Lionel Pilkington

Theatre and Cultural Politics in Northern Ireland: The Over the Bridge Controversy, 1959

a frequently cited landmark in Irish theater history is the controversy generated by the Wrst attempted production of Over the Bridge,1 Sam Thompson’s play about sectarianism and labor relations. The controversy arose in Belfast in May, 1959, when the chairman of the Ulster Group Theatre’s board of directors, Ritchie McKee, stopped rehearsals of Over the Bridge on the grounds that any ensuing performance would be likely to result in civil disturbances. Because McKee was also a prominent Unionist supporter, the vice president of the Stormont-sponsored Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) as well as the head of CEMA’s drama subcommittee, his suppression of the Group Theatre production was regarded by many as badly disguised state censorship. Three other Group Theatre directors—James Ellis, Maurice O’Callaghan, and Harold Goldblatt—resigned in protest against McKee’s action, and an acrimonious dispute concerning political interference in the arts took place within CEMA. This dispute, which resulted in a victory for McKee, led to the resignation of the secretary general of CEMA, J. Lewis Crosby, in October, 1959.2 Thompson himself took the Group Theatre to court in a successful legal action concerning breach of contract with Thompson arguing that Over the Bridge had been formally accepted for production by the

Staging the Body in Post-Independence Ireland

The photograph that we are looking at is a photograph about looking. A young woman facing the camera looks at an older man who is in silhouette and who seems to be smiling. The man looks appreciatively at the young woman, who is not at all discomposed by his stare, and who looks back at him. Against a background of an antiquated and down-at-heel domestic space the two figures appear preoccupied with admiring each other and at the same time posing for the camera. It is as if, to them, the materiality of their background has evaporated and that they exist solely in their self-consciously performing bodies: one looking, the other being looked at. A cloth cap hides the man’s eyes, but we can see clearly the upper body of the young woman and the expres- sion on her face. With arms akimbo and smiling mouth slightly open, the woman’s stance is inviting. Frozen by the photograph as if in the paralysed present tense of a tableau vivant, the easeful flirtatiousness of the pair and the contrast between the leisurely aspect of their pose and the dilapidated interior of the background, reinforce our initial impression that what we are looking at is bodies performing. The performance captured by the photograph tantalizes the spectator with an illusion of the full self-sufficiency of modern times — a fantasy present, apparently unencumbered by the past, but beckoning to the possibility of an evermore abundant future.1

At a Loss for Words: Theatre, Performance and the Northern Ireland Prison Protests

In plays as diverse as Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City, Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians and Vincent Woods’s At the Black Pig’s Dyke, there is evidence of an intemperate opposition to the idea of republicans performing protest against the state in Northern Ireland. Using Augusto Boal’s conception of theatre as a cultural weapon with a powerful emancipatory and utopian potential (“theatre as a rehearsal for revolution”) and drawing on Joseph Roach and Nicholas Argenti’s ideas of the kinesthetic imagination, this essay considers the republican prison protests that took place Ireland in the period 1978-81. “At a Loss for Words” argues that the cultural logic, not to mention the disconcerting effectiveness of these protests in mobilizing mass opposition to the state, is best understood in terms of theatrical performance.