconciliation commission for Northern Ireland to address historical crimes on both sides […] modelled on South Africa’s post-apartheid experience” as something that would prove a “better approach than endless recriminations in court prosecutions” (AFP, 2021). This article compares the potential in contemporary screen and theatre production culture in Northern Ireland to disrupt the prevailing political discourse on reconciliation, a discourse that we believe subordinates the suffering and grievance of victims and survivors to the rhetorical, homogenising optimism of the “peace process”. In the years immediately after the signing of the GFA, which was internationally celebrated as a successful model of conflict transformation, it became clear that waging the peace would be fraught with difficulties as enduring enmities over the Agreement’s implementation ensured the initial euphoria which greeted its signing soon subsided. As the political institutions it inaugurated repeatedly collapsed over disagreements about paramilitary structures, police reform, parades, and the decommissioning of weapons – an issue that became especially urgent given the growth of dissident Republican groupings and increasing Loyalist alienation – it seemed that the ultimate legacy of the GFA had been one of old-fashioned pragmatism rather than new-fangled idealism.

As various commentators have pointed out, the much-vaunted “peace dividend” of the GFA never materialized for those who needed it most; with working-class communities that bore the brunt of the conflict benefiting least from the neoliberal regeneration of “Boom Town” Belfast (Coulter, 2019; Gosling, 2020; Knox, 2016). At the level of public discourse, voices sceptical of the “process” – but not peace – and concerned about some of the inherent design flaws of the Agreement, were dismissed as irrational cranks; their views invariably conflated with dissident republicanism which has remained committed to violence. The mainstream print and broadcast media was also accused of being complicit in protecting the “process” from troublesome questions that might otherwise expose its shortcomings, such as the dysfunctional application of the D’Hondt voting mechanism, which was ostensibly designed to obviate sectarian divisions but which ironically reinforced and enshrined them to produce a perpetually polarised “coalition of the unwilling”: a Sinn Féin-DUP duopoly compelled to share power in spite of their mutually incompatible manifestos (McLaughlin & Baker, 2010, pp. 17–34; Murtagh, 2021, pp. 148–156). Tom Luby, for example, excoriates the “bulk of the Irish media during the years of the peace process [for simply failing] to do its job, which is to dig out the truth and challenge those with the power […] no matter how uncomfortable or unsettling the end result. Instead, too many of them have become court jesters in a kingdom of deception” (Luby, 2005).

In contrast to the critical complacency of a media perceived by community activists as having failed to adequately interrogate the complexities of peace building in a society devoid of any consensus on the past, it has often fallen on the arts to address the difficult issues around “dealing with the past”: issues that the main political parties have still collectively failed to address (Rice & Taylor, 2020, pp. 11–18). The work of contemporary Northern Irish playwrights – Rosemary Jenkinson, Owen McCafferty, or Gary Mitchell, for example – challenges the hegemonic narrative that the success of the “peace process” is supposedly guaranteed by neoliberal economics, while a more subtle ironic attitude can also be discerned in the photography of figures like John Duncan, or Daniel Jewsbury’s video art, or in the poetry of a Sinéad Morrissey or Alan Gillis. In so doing, these and other artists have exposed the imaginative failure of both the British state and Northern Ireland’s new political elites to secure genuine reconciliation. Indeed, the very term “reconciliation” has become so over-used that it seems to function as little more than a vacant signifier of a “progress” that is purely economic and material; an accountant’s notion of reconciliation whereby peace equals prosperity and prosperity equals peace, where the mere maintenance of sectarian co-existence is heralded as a triumph of conflict transformation. The arts by their very nature should complicate expedient political narratives and economic orthodoxies, and in their expressive forms and creative practices they can show reconciliation to be a more complex and contested process than those versions that seek to assimilate or instrumentalise it in the form of staged handshakes and new shopping centres.

Northern Irish theatre has long played a perforce role in providing a civic space for staging the truth and rehearsing the (im)possibilities of reconciliation, with Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness productions amongst the most notable (and publicly funded) of these initiatives. Interestingly, over more than two decades, an important body of other work has also been produced in which victims encounter perpetrators in either contrived or coincidental circumstances, for example: Quietly (McCafferty, 2012); The Bomb (Dyer, 2005); A Cold House (Campbell & McKeown, 2003); Meeting at Menin Gate (Lynch, 2013), or Bag for Life (Bateman, 2016). Although all theatre is ghosted by the traces of previous performances, what makes such plays especially haunting is the fact that these fictional encounters are often shadowed by actual events, which – like the feature films, Five Minutes of Heaven (2009) or The Truth Commissioner (2016) – are fictional engagements with the aftermaths of real events and the experiences of real people.¹ As counterpoints to the Theatre of Witness project, Quietly and The Bomb will also be discussed in this article in terms of how they explore the complex and conflicting responses of victims who hold diametrically different views on reconciliation to reveal how truth recovery can lead to recrimination as much as reconciliation.

