The fictionalisation of recent Irish history can go one of two ways. On the one hand, there are the slew of pulp thrillers that feature monosyllabic bad guys in balaclavas carrying Armalite rifles. Such characters are invariably swept away by heroic SAS or MI5 types who outwit their prey with stiff-upper-lip derring-do and a dubious sense of morality. The opposing, albeit equally generic view of the Irish Troubles invariably depicts para-militaries as romantically unreconstructed gangster figures with a god-father at the helm. Circumnavigating such archetypes is the figure of an angrily misguided young man, who may be umbilically involved in the cause, but has seen the light enough to want to get out, whatever the consequences.
“That’s a very liberal view of things,” according to playwright Stuart Carolan, whose debut play, Defender of the Faith, arrives on Scottish soil next week in Andy Arnold’s new production for the Tron Theatre. “I wanted to look at characters without putting a point of view on top of them. It’s not saying that violence is good or how it destroys your own humanity, but I didn’t want some kind of trite message behind it. I wanted to make it darker.”
It’s partly this uncompromising darkness that made Defender of the Faith such a hit when it opened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004 before transferring to New York. By 2005 the play had won the George Devine Award, which was praise indeed for a play whose subject matter is still so raw as for the wounds left in its wake to be visible. This was more than evident recently from the angry scenes sparked off by the proposal to compensate the families of everyone killed during the Irish Troubles to receive compensation of £12,000, regardless of whether they were innocent victims or para-militaries of a particular hue. Relatives of many murdered by either the IRA or the UVF described this as blood money, and caused chaos during the announcement. Defender of the Faith, then, remains as timely as when it first appeared.
Set in Armagh in 1986, Carolan’s play tackles the thorny issue of IRA informants during a period when the conflict in Ireland was at its most paranoid peak. The 1981 hunger strikes at the Maze prison when elected Sinn Fein MP Bobby Sands and eight others starved themselves to death were still fresh in peoples memories, while 1986 was the year the inquiry into the RUC’s alleged shoot-to-kill policy of dealing with known insurgents saw fit to remove its chief investigator, John Stalker, from office on the eve of publication. It’s against this back-drop that Carolan has a Belfast stranger turn up unannounced at an Irish border farm-house. The staunch Republican family who lives there, already wounded by the death of a son and an absent mother, are pushed to breaking point by the revelations that follow.
“If you look at the statistics,” says Carolan, “a lot more IRA people have been killed by themselves than you might think. It’s set five years after the hunger strikes when there was a lot of paranoia going round about IRA operations going wrong, and there was this whole history of the IRA being infiltrated by MI5.”
Carolan cites the case of Freddie Scapaticci, whose outing in 2003 as the IRA infiltrator Stakeknife shocked the Republican establishment to its core. As head of the IRA’s internal security forces and a confidante of inn Fein president Gerry Adams, Scapaticci had enforced the slaughter of numerous double agents. Carolan also refers to Denis Donaldson, another long-term IRA member and an associate of Bobby Sands, who was revealed in December 2005 as being in the pay of British intelligence. By April the following year Donaldson was dead, assassinated in an isolated cottage in Donegal.
“One of the things that struck me when writing the play,” Carolan says, “was all these images of informers bodies found around the border area. They were all these similar images, with plastic bags over the heads, hands tied behind their backs, with no shirt or trousers on. That for me was something quite disturbing, seeing a body like that, because when you look at the pictures, there might be someone’s belly sticking out, or they might have only one sock on, and you can see a real humanity in that.”
Carolan’s career began as a radio producer and comedy sketch writer before turning to full-time playwriting on the back of Defender of the Faith’s success. Since then, a second play, Empress of India, was produced in Galway by Edinburgh regulars Druid Theatre, and Carolan is currently juggling three theatre commissions – for Druid, The Abbey and the Royal National Theatre - with assorted television work. As calling cards go, Defender of the Faith tapped into an emotional nerve which clearly still resonates, as some of the responses to the original Abbey production testify to.
