STOP THE FRONT PAGE:
DAVID CAMPTON GOT ON HIS FEET TO APPLAUD A SHOW IN BELFAST!
It really does take a lot to get me out of my seat to give a play a standing ovation, yet it seems to be expected here these days. I’ve discussed this a number of times online and in person with fellow thespian curmudgeon Trevor Gill, so I suspect he was surprised, to say the least, when yesterday afternoon he saw me lifting my backside off the pew in the Sanctuary Theatre and loudly applauding Bright Umbrella's “Stuck in the Middle with You”, the play written by Sam Robinson and Trevor himself, who also directed the show… Actually it was an even bigger surprise to me, because after sitting on those pews for 2 hours I wasn’t entirely sure that my legs would work!
I had agreed to chair a Q&A for the audience afterwards, which is always a dangerous thing to promise without seeing the show first… an actress friend of mine says that when I meet her after one of her shows, despite my background as an actor (many years ago), I am really bad at covering up my feelings if I didn’t like it. However, I had agreed to do so because
1) I had seen a previous collaboration between Sam and Trevor “One Saturday Before the War” about the European exploits of the pre-WW1 Glentoran football team (only in dress rehearsal however, because both times they staged it I was actually out of the country!) and knew that with the right cast they were capable of producing good pieces of theatrical storytelling laced with local authenticity (if they revive this show again, do yourself a favour and go see it, whatever team you support).
2) The subject matter is not often covered in post-Troubles NI theatre. That subject matter is the real-life experience of frontline RUC officers.
Whilst over the years we have had many pieces about paramilitary “combatants”, the politicians involved in the peace process, and victims, the stories from police officers’ perspectives have been few and far between. Kabosh Theatre Company (whose production of “Mary Ann, The Forgotten Sister” I am going to see later this afternoon… I suspect I will be giving it a standing ovation too, as it is a promenade piece/walking tour, and it might be perceived as rude if I actively sit down to applaud) notably developed the award winning “Green and Blue” by Laurence McKeown back in 2016, but I am not aware of any others. And on TV, despite the superb treatment of the officers of the PSNI in Blue Lights (no spoilers please, I haven’t seen series 2 yet… I was away last week when it dropped onto iPlayer), there has been little about those who served in its predecessor (let’s just draw a veil over the execrable “Bloodlands”).
There are probably multiple reasons for this, including the tendency, for various reasons, of RUC officers feeling that they could only talk to fellow officers, and that even that wasn’t encouraged where those stories betrayed any kind of perceived “weakness” and that certainly nothing should be said to outsiders that showed them in what might be perceived as a bad light… Because there has also been a perception that because of political changes the RUC and its officers are increasingly being painted in negative hues… as one character puts it in the play, meaning that in years to come it will be seen as the equivalent of Germans serving in the Waffen SS.
Of course this is hugely unfair to the vast majority of those who served in the RUC. Yes, there were “bad eggs” and systematic failings that required wholesale reform (although, as pointed out in the play, though perhaps a little didactically, the same could be said of the Metropolitan Police), but most RUC officers joined up because they thought they were serving their community… sadly at the time, too many inside and outside the force saw their community in a very one-sided fashion!
But this play and production does not miss and hit the wall in addressing some of the failings of the RUC and its officers. Right from the start it explicitly raises the misogynous culture that female officers had to deal with… It also addresses the issue of collusion head on (although I could have done without the dictionary-definition of collusive behaviour in the awkward scene in St. Anne’s Cathedral between “Winston” and the sort of paramilitary character that gets the term neanderthal a bad name). And in “Winston” we also find the epitome of sheer sectarianism that too many people equate with the RUC.
However, importantly it also looks at issues like mental health, alcohol abuse, the increasing dislocation of officers from their own communities, particularly from loyalist communities post-Drumcree, and the grassroots disaffection with what they perceived that the Patton Report was seeking to do. This was about as far as this play got into the politics of policing, with the possible exception of the slightly artificial engagement between the former Special Branch officer and disaffected IRA volunteer in a bar in Donegal. The wider political questions were obviously there as the backdrop to the rest of the action, but they were not at the forefront of the action nor, as I suspect was true of much everyday policing at the time, at the forefront of a front line police officer’s mind.
At the heart of this big-hearted production, was the attempt to humanise those who found themselves “stuck in the middle” – squeezed into one of the many armoured grey boxes that used to patrol Belfast’s streets when I was growing up. The set had at its core, a stylised Land Rover, stripped of its armour allowing us to peer into its interior, and into the stripped-back lives of its passengers for a couple of dramatic hours. It was laugh-out loud funny, with the black humour you would expect, and enormously moving, not least in its conclusion, and has a tremendous soundtrack, not least leaving me with Steeler’s Wheel’s most famous song as an ear-worm that will require surgery to remove it. But the stories of real people behind this show will stick with me long after the music has faded away.
The production was staged not far from where the play was originally set, at the junction of Short Strand and Castereagh Street/Albertbridge Road, near the old Mountpottinger Police Station (fact I didn’t know until after the play, is that the first British Governor of Hong Kong, Lord Pottinger, was born in that area – ironic given that the last British Governor of Hong Kong, Lord Patton was such a key political figure in the background of this story). However it deserves a viewing across this province and beyond, especially in communities that would never have thought about the human beings inside the grey “pig trucks” that were targets for breeze blocks, petrol bombs and worse. I am told there were many former RUC officers and their families who filled the pews of this former church to see it, but this play offers more than just “preaching to the converted” and indeed I know of some from a republican background who saw it, and, like me got on their feet to applaud at the end.
This “review” is too late to encourage anyone else to go to see it this time out, as the sell-out run finished last night. But it will be revived in October I am told, so get to see it then if you can, and indeed if you know of venues and audiences beyond Mountpottinger who would host it, please get in touch with the team at Bright Umbrella.
Selah
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