On
15 October, I heard Nicola McCartney speak at an
Irish Studies conference at Oregon State University.
In the surroundings of what could be a Platonic
ideal of an American college campus, with autumn
leaves dappling the skies and drifting down into
the drizzle, her powerful, densely written theatre
appears incongruous, if no less so than many Irish
literary works addressing our past century’s
traumas. You can find more information–including
her detailed curriculum vitae–easily on Google.
My purpose in this brief commentary merely will
relate her comments upon the Troubles, which I found
of interest due to her long reluctance to address
these until well after a decade into her career,
until she had to summon up voices that haunted her
from her home town.
First
raised around Sydenham, then Newtownards, McCartney
(born in 1972), left for university in Glasgow and,
with the exception of a year as writer-in-residence
at the university in Coleraine (although–typical
of her stance–she refused to live there, preferring
the more idyllic Portballintrae, and who can blame
her!) has not returned permanently to the North.
Throughout her talk, she varied the appellations:
the North of Ireland, the North-east of Ireland,
and Northern Ireland. Semantic subversion--from
a writer named McCartney--reveals her surprising
parentage. Her mother’s family ranked among
the highest of the Orange Order; her father, Norman,
called for a workers’ strike in 1944 and agitated
as a Communist in Belfast. She recalled running
into a laborer who–after inquiring about her
surname in standard conversational fashion among
Belfast interlocutors– had remembered the strike
and deemed her father ‘a right bastard’.
Her parents removed themselves from sectarian labels,
while fittingly their daughter’s doomed attempt
to attend both chapel and church as a pre-teen soon
ended any kicking with either foot.
Dogged
by her accent, still undiminished after many years
in Scotland, she successfully avoided in her theatrical
work, begun in earnest as a student in Glasgow,
the dreaded Troubles trap. She figured that many
others had said it all--if not better than at least
earlier. When, however, long after she had lived
in Scotland, a post-victory taxi driver’s tape
of increasingly pro-‘ra Celtic anthems irritated
her enough to cut off his own ranting. The anecdote
she told shut him up for the rest of the ride. She
recounted how a relative had been befriended over
a long period by two Protestant men who infiltrated
his workplace with the express intent to lure him
into letting down his guard, through not only on-the-job
camaraderie, but diversions that included all of
their children and wives. Quite a time passed, and
he assumed he had found true friends. Only then
did they lure him out on a bogus call in the middle
of a night; his body was later found in the back
of his car. McCartney realised, telling the taxi
driver this tale, that she had to face and express
the pain of her own loved ones over the past decades.
While she left Belfast, she could not escape, as
she spoke movingly, of the affliction of exile emblematic
of each one of those who have left the North, by
whatever name those departed may call their land
of birth.
She
summed up what both natives and exiles such as herself
carry within. The afflicted ‘soul of Northern
Ireland’ McCartney judges neither as religion
or politics–but as ‘insecurity’.
This dimension dynamises her determination to transcend
sectarianism, the expectations raised by her surname,
and the prejudices common to her maternal relatives.
This emerges in her personal and dramatic decisions.
Getting her perspective on the Troubles out on paper
and then on stage (and soon we hope a feature film)
resulted in a displacement into her recent play,
Heritage.Set when the collapse of the flax trade
and the linen industry around 1912 onwards forced
many Presbyterians to leave Ulster (for as second
sons or worse, the choice was emigration and more
prosperity or penury and less wages) for Canada,
the extension of tensions away from an immediate
Irish locale allowed McCartney to explore from a
distance the sectarian tensions that reify not only
in the years of uprising, but as the ancient myth
of Naoise. Parallels between the struggle for Irish
independence and the pain inflicted by victims revenged
as well as upon those engendered, even on the faraway
plains of Saskatchewan, reflect the playwright’s
own interpretation of how the personal tangles with
the political for any who inherit an Irish origin.
In
the Heritage selection that was declaimed by Oregon
State students and faculty, a young man and woman
from opposite sides again seem fated to follow the
contentious ancestors whom they, hopeful emigrants
and proud Canadians, thought were long buried. Reduced
to this summary, its language and tension cannot
thrive, but certainly this excerpt makes me want
to seek out the edition of this play (published
by Faber & Faber). Increasingly acclaimed if
not easily labelled, McCartney had begun her talk
by wryly reflecting upon her canonisation as a Scottish
dramatist, after so many years of being branded
as an Irish one. Still, she insisted, she remains
an Irish writer--working from her Glasgow home.
She plots her plays with exile and cunning–not
silence.
Although
time constraints prevented her explanation of other
works, Belfast readers may know of her contribution
for the Tinderbox company in a production of Convictions,
when seven Northern Irish playwrights were commissioned
to write a single-act drama each, assigned to one
part of what was the Crumlin road prison. McCartney,
allotted the jury room, concocted what I imagine
is one among a inherently suspenseful collection
(published by Tinderbox). In closing, she elaborated
upon a comment that raised at least one eyebrow
in the audience. A Belfast woman asked why McCartney
had asserted in her talk: ‘Learn history, and
then forget about it.’ By this, the dramatist
elucidated provocatively, she urges that we become
fully cognizant of the real history, the true facts.
As with her comments to the cabdriver, she fights
jingoism–the casual identification with a Celtic
win--that degenerates into reflexive brutality via
taped singalongs-- with hard evidence. The facts
of her relative’s murder demolished, at least
for the rest of her taxi trip, the driver’s
smug invective. The republican chants clicked off.
The glorification of violence stopped. Perhaps those
moments stretched into hours for that driver. Maybe
his own soul gained a measure of the insecurity
McCartney finds endemic to her heritage–that
loaded word, that title of her play, and her outlook
that marks her as much as her accent, but also misleads
and confounds those expecting to trap her flight
away from their predetermined Belfast trajectories.
Although
the excitement of Celtic’s defeat of Rangers
that afternoon may have been untimely aborted by
McCartney’s rejoinder, her speaking truth–not
to power in that abstract phrase now cliched--but
one of its myopic supporters, may show how a dramatist
can expand consciousness beyond the confines of
the stage and effect personal change along with
political and religious conversion to a humanist
creed. I don’t mean to pontificate (pun intended).
But, as I listened to McCartney, I watched how our
audience, gathered beneath idyllic groves of academe,
if only for a day, learned from this young teacher.
Unlike certain compatriots, as she opined, McCartney
refuses to fetishise Northern identity or of its
factions chose sectarianism ‘as a way to make
a living’. Instead, she defended a common allegiance
for Northern Irish, drawn apart from the rest of
Ireland as from the rest of Britain into an inimitably
stubborn defiance of sashes and slogans.