Documentary filmmakers have also set out to reveal the forgotten and concealed spaces created by Northern Ireland’s post-conflict culture. As a form or genre, documentary film naturally lends itself to testimony, investigation, and historical enquiry, as well as giving space and time for victims, survivors, and perpetrators to speak their truths to a potentially mass audience. As NI Screen stated in a 2018 strategy document: “the expansion of feature documentary […] has grown into a highly visible and buoyant category all its own” (NI Screen, 2018b, p. 37). However, and in contrast to the dramaturgically subjunctive mode mentioned above, documentary filmmakers have relied on an investigative and retrospective (indicative) mode in representing the politics of truth and reconciliation. In films such as The Disappeared (2013), No Stone Unturned (2017), Unquiet Graves (2018), ReMastered: The Miami Showband Massacre (2019), or even A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot (2017), actual historical atrocities that have remained un(re)solved and inadequately or disingenuously investigated by the state, provide the filmmakers with their content. However, when comparing the role of theatre and documentary filmmaking in filling the void left by the exigencies of political “progress”, it should also be noted that any simple drama/fiction versus documentary/factual dichotomy is problematic. Documentaries exist “after the fact” and are therefore allegorical to some degree, and especially when dealing with history regardless of their different production contexts and editorial priorities. Films such as No Stone Unturned or ReMastered are also documentaries about the present and exist primarily because of a crisis within the contemporary democratic process and should be understood within that context, and against the backdrop of a mainstream print and broadcast media disinclined towards critical depth or challenging the political management of a post-conflict society (McLaughlin & Baker, 2012, pp. 293–294).

Documentary filmmaking is a creative activity in which real -life narratives, testimonies, and observations are framed by an aesthetic that is always inherently ideological. They can no more offer “degree-zero” levels of realistic representation than any other expressive forms, and in many of the films mentioned above, archive news footage, contemporary interviews, photographs, and home video clips are combined with re-enactments, elaborate rostrum cinematography and animation, emotive music, voice-overs, and sound effects. In addressing the politics of memory, trauma, and identity in post-conflict Northern Ireland, some filmmakers have also readily integrated other artistic practices into their documentary mise en scène and subject matter. If the imaginary scenarios offered by contemporary Northern Irish theatre can reveal some of the more difficult and disturbing truths about political reconciliation, how effective is contemporary documentary film in addressing the politics of memory, trauma, and identity in Northern Ireland’s post-conflict society? How does its increasing deployment of intermedial and technologically sophisticated aesthetic strategies assist in representing the grievances of victims and survivors?

Moving images

The Life After (2018, Century/Marcie, 89 mins), Hear My Voice (2018, Fine Point, 23 mins), and Lost Lives (2019, DoubleBand, 93 mins) are recent examples of documentary films that directly address the complexities of post-conflict truth and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Commissioned by BBC Two, The Life After (re-titled, Troubles: The Life After for its network broadcast on 6th October, 2018) received over €80,000 in production loan funding from Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland (Screen Ireland, 2017); and according to the poet and novelist, Nick Laird (who is also the film’s principal screenwriter and associate producer): “[W]e got funding for it by making it into an arts show, so I wrote some linking lyrics and little poems based on [the victims and survivors’] testimonies for them to read to the camera” (Laird, 2019). Hear My Voice and Lost Lives were separately commissioned by BBC Northern Ireland and produced with funding from Northern Ireland Screen, which in its 2018–19 funding round contributed £40,000 to the production of Hear My Voice, and £150,000 to Lost Lives (Northern Ireland Screen, 2018a, p. 1).

It is perhaps surprising that significant production funding was provided by NI Screen for both Hear My Voice and Lost Lives. While its “partnership” with BBC NI remains a key factor in many of its co-funding decisions, NI Screen is an organisation synonymous with the doxa that there is a late-capitalist solution for every post-conflict problem. Since 2016, it has been core-funded through the region’s publicly-funded economic development agency, Invest NI, with its strategic priorities ultimately determined by the Department for the Economy (DfE) rather than the Department for Communities (DfC): a policy shift related to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s (ACNI) decision to “delegate the majority of [its] responsibility for the funding and development of Film and Television” to NI Screen (ACNI, 2014, pp. 2–3). Committed to an instrumental economic approach rather than a cultural one, NI Screen’s key mission is to “accelerate the development of a dynamic and sustainable screen industry and culture in Northern Ireland” (Northern Ireland Screen, 2018b, p. 7). The collateral impact of this policy is candidly acknowledged by NI Screen, which states that “independent film cannot be the key element of any economic development or sectoral development strategy” (Northern Ireland Screen, 2018b, p. 53); thereby leaving the independent film sector increasingly to fend for itself, a sector that elsewhere across Europe is the creative lifeblood of a healthy regional and national film industry.

