Performing ‘Progress’: Post-Agreement Drama

Abstract

Unlike its southern counterpart, Northern Irish drama had long been “the forgotten branch”1 of the island’s theatrical scene. Coinciding with the outbreak of violence, it was not until the 1970s that theatre practitioners in Northern Ireland began to liberate themselves from both British and Irish conventions of drama by developing a distinct style of performance, with the urban trope replacing the traditional rural imagery.2 Since then, the aesthetic collusion between art and politics has emerged as the defining feature of contemporary Northern Irish drama. Undoubtedly, Stewart Parker played a vital role in challenging as well as changing the role of the artist in a politically polarised society. In his oft-quoted John Malone Memorial Lecture given at Queen’s University Belfast in 1986, the playwright avows that “if ever a time and place cried out for the solace and rigour and passionate rejoinder of great drama, it is here and now. There is a whole culture to be achieved.”3 Parker’s invocation of a ‘holistic’ politics calls for an alternative approach to staging Northern Ireland, one that provides new “forms of inclusiveness”4 which transcend deeply entrenched divisive ideologies. As a result of a failed political legacy, Parker suggests, “[i]t falls to the artists to construct a working model of wholeness.”5 Here, instead of aestheticising politics, he makes a curious case for politicising aesthetics by promoting drama’s potential for alternative visions of the country’s political status quo during the Troubles. Parker’s creative clout, in particular his political prescience, has made rapid inroads well into the post-Agreement period, as playwrights respond to the country’s current campaign of ‘progress’ by re-enacting his notion of political theatre in myriad ways. The violent past, however, serves them as a mere reference point for transforming the stage into an almost “utopian space”6 where future political scenarios can be both played out and practised.7