THREE VERY DIFFERENT VIEWS OF LIFE IN THE TROUBLES
Three Monologues by Jennifer Johnston
Peacock Theatre Date ★★★★★
In a programme note, Jennifer Johnston writes, ‘In each case, a voice… demanded with great vigour… to be freed. I sat down at my desk and each person in turn dictated their story to me and obediently I wrote them down’.
A bit of a stretch perhaps. There’s nothing ready-made about these penetrating monologues that go intimately into the hearts and minds of three people caught up in the horror of the killing and maiming that polluted Northern Ireland for 30 years.
First up is Mustn’t Forget High Noon, the story of
Billy, a non-political loyal Orangeman, farmer and driver of the school bus, who grew up enjoying the razzamatazz of the marching on July 12. As he says himself, it was all for fun, to give the Taigs a bit of music, and to honour King Billy, who, his father, a member of the B Specials, said, ‘gave us our freedom’.
That word ‘freedom’ echoes through the three monologues with its mangled meaning for people on opposite sides. It’s a grim irony that Billy’s most precious possessions as a boy were a couple of toy guns; his greatest entertainment was cowboy pictures like High Noon. But Billy had nothing to do with politics until his lifelong buddy, Sam, a UDR member, was killed by the IRA, after which, Billy felt it proper to join the regiment himself. His greatest regret is that he never had children to continue the loyalist tradition of his family stretching over 200 years.
Charlie Bonner makes a very agreeable character of Billy, likeable and serious but with a good sense of humour. His is the most static of the performances, mainly carried out while sitting in what looks like a tin shed.
His last sung words, ‘I do not know what fate awaits me’, are ominously from High Noon.
In Christine, Ali White plays Billy’s quiet, neatly dressed widow. She’s a woman seething with unfulfilled dreams and hopes, lumbered with the job of looking after Billy’s old father, but keeping her emotions under rigid control, comforted only by her nearest neighbour, a Catholic. She didn’t want Billy to join the UDR and now she’s left alone, looking longingly at the neighbour’s children, pondering her fate, missing the spiritual strength she had from her Church of Ireland background before she adopted Billy’s more arid Presbyterianism. Her lack of children is the result of Billy’s infertility, which she selflessly kept to herself.
Ali White’s beautifully restrained performance is a chilling portrait of a damaged but determined woman forced to leave her old home. And yet her bleak humour breaks through as she describes the deaths of Billy and his father as ‘killing two birds with one stone’.
After the quiet unburdening of Christine’s soul, Aoibhéann McCann’s garishly-dressed, tipsy republican Karen blasts onstage from a party – like a drunken interloper breaking in on a funeral – in Twinkletoes. There’s no restraint here as she swigs her booze, flips off her uncomfortable shoes and tights, wanders around and bemoans her situation. Her IRA lifer husband Declan has been in prison for nine years, while she, now 35, loves dancing but is stuck at home with her recalcitrant 17-year-old pregnant daughter.
Karen’s father had called her Twinkletoes because of her dancing but she can’t enjoy life while her hero husband is locked up. And she too, regrets the children she might have had. She loves Declan but is running out of things to say on her weekly prison visits. And there are limits to her selfcontrol. ‘You ruined my f ****** life and your own too’ she blasts in anger and self-pity.
There’s a case to be made that Karen might be the one to open proceedings, allowing the other two more sober episodes to close the evening. Her character tends to drown some of the tragedy that has gone before, but Billy and Christine are so interwoven the sequence is difficult to get right.
This show doesn’t finish until 10.45pm, so anyone hoping to use car parks should check closing times.