Virtual Methodist

The first thing I heard as I woke up this morning was that the playwright Sam Thompson was being honoured by naming the new bridge from Victoria Park over to Airport Road after him. This bridge allows access by foot and bike to the Harbour Estate and Titanic Quarter, the erstwhile Shipyard where his most famous play "Over the Bridge" was set...  There is a certain appropriateness to this, but also some irony given that many of the issues that Sam Thompson raised in that play apply directly to the malaise affecting the loyalist community that lies in the shadow of the gantries of the remaining 2 shipyard cranes. To that end I offer this slightly revised reblog of one I produced in the wake of Martin Lynch's revival/revision of the play 3 years ago, looking at why I believe it is a crucially important play : The Physical Context - The Shipyard In a moment of unguarded honesty a few years ago, when Harland and Wolff was teetering on the brink of total closure...

Well, I did promise... although with the passage of time and other intervening events I do wonder why... But given that I've recently posted on another play that touches on some of the issues that face working class Northern Ireland, and particularly the protestant part of it, I thought I should return to look at Sam Thompson's "Over the Bridge." I've already foisted an outrageously long post on you, dissecting Martin Lynch's recent adaptation of it, but I thought it might also be useful to look at some of the reasons why it is, in my not so humble opinion, one of the most important modern Irish plays... There are a number of reasons: The Physical Context - The Shipyard In a moment of unguarded honesty a few years ago, when Harland and Wolff was teetering on the brink of total closure, a political representative with responsibilities for trade and industry said that the shipyard was a dreadful place... Full of asbestos and other noxious substances tha...

A brief ps to my post of a couple of days ago. When I posted the Noel Coward song I was thinking to myself that the big thing separating us from the 1950s when it was written, or the last big economic downturn in Britain during the 1970s and 80s was the lack of what Coward refers to as the "reds and the pinks" making any significant comment. What Thatcher had failed to do in killing off the hard left here in the UK was well and truly finished off by Tony "New Tory" Blair... So, methought, the last verse of Coward's song doesn't quite fit any more... and I had briefly thought about omitting it... However, my wife was telling me about a conversation with a mutual friend who, in the light of the current economic chaos had decided to look again at Marx's "Das Kapital" but couldn't find his copy (I wonder where mine is?). So he went into Waterstone's to by a new one, but they didn't have any. When he then went to the counter to order one...