.
“It seemed quite cathartic for some people,” he reflects, “and there were sometimes people crying. You can talk about the thing in an intellectual manner as much as you like, but ultimately, when you’re talking to a man whose lost his son, that’s all bulls***.”
Tackling such sensitive issues can itself be a minefield of misinformation. In 2008, the producers of Fifty Dead Men Walking, based on the book if the same name by former IRA infiltrator Martin McGartland, were forced to pay him compensation after he complained that aspects of his life had been misrepresented. Carolan himself points to the Jim Sheridan-scripted 1996 film, Some Mother’s Son, which pitted two mothers of the Maze hunger strikers - one a supporter of the cause, the other against it - as a text-book example of how Ireland’s bloody conflict can be sentimentalised.
Carolan is full of praise, however, for Hunger, Steve McQueen’s unflinchingly unsentimental depiction of Sands’ doomed protest, as scripted by Herald Archangel-winning playwright Enda Walsh.
“It’s a brilliant film,” he says. “It’s very painful to watch, but it’s also very honest, and doesn’t flinch from the situation. Steve McQueen has spoken about how when he was growing up he became obsessed with the hunger strike, and that’s something you can ever plan. Someone else growing up in the 1970s or 1980s might have become obsessed with something else. That’s partly why you get things like Frost/Nixon. But it’s important that a person be allowed to write whatever they want to write, and not have things imposed on it.
“Defender of the Faith I wanted to be as biblical as possible in some ways, and when script editors start talking to you about what journey a character’s on, and try and make them a good person who becomes bad, it never rings true. There’s no need to spoon-feed audiences this stuff about a good guy gone wrong. I’m not interested in doing social satire about new found wealth or anything like that, but this thing about informers has always got to me, I suppose. So much has been written about it, but so much is either thriller muck or else very consciously trying to send out a message of peace. That leaves no room to look at the poverty of the human beings involved. These political situations are caused by human beings, and will be ended by human beings. So Defender of the Faith, it’s something very personal, and I don’t know how beneficial that’ll be in a way that people might expect. At the end of the day it’s just a piece of theatre about people.”
Defender of the Faith, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, February 6-28
www.tron.co.uk
The Herald, February 3rd 2009
ends
“That’s a very liberal view of things,” according to playwright Stuart Carolan, whose debut play, Defender of the Faith, arrives on Scottish soil next week in Andy Arnold’s new production for the Tron Theatre. “I wanted to look at characters without putting a point of view on top of them. It’s not saying that violence is good or how it destroys your own humanity, but I didn’t want some kind of trite message behind it. I wanted to make it darker.”
It’s partly this uncompromising darkness that made Defender of the Faith such a hit when it opened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004 before transferring to New York. By 2005 the play had won the George Devine Award, which was praise indeed for a play whose subject matter is still so raw as for the wounds left in its wake to be visible. This was more than evident recently from the angry scenes sparked off by the proposal to compensate the families of everyone killed during the Irish Troubles to receive compensation of £12,000, regardless of whether they were innocent victims or para-militaries of a particular hue. Relatives of many murdered by either the IRA or the UVF described this as blood money, and caused chaos during the announcement. Defender of the Faith, then, remains as timely as when it first appeared.
Set in Armagh in 1986, Carolan’s play tackles the thorny issue of IRA informants during a period when the conflict in Ireland was at its most paranoid peak. The 1981 hunger strikes at the Maze prison when elected Sinn Fein MP Bobby Sands and eight others starved themselves to death were still fresh in peoples memories, while 1986 was the year the inquiry into the RUC’s alleged shoot-to-kill policy of dealing with known insurgents saw fit to remove its chief investigator, John Stalker, from office on the eve of publication. It’s against this back-drop that Carolan has a Belfast stranger turn up unannounced at an Irish border farm-house. The staunch Republican family who lives there, already wounded by the death of a son and an absent mother, are pushed to breaking point by the revelations that follow.