From an enterprise and investment perspective, it may seem perverse to question the benefits to the regional and all-island economy of securing largescale international productions like Viking Destiny (2018, Saban Films), The Northman (2022, Universal), and major BBC television drama series like The Fall (2013-16), Line of Duty (2012–2021), or Hope Street (2021), not to mention major infrastructural investments such as the Belfast Harbour Studio development (NI Screen, 2020). However, in an important article focussing on the production of Game of Thrones, Phil Ramsey, Steve Baker, and Robert Porter have carefully elaborated how “NI Screen’s work is disproportionately skewed towards economic objectives, rather than its cultural and educational remit”. They also reasonably question “the ethics of providing £14.85 m of public funding to a company of the scale of HBO [itself a subsidiary of TimeWarner Inc.]”, and the extent to which the levels of economic impact and job creation associated with these productions are exaggerated (Ramsey et al., 2019, p. 583). Other observers might then wonder why NI Screen, given its commitment to economic development, is now inclined to funding independent documentaries addressing the politics of truth and reconciliation in a post-conflict society; a genre not known for its commercial return. Is support for these films influenced by the lack of a political agreement around establishing a statutory framework for truth and reconciliation? Is it an opportunity to distract from the reality that “cultural policy ‘success stories’ [such as NI Screen] cannot mask what are deep-rooted problems, further underlined by wider divisions within NI society” (Ramsey & Waterhouse-Bradley, 2018, p. 207)?

The Life After, Hear My Voice, and Lost Lives are expository-poetic documentaries that incorporate another artistic practice or cultural artefact into their subject matter: poetry by Laird; an exhibition of portraits by Colin Davidson; and an award-winning Troubles necrology, respectively. These films eschew conventionally constructed historical commentaries, even though each film extensively uses archive television news footage as part of its narrative framework. In each case, the filmmakers configure images and sounds associatively, in a style that contrasts with mainstream journalistic documentaries on the political history of Northern Ireland (for example, the BBC NI series, Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History (2019)), or indeed documentary features focussing on a particular personality or atrocity (for example, I, Dolours (2018, Maurice Sweeney, RTÉ), The Ballymurphy Precedent (2018, Callum Macrae, Dartmouth Films, 108 mins), or The Day Mountbatten Died (2019, Sam Collyns, Ronachan Films); films that while sharing the tendency in contemporary documentary practice towards visually innovative techniques and effects, invariably prioritise investigative content over an investigation of form. The Life After, Hear My Voice, and Lost Lives, are certainly more formally ambitious films in this regard, although that approach can also prove problematic as Agnès Varda, for example, commented in 2012, the modish prejudice that such documentaries cannot comprise entirely of witness testimonies has caused them “to be dressed up and inflated with a profusion of irrelevant devices” (Amado & Mourao, 2013, p. 230).

The Life After is structured around a series of reflections by individuals closely related to someone killed during the conflict, who are typically filmed speaking directly to the camera and framed in close-up. These testimonies are both sadly familiar and yet, defiantly singular: Colette O’Connor’s father, Sammy Devenny, was brutally assaulted – along with one of his daughters – by the RUC in 1969, and died soon afterwards from a related heart attack; Sharon Austin’s eighteen year-old brother, Winston Cross, was abducted, tortured for three days, and then “executed” along with his friend by the IRA (in a case of “mistaken identity”); Virtue Dixon’s daughter, Ruth, was killed in the 1982 INLA bombing of the Droppin’ Well Inn (her brother, Timothy, also features in the film); Marie Newton’s husband, and the father of their seven children, John Toland, was shot by the UDA in November 1976; and Linda and Pat Molloy’s eighteen year-old son, John, was attacked and fatally stabbed by a Loyalist gang in 1996. As the film points out in its end-title sequence, apart from the Droppin’ Well atrocity, no one has ever been charged for these crimes. With each of these testimonial accounts, segments of Laird’s poetry(read by Derry actor, Bronagh Gallagher), function as a tragic choral ode, accompanied by aestheticised images of sea and landscapes, as well as archive newsreel footage, photographs, and other visual metaphors signifying mourning and loss. In writing a poem version of each victim’s testimony which they themselves performed in person to camera, The Life After appears to offer audiences a “poetry of witness” akin to the “theatre of witness” methodology documented in Margo Harkin's film, The Far Side of Revenge (2012, Besom, 59 mins.) (Phelan, 2016, pp. 282–384).

The documentary short, Hear My Voice, is a cinematic reframing of artist Colin Davidson’s 2015 series of eighteen portraits of survivors, “Silent Testimony”. Although originally exhibited at the Ulster Museum, Byrne’s film was shot at a special exhibition in Riddel’s Warehouse, a four-storey former Victorian ironmongery works in central Belfast. In configuring its elegiac, requiem-like mood and mise en scène, Hear My Voice aims for a graceful, unobtrusive cinematographic style in which tracking and close shots merge with the textures and impressions in Davidson’s paintings, and are complemented by Brian Byrne’s Einaudi-esce score. Notably, Davidson appears prominently in the film, working and talking about the wider project and its provenance, punctuating the testimonies of the actual survivors whose eponymous "voices" give his images poignancy and importance.

