An uneasy DIVIDE
The four performers bring out all the delicate nuances that can reveal underlying tensions
Can people who lived through the atrocities committed in Northern Ireland ever really overcome the bitterness, and accept that it’s all part of a wicked past, relegated to history?
Owen McCafferty’s new play poses that question and sets about exploring it through two couples: next door neighbours, Catholics Gerry and Rosemary, and Protestants Tom and Maggie, who look down from a patio onto a Belfast estate that’s all set for the annual July bonfire. The four see the annual ritual through middleclass eyes that weren’t affected much by the savagery of the past.
For them the bonfire is something ridiculous, kept alive by a working-class narrative of what all the trouble was about, something they believe, as civilised people, they can stand aloof from.
There’s a conscious determination to discuss everyday affairs: politics, house improvements and foreigners, while savouring the wine and preparing to enjoy the festivities.
After all, as Gerry says, ‘We’re not real Protestants and Catholics are we?’
The evening has started with a great sense of joviality. The cynical Gerry (Frankie McCafferty) who is not interested in improving his house, shares none of his wife’s enthusiastic plans.
Tom (Ruairi Conaghan), a liberal at heart, is trying to learn Irish. Gerry believes there’s no problem in the world that can’t be solved by education and alcohol, while he and Tom can banter with remarks across the religious and political divide.
Yet for all the liberal bonhomie, there’s always an uneasy sense that the conviviality is fragile: words, silences and even casual actions here are loaded.
For Maggie (Ali White), just because you’re not in the middle of something, it doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion about it.
Strong statements about Irish troubles are out of bounds. But that’s not the case with foreign problems, where a discussion of the Arab/Israeli conflict becomes a revealing proxy war of words that dramatically raises the emotional temperature.
The bonfire below acts as a kind of metaphor for the hidden fire in the bellies of these sophisticated characters, rounded off by onstage mirrors that distort their images.
The play is a companion piece to McCafferty’s fine, understated play, Quietly, from 2012, and one of the outrages described in that work is vividly recalled by Maggie.
The four performers, including Cara Kelly as nationalist Rosemary, bring out all the delicate nuances that can reveal underlying tensions, in a powerful work that combines comedy with unsavoury truths about the past and present.