“If you look at the statistics,” says Carolan, “a lot more IRA people have been killed by themselves than you might think. It’s set five years after the hunger strikes when there was a lot of paranoia going round about IRA operations going wrong, and there was this whole history of the IRA being infiltrated by MI5.”
Carolan cites the case of Freddie Scapaticci, whose outing in 2003 as the IRA infiltrator Stakeknife shocked the Republican establishment to its core. As head of the IRA’s internal security forces and a confidante of inn Fein president Gerry Adams, Scapaticci had enforced the slaughter of numerous double agents. Carolan also refers to Denis Donaldson, another long-term IRA member and an associate of Bobby Sands, who was revealed in December 2005 as being in the pay of British intelligence. By April the following year Donaldson was dead, assassinated in an isolated cottage in Donegal.
“One of the things that struck me when writing the play,” Carolan says, “was all these images of informers bodies found around the border area. They were all these similar images, with plastic bags over the heads, hands tied behind their backs, with no shirt or trousers on. That for me was something quite disturbing, seeing a body like that, because when you look at the pictures, there might be someone’s belly sticking out, or they might have only one sock on, and you can see a real humanity in that.”
Carolan’s career began as a radio producer and comedy sketch writer before turning to full-time playwriting on the back of Defender of the Faith’s success. Since then, a second play, Empress of India, was produced in Galway by Edinburgh regulars Druid Theatre, and Carolan is currently juggling three theatre commissions – for Druid, The Abbey and the Royal National Theatre - with assorted television work. As calling cards go, Defender of the Faith tapped into an emotional nerve which clearly still resonates, as some of the responses to the original Abbey production testify to.
.
“It seemed quite cathartic for some people,” he reflects, “and there were sometimes people crying. You can talk about the thing in an intellectual manner as much as you like, but ultimately, when you’re talking to a man whose lost his son, that’s all bulls***.”
Tackling such sensitive issues can itself be a minefield of misinformation. In 2008, the producers of Fifty Dead Men Walking, based on the book if the same name by former IRA infiltrator Martin McGartland, were forced to pay him compensation after he complained that aspects of his life had been misrepresented. Carolan himself points to the Jim Sheridan-scripted 1996 film, Some Mother’s Son, which pitted two mothers of the Maze hunger strikers - one a supporter of the cause, the other against it - as a text-book example of how Ireland’s bloody conflict can be sentimentalised.
Carolan is full of praise, however, for Hunger, Steve McQueen’s unflinchingly unsentimental depiction of Sands’ doomed protest, as scripted by Herald Archangel-winning playwright Enda Walsh.
“It’s a brilliant film,” he says. “It’s very painful to watch, but it’s also very honest, and doesn’t flinch from the situation. Steve McQueen has spoken about how when he was growing up he became obsessed with the hunger strike, and that’s something you can ever plan. Someone else growing up in the 1970s or 1980s might have become obsessed with something else. That’s partly why you get things like Frost/Nixon. But it’s important that a person be allowed to write whatever they want to write, and not have things imposed on it.
“Defender of the Faith I wanted to be as biblical as possible in some ways, and when script editors start talking to you about what journey a character’s on, and try and make them a good person who becomes bad, it never rings true. There’s no need to spoon-feed audiences this stuff about a good guy gone wrong. I’m not interested in doing social satire about new found wealth or anything like that, but this thing about informers has always got to me, I suppose. So much has been written about it, but so much is either thriller muck or else very consciously trying to send out a message of peace. That leaves no room to look at the poverty of the human beings involved. These political situations are caused by human beings, and will be ended by human beings. So Defender of the Faith, it’s something very personal, and I don’t know how beneficial that’ll be in a way that people might expect. At the end of the day it’s just a piece of theatre about people.”
Defender of the Faith, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, February 6-28
www.tron.co.uk
The Herald, February 3rd 2009
ends
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