Lost Lives is a more ambitious production than The Life After and Hear My Voice. It transposes into documentary film language some entries from the celebrated necrology of Troubles' victims, originally compiled and edited by David McKittrick and other journalists (McKittrick et al. 1999). Unlike other compilations (Flackes & Elliott, 1998; Sutton, 1994), Lost Lives provides more detail on the specific circumstances of each death, often with a carefully selected quotation from an interview or contemporaneous newspaper report. In terms of visual style, Hewitt and Laverty’s film seems to consciously draw on both Irish and international influences: contemporary video art installations (for example, Willie Doherty’s Ghost Story (2007, video installation, DVD, colour, sound, 15 mins); photography (for example, Paul Seawright’s 2009 Conflicting Account exhibition, and Donavan Wylie’s British Watchtowers (2006)), as well the “art cinema” of figures such as Peter Greenaway (Prospero’s Books, 1991, UK), or Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker, 1979, USSR). Interestingly, Lost Lives does resemble The Life After, and to a lesser extent, Hear My Voice, in its affinity with the “essay film” genre rather than more conventional documentary styles; a subgenre that has itself benefited from both the current popularity of historical documentaries on streaming and linear television, as well as the expressive possibilities now afforded by new post-production digital technologies. Typically, the essay film lends itself to a more experimental approach to the documentary form, one suited to the task of seeing history through personal testimonies and memories, while also existing as a “fourth estate” capable of criticising the “banality of news reporting and the inadequacy of the documentary genre tout court” (Alter, 2018, p. 193). Films, like theatre performances, are also ghosted by images and forms from other films and other cinemas, and in weaving its narrated “accounts” around a palimpsestic montage of images, sounds, and genres, Lost Lives reaches for a distinctively filmic mode of representing the shadow that falls between memory and history.

As examples of contemporary documentary films seeking to represent the experiences and grievances of victims and survivors, there is much in the subject and content of these films that is sincere, urgent, and moving. It is also reasonable to argue that such works can at times “give voice” to victims and survivors who have long been silenced by post-conflict political expediency, and that such filmmaking might even contribute to “reconciliation from below”. However, film – especiallydocumentaries – can also be a problematic medium in this respect, and without rehearsing various theoretical debates about its claims to social truth and ethnographic objectivity, it is worth reflecting on how filming the conflict “after the fact” can displace rather than disclose certain truths.

Although largely concerned with participatory rather than poetic modes, the work of Pooja Rangan, for example, offers a compelling critique of the “humanitarian impulse” at the heart of the contemporary documentary project, and it can be instructive to apply some aspects of her approach to this context (2017, pp. 1–16; Rangan et al., 2018, pp. 198–201). For example, whose interests are being served by associating the very legitimate grievances of victims and survivors and their right to truth with the production of formally sophisticated media forms predicated on a naïve notion of the documentary as an humanitarian, truthful filmic discourse? What “immediations” are at play in the production and distribution of these particular films? To what extent is “the urgent ethical imperative” of representing the grievances of victims and survivors compromised by the institutional practice of documentary filmmaking? Are the victims and survivors serving the filmmakers, the funding bodies, NI Screen, BBC, or RTE (qua the post-conflict polity) rather than vice versa, and who or what is really being “rehabilitated” by these productions?

In both The Life After and Hear My Voice, for example, the artist (a poet and a visual artist) and their art remains prominent throughout, and although the art form is clearly capturing in its language something of victims and survivors’ suffering, the filmmaking process inevitably mediates and re-frames that relationship, foregrounding the artists and their art at the expense of the experiences and memories of the victims and survivors. In the case of Hear My Voice, for example, how do we draw the line between documentary as a portrait of victims and survivors, and as a portrait of an artist? Furthermore, in focussing on the harrowing, deeply traumatic experiences of some real-life victims and survivors, do such documentaries risk decontextualising history by containing it within a narrative of personal and family tragedies, a narrative that can never be a substitute for an enquiry into the structural role of the those who managed, manipulated, and who have benefited from the conflict.

Related to this issue is the degree to which such documentaries might be complicit in the aestheticization of trauma; an issue debated extensively elsewhere in the visual arts (for example: Bennett, 2005; and Bal, 2007). Documentary representations of grief and suffering are not without potential in influencing social change, but they can also be parasitical on the suffering of others, with formulaic facial close-ups, cuts to “dead spaces”, and archive newsreel inserts, invariably combined with emotive music that ultimately engenders sentimentality, instead of responsibility. Lost Lives, for example, features a free flowing, seemingly random montage of images complemented by an eclectic (and at times, oppressive) musical score. Many of the “incidental” images in the film depict nature and the environment, redolent landscapes and derelict buildings, often in a gothic and expressionistic visual register that further risks decontextualizing the reality of the deaths and the violence. In “casting” well-known Northern Irish actors (local “stars”, so to speak) to provide their voice for each of its main segments, the film could be accused of silencing the very voices it seeks to express. Are these actors being actors, or actors being characters, or actors just being citizens? This is not to say films like Lost Lives should not be produced, nor that only documentary practices reliant on archival sources or testimonial subjects have greater ethical integrity, but to make the argument that when faced with the epistemologcial challenge of representing the unrepresentable, the “humanitarian documentary impulse” is ultimately inadequate. As with The Life After and Hear My Voice, the ethical directness of Lost Lives – the gravity of its concerns – is incompatible with its modish filmmaking technique, which is itself influenced by wider screen production, funding, and cultural factors that are indifferent to the troubling relationship between the fetishization of new screen technologies (“economic development”) and the aestheticization of trauma. All of which begs the question: in terms of the relationship between the arts and reconciliation, can theatre and the immediacy of live performance succeed where the documentary image can be found wanting?

