Fortnight Publications Ltd.

The Irish for LondonAuthor(s): Rebecca O'RourkeSource: Fortnight, No. 264 (Jul. - Aug., 1988), p. 27Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25551641 .

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Meanwhile, is there a collective cell available somewhere in Pur

dysburn? Tastefully padded in red plush, with just a hint of gilt at window and door, it might offer suitable accommodation for the board of Theatre

Ulster to indulge?not before time?in long, cool reflection.

The board has dropped Branagh's slight play Public Enemy (Fort night 260) as its autumn production and come up with ... a revival of

Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Now there's daring. It's all

of three years since the play was produced at the Lyric. It didn't do well

on tour, but never mind?sure that's only the audience. Some of the same

cast may still be available. And, though this has nothing to do with it, the

work is on the school curriculum.

Shakespeare, as one arts officer put it recently, has been marginalised, but old TW has been brought in from the reserves to play on the main team.

Of course it's hard to find new plays. As script reader for a distin

guished Irish theatre I can vouch for that. But here I might be able to help. How about this updated version of Baroness Orczy set in Ulster? It's

called Scarlett O'Hara's Pimple and it's about a tempestuous Irish

redhead who, by day, works in the mill organising the 1912 strike and, at

night, smuggles victims of oppression in and out of the Bogside. A trendy English director could be employed using the latest impro

visatory techniques (readily available in the handbook Stanislavsky and

Ulster on sale on the Stranmillis Road). And audiences each night could

vote for the ending of their choice.

I don't want to be pushy, but I'm working on a little thing myself. It's

a vivid, relevant re-writing of Mrs Miniver. God knows this has a real

Ulster connection. Didn't Greer Garson come from Castlewellan?

The Irish for London SEAMUS Finnegan has an impres sive track record: ten plays in the

last eight years, with performances at the RSC, the Drill Hall, Soho

Poly and on Radio 3. His theme is Ireland?the 'troubles', con

science and politics.

Unfortunately, the power of the

theme does not make the play. Even so, Mr Finnegan appears to

labour under the delusion that to

shout long and loud enough at

English audiences about their sins

in Ireland is somehow good theatre

and better politics. The Murphy Girls, put on at

the Drill Hall, asks how the last 20 years have served sisters Aine, Brid

and Caitlin, personally and politi

cally. It has potential?especially in its focus on women's experi

ence, given the usual preoccupa tion with men and male values. But

it doesn't work. There is no real

sense of the sisters' lives, and they never appear as anything but vic

tims. Not enough is said about

what, for instance, sent Brid across

the water. A fairly major omission, as she determines the action far

more than Caitlin's exuberant

chafing at marriage and maternity or Aine's quiet independence.

The play tends towards the posi tion Brid expresses throughout: that Ireland's ills are less of

England's making than her own

and that the real occupying army is

the Catholic church. But it is hard to say what the overall view is, as it

lacks any real dramatic structure.

Nothing happens in this play: noth

ing is changed or re-examined,

nothing fought over, nothing learned. Things happen to the

women?babies or bullets?and

they simply endure them.

For all the shouting about Irish

nationalism, the play sticks on, and

with, Brid's sentimentality as she is

pitched from one traumatic situ

ation to another. Her past flashes

before her as she drives up the Falls

in a black taxi, she meets an old

flame, gets shot, interrogated, ar

rested. And the puir wee girl just home on holiday for a few days. Gerardine Hinds struggled bravely with the part, but really she'd have

been better playing it as farce.

It's a great pity that plays like

this, rather than the work of

Ireland's own playwrights such as

Peter Sheridan or Dan Magee, are

what's seen in London. And per

haps a greater pity that Seamus

Finnegan continues to mine a seam

whose treasures lie too deep for

him?themes to which he does no

justice and which do none to him.

Rebecca O'Rourke

- SHORTER THEATRE NOTICES h

THE SET is an arrangement of

articles shrouded in sheeting spat tered with pain: a chair, a table and

a symbolic central towering pillar. There's girls, there's women and

there's ladies (a male erotic trinity), the theme song goes, and a woman

in a loose-fitting dress of the same

stained fabric bops into centre

stage. She's getting married in the

morning, she tells us; she's already

pregnant. "Romance," she says, "is

the worm at the heart of feminism."

Her father, she says, would

always dance with her mother even

when they weren't talking. Her

father would say: be an engineer or

whatever, but for God's sake get the dinner on the table. But when

her mother was dying she said: "I

love all my children." What man, asks our heroine, would say that of

his work? "It's my job to make us

all engineers," she says, "but I do

wonder sometimes."

Jobs or babies is the debate at

the core of Nell McCafferty's dra

matic monologue, Worm in the

Heart, performed at the Drill Hall in London. "Jesus", says the hero

ine, "

19 years ago, men were walk

ing on the moon and women can't

even get an abortion." But Mc

Cafferty's central character has to

represent everywoman and some

times she creaks a bit at the edges. She tells us about the casualties of

the abortion law: Anne Lovett, who

died in childbirth out in the rain when she was 15, and the Kerry babies case. About the great femi

nist demos in pubs for the pint and

the occupation of the men's toilets

in the Dail. She was even there on a

Peace People march?"for her

sins", she adds.

Derry women were the first

she'd ever heard say 'fuck'. "Why do you have to throw stones?" she

asked them. "Because the politi cians are all unionists," they re

plied. When there's violence on the

demo, she falls to her knees,

screaming. The Derry women, she

says, were very kind. At the same

time, she complains that feminists

are spoiling the English language, and confides that her deepest wish

is to achieve the same satisfaction

as her mother, through her chil

dren. She wants her husband-to

be's sleepy warm bum in her stom

ach every night of her life. What's

more, she thinks a pregnant woman

represents the true trinity. This is a provocative and often

very funny play which raises issues

rather than solving them. Ruth

McCabe gave a wonderful per formance, holding the packed audi

ence in her hands.

But romance the worm at the

heart of feminism? Surely not: why should women take the blame?

Christina Dunhill

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The Apex Jazz Band's George Chambers?local stalwart

Jazz isn't

free for

nothing Brian Carson

BELFAST'S first major jazz and blues festival took place last month in the Europa hotel. It was

a commercial venture, with backing from the

BBC, the tourist board and Beck's Bier (which seems to have a hand in most fringe cultural

events these days). On the face of it the programme looked safe

and conservative?perhaps Ulster Jazz Promo

tions (UJP) was taking a cautious step in its first commercial outing. Modern forms of jazz, post bebop, were not represented and the many 'free'

Fortnight July/August 27

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