His plays have shocked audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Is David Ireland bothered about the walk-outs? Will he give in to demands for trigger warnings?
Cradling his grandchild for the first time, a man looks into the baby’s face and sees the bearded, bespectacled features of Gerry Adams, former president of Sinn Féin. This would be alarming for any grandfather but even more so to a Belfast Protestant who sees Adams as a threat to the union between Ulster and Great Britain that Northern Irish loyalists cherish.
Eric, in David Ireland’s play Cyprus Avenue, is clearly in some way demented, but Stephen Rea makes him a complex and even moving examination of the consequences of one people being raised to hate another. The climax is so brutal that, at the performance I saw at the Royal Court in London in 2016, some audience members walked out. When the play ended, they were telling ushers that theatregoers should have been advised about the content in advance.
“I think most playwrights are against trigger warnings because they remove the tension,” says Ireland. “I had a play on in Belfast called Summertime. And I didn’t know it had a trigger warning until I came to see it. The usher said, ‘Oh, by the way, there are themes of child sexual abuse.’ And I thought, ‘If you tell them that, it gives away a big twist at the end of the play.’”
For the Royal Court’s revival of Cyprus Avenue, there is an age advisory (14+), and, as with all the London venue’s productions now, a phone number that the potentially upset can ring, to ask if their particular triggering issue is going to come up. There might be a case for a hotline dedicated solely to the work of the burly 42-year-old Ireland. Ulster American, his most recent play, won awards at Edinburgh last August and is under discussion for a London production. It too caused walkouts and demands for advisories, especially for a scene – premiered soon after the #MeToo movement began – in which a Hollywood actor suggests a scenario in which criminal sexual behaviour might be justified.
So does the writer regard such reactions as a tribute or an irritation? “I really don’t like it. Some people think that I like offending audiences. But I don’t. Well, I suppose that, subconsciously, I may want to upset people, or I wouldn’t write the things I write. But, consciously, I don’t. I’d really rather that people who were going to be offended stayed away.”
I thought Gerry Adams was unlikely to come after us. Maybe he will now!
In a possible sign of softening, for the new production of Cyprus Avenue, Ireland is rewriting the opening scene to remove the N-word, after a cast member expressed unease. “I’ve always disliked that word in performance and questioned its relevance in the scene,” admits the writer. “But I don’t think I’d have changed it if it hadn’t been raised by the actress.”
Commissioned by the Abbey theatre in Dublin, Cyprus Avenue did not reach the stage until three years after it had been written. The Abbey’s lawyers were concerned about Adams’ possible reaction. European privacy and image legislation raises questions about whether a living individual can be dramatically depicted without their permission, which Adams was unlikely to give.
“I don’t know all the legal ins and outs. But then I only expected the play to be on for a couple of weeks in Dublin. So I thought he was unlikely to come after us.” He laughs loudly. “Maybe he will now!”
Having initially regarded Cyprus Avenue as a play “about the state of unionism”, Ireland is now surprised to see it contains a private subtext. “I’d got married and we were talking about having children. I now realise that all this stuff went into it – about becoming a father, and my anxieties about what I would teach my children about their heritage, and who they are.”
Apart from testing audience sensitivities, Cyprus Avenue and Ulster American share an exploration of political and national identities. Rea’s character in the first play has a 10-minute monologue in which he talks about the experience of going to an “Irish pub” in north London and being warmly welcomed by men with London accents, who regard themselves as Irish and consider Eric to be a fellow countryman. It shows the tragedy of Ulster Unionists, thinking of themselves as proudly British but being regarded by much of the UK as not British at all.
“Cyprus Avenue was commissioned by the Abbey theatre, which is the national theatre of Ireland,” the writer says. “So the starting question was, ‘Am I Irish?’ And I still haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer for myself.”
In Ulster American, an Oscar-winning actor called Jay regards a script by Ruth, a Northern Irish playwright, as a “great Irish play” in the nationalist tradition of JM Synge and Seán O’Casey. He is bewildered when the writer explains that she is an Ulster Unionist and therefore proudly British, while her central character hates the IRA, of whom Jay is, like many American showbiz liberals, a supporter.
The designation Irish-American almost always means Catholic Irish nationalist, as typified by the Kennedy clan. Are there unionist Americans? “Not to my knowledge. And, if there are, they certainly didn’t come to see Cyprus Avenue when it was on in New York. The Irish-Americans turned out in force and were completely horrified and confused by it. They really intensely hated it. The theatre asked for trigger warnings. But I said no.”
The writer was born in 1976, in Belfast’s Sandy Row, a heartland of the Orange Order and loyalist paramilitaries. He never went on marches but did watch them. He accepts that growing up during the Troubles has made a “deep impact” on his plays. “I find it really hard to end plays without violence. I watch other people’s plays, which don’t end in violence, and I think, ‘How do they do that?’”
The fight over identity that drives his plays was fired by his teenage interest in theatre. “When I was 15 or 16, I went to this drama course in Cambridge, and it was the first time anyone had ever called me Irish. I got such a shock. It was a guy from Yorkshire who called me it, so I thought he must think I’m from Dublin. But when I said I came from Northern Ireland, all these English kids still called me Irish. That was very strange.”
Keen to escape the violence in Belfast, he applied to drama school in London, but was rejected for all the courses there and ended up in Glasgow, where he still lives. “It was odd for my generation of Ulster Unionists because, at the time of Riverdance and Liam Neeson, Irishness suddenly became cool. So people would want me to be Irish. Girls would say, ‘Ooh, I love your Irish accent’, and I’d say, ‘I’m not Irish!’ So you can see the conflict.”
Ireland’s acting career has been restricted to small roles (“I have two lines in the first episode of Derry Girls, but was glad to be in it”). Now he writes the sort of parts he would like to play, but admits to being “too nervy an actor” ever to attempt them.
With the British government currently dependent on support from the Ulster Unionists – and Brexit deadlocked by the future of the Northern Irish border – the writer’s homeland has become rich dramatic territory. Surely there must be a play there?
His next play is a ‘wild, dark comedy’ about paedophilia – which seems likely to upset more theatregoers
“It’s come up in conversations,” he says. “But I’m not sure what the story would be. Although I think one reason the Royal Court is doing Cyprus Avenue again is that they think it’s relevant. When I wrote the first draft, in 2012, I thought, ‘I really like this play, but it feels irrelevant.’ Because the union didn’t feel like a big subject.”
Soon afterwards, though, there were protests over Belfast city council’s decision to reduce displays of the union flag, and then came Brexit, increasingly pivoting on Irish issues. Now, the playwright jokes, “it feels as if the whole world is becoming like Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s!” President Trump, he thinks, is like the unionist firebrand leader Ian Paisley would have been “if Paisley had been American and had a Twitter account. I think it would all have been in block capitals.”
Ireland’s next play is a “wild, dark comedy” about paedophilia, which seems likely to upset more theatregoers. “I’ve thought about writing a play called Trigger Warning – just to keep away people who wouldn’t enjoy it. But I need to work out the plot. Actually, I had this play on in Edinburgh called I Promise You Sex and Violence. I called it that so those who are easily offended would stay away. But nobody came at all. So it was a disaster.”
The Guardian
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