Staging reconciliation

The theatre, as the most public and participatory of all the art forms, seems singularly suited to providing a shared space to rehearse the (im)possibilities of reconciliation in a society that remains deeply divided. Perhaps the theatre practice most closely connected with staging truth and reconciliation has been the Theatre of Witness programme in Derry, which has adopted a form of documentary or verbatim drama that uses the stage as a public platform for personal testimonies from a range of ex-combatants, victims and survivors, all of whom tell their own stories in person. The Theatre of Witness has produced several plays, with some themed in terms of exploring transgenerational trauma, women’s experiences, and those of soldiers and security forces, as well as child victims of the conflict. What collectively connects these plays is their reliance on non-professional performers, with each participant telling their own testimonial story: a profoundly affective aesthetic – albeit a problematic one – for the seductive illusion and aura of “authenticity” this produces. This form of testimonial drama draws on the live nature of theatre, on the experiential and affective registers of performance, so that audiences empathise with the stories and speakers on stage, regardless of their provenance or politics. They are then encouraged to engage with the cast – and the rest of the audience – in emotional post-show discussions that follow each performance, in what are often cathartic outpourings of collective memory as audiences extemporaneously open up about their own experiences in an improvised forum that serves as an exemplary model of civic dialogue.

Beyond being affected by these traumatic stories of loss and grief, audiences are also struck by the profound spectacle of reconciliation playing out before them; in the remarkable proxemics of police and paramilitaries from republican and loyalist sides sharing the stage together, along with victims of their violence. The ethics and aesthetics of this form of theatre are fraught, though this is less to do with the foregrounding of artists themselves (pace Davidson and Laird), nor is there an aestheticization of trauma through photographic or documentary mise en scène as the painful lived experience of each “actor” is palpable with every autobiographical performance, with individuals often struggling at different points of the show, even breaking down and comforting each other in unscripted moments as emotions overwhelm them. These plays also refused to contain – in both senses of the word – stories within a narrative of personal and family tragedy, but also questioned the role of the state authorities as well. Indeed, the Theatre of Witness’s pioneering model proliferated, even becoming part of public campaigns and activism of some victims’ groups who utilized the “testimony of memory […] in an attempt to gain justice or recognition for traumatic events that took place during the Troubles” (Linthicum, 2019, p. 28). Perhaps the most prominent of these was Blood Red Lines (2019), a testimonial drama performed by victims and survivors involved with Justice for the Forgotten, in association with the Pat Finucane Centre, which highlighted the experience of victims and relatives seeking justice for the 1974 Dublin/Monaghan Bombings, and multiple murders in the border area.

Another unique feature of the Theatre of Witness work was its erratic and extensive touring circuit, with shows performed all over the North in an electic range of venues in towns and cities which no professional company could ever replicate given the prohibitive costs and logistics involved. This was especially striking as all performances were free to the public; a vitally important dimension which underwrote the democratic commitment of the project in making the Theatre of Witness’s work as accessible as possible in an exemplary form of town hall theatre. This was only made possible given very substantial grants awarded to the project by the EU PEACE III and IV Programmes: funding explicitly aimed to “reinforce a peaceful and stable society by promoting reconciliation […] by supporting actions that promote cohesion between communities” (SEUPB, 2016). The EU has poured enormous sums of money into projects involved in peace and reconciliation through its PEACE I-IV programmes, investing almost £8o million annually between 1995 and 2013, though it remains inordinately difficult to measure the success of such investment in projects seeking to facilitate peace and reconciliation.² As Maria Power observes, “the fact that there is no definitive way of measuring the impact and effectiveness of this work, means that its usefulness will always be under question” (2011, p. 10).

Nevertheless, the EU has remained “particularly dedicated to both communities reconciling with each other and building a shared community through funding projects that promote peaceful coexistence”, hence the obvious appeal of the Theatre of Witness given how it breaks barriers down among cast members from different political and religious backgrounds, we well as its outreach to, and impact on, audiences all over the North (Hyde & Byrne, 2015, p. 99). However, just as the generous funding by state-sponsored bodies has encouraged film production that serves to frame truth and reconciliation in a distinctly ideological fashion, the EU-funded work of the Theatre of Witness in staging reconciliation also bears further scrutiny. Indeed, “staging reconciliation” is a curiously paradoxical phrase; one alluding to the seductive illusion of this potentially suspect performance, given that anything that is “staged” is, by definition, not “real”; but something constructed, manufactured, stage-managed for the consumption of an audience.

