Just over 20 years ago I was part of the newly formed “Good Relations Steering Panel” within Belfast City Council, made up of councillors and representatives from different parts of civic society. Early on one thing that was noted was the lack of representation of both women and nationalists in the artwork within and around City Hall. In response the group quickly settled on Mary Ann McCracken as a suitable person to honour who would “tick both boxes” and so the bust of her pictured here was commissioned and unveiled in late 2004 (the clay model for it is in Clifton House, the former Belfast Poorhouse, where she was actively involved for many years). But I confess I didn’t really know much about this woman at that time and, unwilling to reveal my ignorance, in those pre-easy access internet days, I had to draw on the resources of the Linen Hall Library across the road from City Hall. My only previous encounter with her was in Stewart Parker’s “Northern Star” staged by the Lyric 20 years before that again, which I had been sent to review by the short-lived “Scene” Magazine (although I don’t think the review was ever published). In that (and I am going only on my failing memory of that production and the later Rough Magic production) Mary Ann is only a relatively minor, and relatively unsympathetic character, in that complex retelling of the story of her brother, the executed United Irishman, Henry Joy McCracken. But as I quickly learned not only was she herself a committed revolutionary, she was also an educationalist, businesswoman, feminist, social reformer and abolitionist… the epitome of the forward thinking people that shaped the rapidly growing city of Belfast, but who had been left in the margins of history, partly because she was a woman, but also, I suspect, because her early revolutionary associations were an embarrassment to an increasingly conservative unionist city council.
20 years further on, Belfast City Council has now commissioned not just a bust, but a full scale bronze statue of Mary Ann McCracken in the grounds, although personally I would have preferred something a bit more imaginative than the relatively straightforward bronze figure installed at the northwest corner of the grounds… and indeed I would have preferred to see a suitable statue in a public space duly named after her in an area more associated with her, eg. near High Street, Clifton House or Donegall Pass. But I am no longer involved in the affairs of the City Council, except as a voter.
However, not only has Mary Ann been rendered in bronze, playwright Clare McMahon and Kabosh Theatre company have put flesh and blood back into her, in a powerful site-specific promenade play 'Mary Ann, The Forgotten Sister' allowing this amazing woman to step out of the shadow of her more famous brother and his gallows.
Starting in Clifton Cemetery at the graveside of Mary Ann and Henry Joy, and finishing at Clifton House, home of the Belfast Charitable Society, where Mary Ann played a prominent role in the education of the poor, this three-hander, directed by Paula McFetridge, with Carol Moore in the title role, and Maria Connolly and Calla Hughes playing a variety of roles, not only tells the story of Mary Ann’s life, but uses it to ask questions of our lack of activism on so many of the issues she championed today, given that political oppression, poverty and slavery are still issues.
The production took place over three weekends this month – a brave/foolhardy thing to do in a Belfast spring. Sally and I were fortunate to pick last Sunday afternoon to see it as it was sunny and warm. Indeed last weekend was a good one all round for us in terms of theatre, having seen the production “Stuck in the Middle with You” the previous afternoon. I joked in my review of that show that having given it one of my rare standing ovations, that I might be giving “The Forgotten Sister” a standing ovation too, as it was a promenade piece, and it might be perceived as rude to actively sit down to applaud… However, given that the finals scene is delivered in the upstairs room of Clifton House where the audience are invited to sit, this did not prove to be a dilemma, and for the second time in 2 days I was on my feet applauding a show with tears running down my cheeks. Sadly all tickets for the remaining performances today and tomorrow are sold out, but I do hope that there will be further outings, and indeed that Claire and Paula will develop a “portable” version of the show that might go elsewhere and be accessible to those for whom such a site specific show is impractical.
Actually this past week has offered a glut of good theatre, because on Tuesday night I joined thousands of others in the 100th National Theatre Live production broadcast to cinemas across the world. And I was almost tempted to give it a standing ovation as well, although the etiquette of applauding, never mind standing to do so in a cinema simulcast is unclear…
When such broadcasts started I was very sniffy, but much like my desire for more people to see “The Forgotten Sister” even if not in the “pure” form of the promenade performance, such “Live” cinema showings give opportunities to see amazing productions to those who would never be able to see them otherwise.
And in this case, a production of “Nye” by Tim Price, with Michael Sheen in the title role of Aneurin Bevan, the more people who get to see this his surreal but moving play the better. The imagination of the staging by RNT Artistic Director Rufus Norris was a fitting tribute to the vision of the political giant who transformed Britain’s welfare state and established the NHS (depicted here in another statue in Cardiff).
Despite the huge disparity in production costs, staging and scope, there were striking similarities between the subjects of both. Neither were saints, nor portrayed as such. They were both “difficult” characters to live with, but who also inspired enormous loyalty in those around them, allowing them to achieve amazing changes for those most in need, in the face of the resistance of the established order (and all comparisons with Liz Truss’s pity party at this point should be disregarded).
But whilst both productions and the lives they chronicled were inspiring, whereas “The Forgotten Sister” left me with a degree of frustration that many of the social issues Mary Ann sought to address still have their contemporary equivalents, I actually left the showing of “Nye” with an abiding anger, that has stuck with me all week, hence my delay in posting a review of or reflection on either show.
When I saw the struggle for Bevan and others to deliver the nascent NHS and the safety net of the Welfare State, with the massed ranks of the medical and political establishment being projected as shadowy figures looking down on the action, I had the abiding sense that these self-interested, patrician forces have fought a long ideological battle to roll back the welfare state and dismantle the Health service, with the culmination being the death by a thousand cuts administered over the past 15 years by the current British Government, hiving off less problematic and potentially more profitable parts of the service to their friends in private medical provision, and rendering the rump an under-resourced and increasingly unloved shadow of its former self, meaning that people who are already increasingly having to go private to bypass eye-watering waiting lists, think that anything, even the money-grabbing American insurance-based system must be better than this… And don’t start me on the head in the sand approach of local MLAs reluctant to implement repeated reviews that could have arrested the rot here, but didn’t because they feared it might cost them votes in the short term.
Where are the Mary Ann McCrackens and Nye Bevans of this generation? It is not enough for them to be rendered in bronze or portrayed on stage or screen… We need them shaking up local politics and parliament, for the sake of those forgotten or deliberately ignored by those currently in power…
Selah
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