The fact that the Theatre of Witness explicitly sets out to stage reconciliation as required under the terms of its EU grant is problematic, particularly when the process through which this work is produced is considered. The founder and director of the Theatre of Witness, Teya Sepinuck – “a Jewish/Buddhist American woman who knew very little about the Troubles” – describes how she works with large groups of individuals over a long gestation period, through a slow process of in-depth interviews, with the inaugural play, We Carried Your Secrets involving “more than 40 former paramilitaries, clergy, politicians, victims, members of the security forces, youth and community workers” (Sepinuck, 2013, pp. 153–56). These preliminary meetings developed into longer interviews, workshops, and meetings through which Sepinuck built relationships with those individuals whose stories she decided to use for the play as part of what can be “a rough period of people trying us out, and us them” (174). So, throughout this process, some individuals are winnowed out, with others opting out voluntarily, whilst as Sepinuck acknowledges: “I ultimately didn’t choose, not because their stories weren’t compelling or important, but because I had to balance sides, issues, themes, and personas in casting the production” (164). It’s a revealing admission, one equally applicable to all sorts of devised and collaborative work, but the question of which voices and stories are included and excluded is of critical importance. Sepinuck describes how in the earlier stages of the process, some of those interviewed as potential performers still experienced and expressed raw anger and bitterness, others held secrets they felt unable to speak publicly, and others remained too traumatized to do so. Of those who were involved in the final production, it is noticeable that all the ex-combatants (both paramilitaries and security forces) expressed profound remorse and regret for past actions, as did another republican ex-combatant from the subsequent play, I Once Knew a Girl (2010): a perspective that is certainly not universal amongst their comrades.

Whilst the close bonds of friendship amongst the cast were evident, the question remains: to what extent was the creative process compromised by its explicit commitment to facilitate reconciliation and not just in terms of the cast, but in terms of the themes and form of the play? Realistically, would it have been possible for the production to have included dissident voices and views, whether they belonged to dissident republicans, aggrieved security forces, or loyalists who felt betrayed by the peace process? Could ex-combatants have been included who expressed pride in their paramilitary pasts instead of remorse – a hardly hypothetical question given the Sinn Féin Vice-President and Northern Ireland’s First Minister designate, Michelle O'Neill’s recent assertion that the IRA had “no alternative” but to engage in political violence (Carroll, 2022)? Could victims and survivors have expressed a desire for revenge or retribution? Or in casting a play from people who hailed from different backgrounds, but who shared similar views on the futility of violence, was this particular form of testimonial theatre, for all its aura of autobiographical authenticity, an insidious political exercise in engineered reconciliation?

In contrast to the Theatre of Witness’s testimonial mode of performance, dramas like Quietly, or The Bomb, suggest that “truth” can lead to reconciliation (albeit in a rather ambivalent register); whilst other plays such as Bag for Life and Meeting at Menin Gate even go so far as to predict truth may lead only to recrimination and revenge (Lehner, 2018, pp. 99–104). Such plays reveal “the truth” to be partial, in both senses of the word; it isn’t something that we can prise free from the past like a pristine pearl from an oyster, nor is it completely contingent on facts and forensics as in a court of law or a clinician’s laboratory. As the loyalist bomber of Quietly gently chides the son of the man he killed: “There’s more to the truth than facts” (McCafferty, 2012, p. 35).

In Quietly, Ian, a loyalist paramilitary responsible for the sectarian bombing of a Catholic pub, arranges to meet Jimmy, the son of one of his six victims on the very site of the original atrocity, to acknowledge and apologize for the devastation he has caused: “i can’t speak for the actions of a sixteen-year old child- but i can speak for myself now - i’m sorry for what happened” (p. 41). Though he cuts a contrite figure, Ian is given short shrift by an embittered Jimmy who assaults him as soon as he enters and scorns his appearance in the pub as nothing more than a phony, futile quest for forgiveness. Ian reveals that Jimmy is the first relative of his victims he has approached, on the basis they were both sixteen when this atrocity happened. However, an unsympathetic Jimmy sees little symmetry in their lives and excoriates Ian’s motives while mocking his own complicity in acquiescing to this charade: “this is me playin' my part in the truth and reconciliation process” (p. 30). However, when Ian requests that they move from the bar to somewhere less public as their meeting “should be in private”, Jimmy refuses; maintaining that their encounter be public, even if it is only witnessed by a bemused Polish barman oblivious to the historical circumstances of the conflict, which means he can act as an independent auditor; someone who quietly listens to both men in a symbolic role as a surrogate and “silent truth commissioner” (Parr, 2017, p. 539).

Jimmy laments the lack of any formal “truth and reconciliation commission” and lambasts the notion from the “powers-that-be” that “we are not ready for that – not mature enough”, as “the - consequences of all this inactivity” means “this man – this man here – must act on his own – take the initiative – save his soul” (p. 31). As such, McCafferty’s play is notable as a theatrical form of transitional justice;as part of a “bottom-up” process of reconciliation that evolves as an organic, grassroots initiative undertaken by individuals: victim and perpetrator; in a public place: a bar; observed by an international witness: a Polish barman. It thus reproduces the official format of a formal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, though it has no factual or legal status and is anything but state-sponsored, but in terms of its impact and affect, Quietly presents a de facto “truth and reconciliation process in miniature” (Felton-Dansky, 2016).

Ian’s fictional decision to confront his past by contacting victims of his actions also recalls the determination of real ex-combatants like Patrick Magee who felt “a political and moral obligation” to acknowledge how they had “caused pain and loss” (Magee, 2021, p. 191). Magee, the Brighton Bomber who targeted Margaret Thatcher’s government and killed five people, has become more well-known for his extraordinary relationship with Joanna Berry. He had killed her father in the 1984 attack, but Berry later sought out Magee, not to confront him but to gain a greater understanding as to why she had been so “cruelly and suddenly projected into the conflict as a casualty from the moment the bomb detonated” (Magee, 2021, p. 178). Their delicate, difficult relationship over the intervening years has performed a public conversation and a profound example of reconciliation; one which has drawn considerable attention, not least from some playwrights and filmmakers.³ But it is also a complicated relationship that, like reconciliation itself, is a process; one which often leaves Berry and Magee painfully conflicted as to the ethics and impact of what they were doing; though they both persevered, continuing to meet in spite of the consternation it caused their family members, friends, and comrades, some of whom requested that they discontinue their dialogue.

The complex realities of their relationship inform Kevin Dyer’s play, The Bomb, which wrestles with the ethical dilemma underpinning their friendship, revealing the redemptive possibilities available to those with capacity to “forgive the unforgiveable”, to borrow Derrida’s phrase. Dyer’s play was devised with the consent and close consultation of both Berry and Magee, both of whom he interviewed and supplied drafts of the play, for “their opinions” (but not approval) (Andrews, 2013, p. 4). However, in spite of the meticulous research invested into the play’s development, its strict fidelity to the facts of the Brighton bombing, and close collaboration with its main protagonists, Magee and Berry, Dyer’s play “is written in a way that deliberately blends reality, memory, fantasy, imagination” (p. 29) whilst its central characters are christened Ned and Elizabeth. Dyer explained this dramaturgical decision as a deliberate rejection of producing “a documentary play about Jo and Pat”, in favour of a more fluid piece, replete with flashbacks, fictional interpolations, and imagined exchanges between Jo and Pat that allowed Dyer to stage the silence, acrimony and anger that also shaped their dialogue, as well as the deep understanding they eventually engendered in each other. Dyer’s desire that the play “wasn’t about being true to the outer events” but to the inner “emotional journey” that Jo had undertaken, appealed powerfully to her from the outset, as it did Magee, who had previously found the documentary made about their early meetings to be intrusive and unsettling.⁴

Berry recounts how “an inner shift is required to hear the story of the enemy” whilst candidly admitting that “sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t”. She also records how she no longer talks in terms of forgiveness, a word “in those early years I probably used […] too liberally … To say, ‘I forgive you’, is almost condescending – it locks you into an ‘us and them’ scenario keeping me right and you wrong”.⁵ Magee, too, struggles to adequately express the emotional depths and ethical complexities of his friendship with Jo, or how their personal process of reconciliation and their shared public activism in “sharing platforms in universities, schools, conferences, prisons, reconciliation events in Ireland … in England; and further afield” could have any import or application to wider society: “Neither Joanna Berry nor I would suggest that our experience is a blueprint or a map for others to follow […] Our journey of reconciliation is not prescriptive and is perhaps better understood as an exploration … much is possible when there is a genuine will to understand the other’s perspective” (Magee, 2021, pp. 5–6). These are ideas which are perhaps best expressed in the theatre, where audiences are physically and perceptually positioned in the dark in silence, forced to listen to the stories and perspectives of others, performed in the evanescent present with each iteration unique to that moment, in a space evocatively described by playwright Simon Stephens as the greatest “empathy machine” imaginable (Stephens, 2016, p. 171).

Magee and Berry’s relationship represents an almost impossible exemplar of reconciliation given its irreducibility and unique complexity. For Magee, a point he often makes at various conflict transformation conferences and events, is his quiet acknowledgement that, “I’m here because I killed Jo’s father. That’s a difficult point to make and move on to the next point”, but it’s the same pretext that sets the scene for Ian’s stage entrance in Quietly as he seeks out the son of one of his victims (Reinelt, 2008, p. 8). In Quietly, however, McCafferty’s undercuts the public rhetoric of reconciliation that often characterizes its “top-down” implementation, suggesting instead that it is possible only on a personal, private level between individuals, and never as a form of public theatre. In Quietly, reconciliation is understated; eponymously enacted in an interpersonal exchange between two men in a public setting with an independent witness, without any wider audience or prospect of future acts. Jimmy first greets Ian with violence, but by the end of the play, after (eventually) listening to Ian’s emotional account of his own life and experience through which his deep remorse for his deeds becomes immanently evident and embodied – though it is never fully articulated or acknowledged – the play comes quietly to its conclusion with Ian offering to shake Jimmy’s hand. In the original Abbey Theatre production, Ian held out his hand for what seemed like an age, as the physically coiled Jimmy stared impassively back, slowly weighing up whether to accept this reconciliatory gesture, before crossing the stage to clench Ian’s fist and pull him close to say, “don’t ever come back here” (51).

The political significance of this physical gesture is obvious, however, the superficial stage directions of the text cannot capture tense proxemics of this act in performance, or how the menacing implications of Jimmy’s final line made for a memorably uncomfortable moment, with both men locked in a handshake that looked as if it would keel into further violence as they stared the other down, before Ian eventually left, quietly. For all the volatility of the moment, and palpable threat of violence, it is an act which brings closure to both men. After Ian leaves, Robert asks Jimmy if he will contact Ian again, and seems surprised when he says “no”. When Robert suggests that he should, because “some good might come from it”, Jimmy quickly corrects him, “some good did come from it – we met – we understand each other – that's enough” (p. 53) as McCafferty undercuts Robert’s idealized notion of reconciliation. Quietly demythologizes reconciliation to show how it cannot be instrumentalized by post-conflict transformation initiatives, new political institutions, or even juridical procedures.

Conclusion

Rather than focusing solely on specific community-based case-studies, this article has taken a broader view of larger scale modes of cultural production, namely contemporary documentary and theatre which reaches regional, national, and international audiences to raise questions about truth and political reconciliation. There is a comparative aspect to this approach in that the trend towards dramatizing subjunctive scenarios (as in Quietly or The Bomb) contrasts with the retrospective, investigative method of documentaries focussing on the history of violence and the need for an effective, legitimate truth and reconciliation process. Unlike theatre, which can perform dramas of grievance and recrimination before a live audience in a local setting, drawing on their shared lived experience, documentaries seem less effective in disrupting the status quo as their victim-orientated humanitarian intentions are vitiated by broader funding and economic factors. This difference is excerbated by theincreasing tendency in documentary filmmaking itself towards intermediality and overly aestheticized representational forms which decontextualise- and even displace- their ostensible subject matter. Perhaps, in the interests of civic values rather than political economy, there is an argument for the Department for Communities to give victims and survivors the requisite funding and training to make more of their own documentaries rather than the Department for Economy funding more films about them, made by – and through – others.

This point also relates to the perennial tension between “top-down reconciliation” and forms of “reconciliation from below”: the age-old conflict between state policies vs personal responsibilities that informs much of the discourse on reconciliation in – and through – the arts. The still-to-be realised potential of the GFA further highlights the fact that where the arts succeed in encouraging reconciliation is where they can indicate the reality that reconciliation can never be staged, framed or or otherwise engineered by those in power. It might be extended by victims and survivors, but it can never be imposed upon them, in whatever guise. If the arts are to serve a vital function in post-conflict Northern Ireland, whether on stage or screen, it will be in their resistance to narratives of reconciliation as forgetting, forgiveness, or more problematically still, amnesia: a word from which we derive the yet more controversial term, “amnesty”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In terms of fiction films and the “politics of reconciliation”, see Richard Kirkland's analysis of the biopolitical Fifty Dead Men Walking (2008), and Five Minutes of Heaven (Kirkland: 2017); and Seàn Crosson’s, 2019 analysis of The Shore (2011). Five Minutes of Heaven has also been analysed by Stefanie Lehner (2011), Ruth Barton (2010), and Philip Metres (2020).

2 These programmes were established in partnership with between the European Commission, the British and Irish governments, in accordance with the findings of a European Commission Taskforce established to explore practical was of assisting the citizens of NI and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland. PEACE 1, also known as the Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in NI, received funding of €300m, which was later increased to €500m. In four successive Programmes (PEACE I, PEACE II, PEACE III and PEACE IV) from 1995 to the end of 2020, “almost €2.3b has been allocated to fund 22,500 projects across the eligible area of NI and the border counties of Ireland” (SEUPB, 2021).

3 In addition to Dyer’s play The Bomb, Julie Everton and Josie Melia’s 2015 play, The Bombing of the Grand Hotel is also informed by extensive interviews with politicians, historians, and academics, as well as with Magee and Berry in a play that seeks to explore “the challenges of reconciliation post-conflict”. See, https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/497132/converis+entry+080715.pdf The first year of Berry and Magee’s meetings was also recorded as part of documentary, Facing the Enemy (2001, Paul McGuigan, 66 mins.)

4 The line in Dyer’s play, “I didn’t come here to be forgiven, and I don’t think I deserve to be forgiven. But I want to […] help”, recalls Magee’s own words (“Some day I may be able to fogive myself […] But I’m not seeking forgiveness” (Andrews, 2013).

5 See, “Jo Berry and Pat Magee”, https://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories-library/jo-berry-pat-magee/ accessed 23 November 2021